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.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs - Arcade

Not the most exciting start image, I know.

It's not the first amalgamation I'd consider if someone said "Put two things together and make a game with it from an original comic book" and while I might have chosen Dinosaurs, because they're dinosaurs after all, it's unlikely I'd have chosen Cadillacs. Likely I'd have opted for Dragons and Dungeons... no wait...

Odd when the language doesn't match the threat.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs started originally as a comic book series in the late 80's, set in post-apocalyptic world where pollution and disasters ransacked the planet, people moved underground for centuries and when they came back to the surface, dinosaurs were around again. Our two main protagonists, Jack and Hannah, fix cars and science dinosaurs respectively while trying to survive in a world where driving down to the corner-shop is likely to get your head chomped by something large and scaly. (Not using a mom joke there...)

I get to punch out T-Rex looking things, awesome.

From this, in steps Capcom to publish Cadillacs and Dinosaurs as a brawl-em-up. Take your two main chars, add in a few extra minor chars, give them some pointless stats details and have them punch, kick and fight their way through multiple enemies, levels, bosses of both human and dinosaur in nature, and some enemies that are a little of both. The special skills are laughable at best, "Good Skill", "Items", "A move everyone else already has" and "Useless" are pretty much the spectrum on that one.

I don't get the appeal of driving a Caddy, but I do get the appeal of running mooks down.

In so far as a plot is concerned, our intrepid heroes embark on a journey to stop poachers from killing dinosaurs and selling the skins, get ambushed on the way home and find out it was a ploy by some nutcase in a lab coat who wishes to fuse humans and dinosaurs together through 'Science' and become the perfect being. Sadly this was doomed from the start as he never wished to become me, oh how fickle life is. Cue this as a reason to fight your way through multiple levels featuring bosses, returning bosses, dual bosses, transformation bosses, bosses that become standard enemies and effectively hitting all the usual feature one might find in the arcade gaming tropes section. Even the obligatory sewer level and elevator level turn up.

No, no mix tapes were dropped here, someone started this fire.

You're not alone in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (Of which the Caddy rarely turns up but thankfully the dinosaurs do) you've a wealth of weapons to help you ranging from pistols to shotguns, clubs, rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, dynamite and knives with the usual smattering of arcade brawling food items and points items to help push you up onto the bonus lives limits. Depending upon the machine you're playing on, you can have 2-3 players on screen at once trying to work out which dinosaurs are nice/nasty and which enemy is about to hit you before your mates screw it up and take you down by accident.

"Parts to include in beat-em-ups, #12 A boss rush of previous bosses: Check"

I can't say that I know of the source comics or the cartoon series (which may or may not have come out after the game anyway) but as a game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs shows that the motion and controls are fluid and quite responsive. Running is done easily with a double tap in a direction, jumping and fighting is pulled off easily while the use of weapons and items comes fairly intuitively. There's little difference between the main characters in choice of skills and abilities, they all have combos, they call can run and jump and attack, they all have the "2 button" desperation attack that floors everything around themselves and costs a small amount of health in the process.

"Parts to include in beat-em-ups, #8 Elevator/Lift/Funicular sections: Check"

Graphically everything looks ok, though there's a little chuckle to oneself when you see the Twin Towers stood next to some new-age Mesopotamian Pyramid, maybe they rebuilt it. The levels don't seem to have the same attention to detail one might expect from Capcom and the detail on the standard enemies is somewhat lacking for quite a few of them, however the focus on the dinosaurs and dino-related creatures is sublime and there's a guilty pleasure in punching out a T-Rex type dinosaur while body slamming a boss into several standard enemies.

Thankfully, that IS his final form.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs also delivers on the sounds, solid and loud explosions, synthed voices punctuating screams and shouts of triumph and jubilation as well as a rather overly enthusiastic "GO" sign that pops up when you need to progress to the right for more fighting. The music however doesn't seem to have been considered suitably for the project in that you can go from 20 seconds of intense rooftop fighting, to a jazzy number in a chaotic hallway before going back outside to a epic, adrenaline inducing rush of music before the boss turns up and it becomes a lower key tune that doesn't have the same rush. It gives the impression that whoever assigned the music didn't have the same ideas as the person that composed it.

STFU! I've got more credits!

Sadly for an arcade game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs doesn't have much of a replay factor. Once you've beaten it you might give it another go and use another character but there's little deviation from the standard play here. Even before you've beaten it, chances are you've seen everything already and there's little reason to come back and go through it again. Which is a shame as it's quite the fun game to play.

Street Fighter 2 (SNES)

"The Country Warrior" just confused a lot of people.

At a time where consoles and home computers were catching up to the arcades in terms of quality and performance, some games matched their arcade counterparts (in a fashion) while other games were mere shadows of their arcade counterparts. However when Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades, its resounding success was touted to be ported onto the Super Nintendo and as a boxed bundle, likely doing almost as much for the console as the fat plumber did in the first place. What people got, was a near-perfect replication of the game people had pumped credits into for a long time and finally a machine that showed it could almost managed what was being done on the bigger machines in arcades.

...Kicking the shit out of me would help too.

Street Fighter 2 on the SNES is likely one of the best arcade to 16-bit conversions attempted. There's a few slight differences and beyond that not much really in the way of gameplay. A few frames of animation have been cut, some of the attack and throw animations are different to compensate for the changes but otherwise all the moves, all the levels and all the music is there in a manner of speaking.

But as a game, what is it like?

And already you're thinking of THAT music, I'm proud of you.

Fundamentally, it's the Mano-a-Mano (or claw if you're Vega) combat of one person and another, going toe-to-toe with some special abilities in a limited arsenal of power moves and special attacks to try to damage the other person enough to drop their health to zero and win the round. Punches, kicks, jumps, fireballs, power moves and throws all add to the roster and fairly uniquely for almost each character (Ken and Ryu being basic palette swaps in this version, later games they differed more significantly in strength and attacks). There's 8 main characters ranging from slight and light Chinese girl, to heavy and chunky slow Russian fighter, to a monster, a sumo wrestler, two shotokan fighters (this was before the retcon to their specific schools of combat), an American pilot and the mystical Indian stretchy man. Throw in the 4 bosses as well and you've a very varied, very colour school of rogues as a 12 character fighter.

I had heard the Russians were capable of some mad dances, this isn't one of them.

There's strengths and weaknesses to every character. Some are faster and more agile. Some are less agile but tend to tank the damage better than others. Some have rapid-fire attacks while others have projectiles, there's a large mix up and almost something for everyone and their preferred style of gameplay. Most of the characters can be paired up with someone else as a "balanced" match (most...) so for two players there's a lot of different combinations of fighters to use and enjoy together.

Hardly seems fair to fight a stretchy man who can teleport and breathe fire.

Each character has their own stage and level, which you'll encounter while playing through arcade mode and see the focus, fine detail and attention gone into the presentation of the game. It's a wonderfully smooth game, with lush graphics for the machine and fluid, very responsive, gameplay that brings about one of the best reasons to actually own a Super Nintendo Entertainment System with a controller almost built as if its sole intention was to be able to play this game. 6 buttons, 6 attacks: 3 punches, 3 kicks and a D-Pad to move, it's quite the achievement and mapped almost perfectly for the players to use (though I still switch out the strong and medium attacks). Every few levels or so, you'll encounter a bonus level which is to smash up a car, or break up a wall. The faster you do it, the more bonus points you can score, nothing really pertinent about it but it does make for an interesting change in the game.

The first boss adds that added air of extravagance.

The AI comes across as fairly balanced around level 4 in difficulty while at level 7 it'll test you or make you exploit the AI weaknesses and cause triggers to ensure you'll always be able to do things that the computer will fall for every time. There are some shortcomings in the unfairness factor, such as the computer being able to pull off moves and specials that it couldn't possibly do if played by someone. Such as being able to instantly do moves that require the player to hold for 2 seconds before attacking. Such as Guiles overhead kick and Blanka's rolling ball attack, or E.Honda's blubber bullet for that matter.

It was a tough match, we eventually called it a draw.

By today's standards, the game is slow. But then this is the version before we starting to go Hyper-Turbo-Ex-Plus-Alpha-Mini-Driver-3D-suck-my-arse-off edition. It's core, it's base but it's good and it's enjoyable to the point of becoming tactical as a fighter rather than picking some overpowered prick and hitting people with moves they can't block *coughAkumacough* (love him really) and as a defining point in the franchise and home-computer vs. arcades, you really couldn't have picked a better band wagon to get upon to do it.