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.

Fighting Fantasy - Arcade

Nice pixel art, but that's about it.

I wasn't entirely sure of what to expect when I started playing Fighting Fantasy. I was worried initially it was going to be one of those QIX based games where you slowly carve out an arena while the image of a nude woman sits behind a screen that slowly is revealed while you progress through avoiding pointless enemies. Thankfully this isn't one of those games as it is in fact a beat-em-up. Sadly it's not a very good one but it is one of the more creative attempts I've seen from the older sets of games.

Thankfully, no hippos were harmed in the Hippodrome

The premise of Fighting Fantasy is a simple one. You've been chosen as some sort of badass with a sword to take part in interstellar games of gladiatorial combat, where all the other creatures also happen to be from the mythos of the same planet. Not quite sure how that figures out but at least there was an attempt to do something other than "Here's enemies, go crack skulls" which is almost neatly explained in the title sequence after you pump in your cash.

For a particularly non-human enemy, it's well coded.

Controls are simple enough, harkening back to the days of Barbarian on the old early 80s home computers. You've an attack button, a jump button and 8directions of the joystick. Tapping the attack while pushing a direction will result in an attack of some nature while hold back and attack will block (usually) an attack for a short while. Interestingly, after each fight you can purchase weapons and items to keep yourself alive and give different stats. Longer weapons tend to hurt less while short range weapons do the most damage (except against the last enemy where everything does 1 hit point of damage, the cheap bastard).

Just a little bit one-sided in this battle...

Your opponents in Fighting Fantasy are as varied as they are difficult to fight. Each enemy requires a different tactic (Though getting them into a corner and hammering them repeatedly works almost universally well. Ranging from a Lamia (snake woman), Gargoyles, lizard men, scorpion men, dragons, an obligatory twin battle, wizards and the last boss who might as well be God with the health and over prioritised attacks and moves he's got.

Just as unfair as it looks, the 2nd hardest battle in the game.

But the uniqueness in Fighting Fantasy is that each character will fight in a different way. Lamia will use her snake tail to attack at times, Scorpion man will try to poison with the stinger, the twins will do dual-moves, wizard attacks with a huge selection of spells, the Dragon is enormous and more like a boss than a fight and all the fighters have a certain charm to them that shows there's something fairly well developed in this game.

I did not beat this guy, I am ashamed.

Sadly the execution of the game is dross. Fighting Fantasy has the ideas and the ambition but lacks the actual game to pull off what it's attempting to do. While the graphics are impressive for the time and the enemies are clearly and well thought out in their design and performance, the gameplay is the key issue in that it becomes a hammer and button basher very quickly and the idea of using tactics in combat is laughed out the window unless you effectively study this game like you're learning a new language. (And no, not because it's partly in Japanese)

Will kill you unless you fight dirty.

If the combat in Fighting Fantasy (you know, the very CORE of a fighting a game) had been improved and made more accessible and playable, this would have been a solid hit of a game. Unfortunately it's become an unexciting mess punctuated with impressive idea but horrible execution.

One of the MORE infuriatingly cheap enemies. Akin to putting a slingshot against a Howitzer.

Almost fitting that the last two words of my previous paragraph are entirely suitable for what to do with this game.

Outfoxies - Arcade

No foxes are involved

It's every once in a while a game really surprises me as to just how inventive an arcade game can be. It's been a long time since I saw anything like this one and with Outfoxies, I can only really liken it to a sort of 2D version of the original Power Stone, or Super Smash Brothers with less in the way of items and combat.

Some large and creative areas here

Outfoxies is about over the top arenas, crazy characters and duelling spies one on one in a very action orientated game that seems like the semi-final showdowns in numerous James Bond films, especially with one particular character that seems to be a direct copy of Tee Hee from Live and Let Die (You know, the tall guy with the metal claw arm thanks to a hungry gator... or croc, I forget and I don't stop to ask when running from such things).

Dead on a dead whale... How embarassing.

Your characters in Outfoxies, range from Any Job for Cash man, Psycho Twins, Naughty Chimp, Professor Chairbound, Madame Killer, Circus nutcase, Tee Hee rip off and High Class Hit Woman. Each character brings something fairly unique to the table aside from speed and strength bonuses, the professor in a chair is able to turn aruond and negate most projectile damage with his reinforced wheelchair at the cost of mobility, the chimp is faster but takes more damage while the more generics of the group are John Smith (Great name) and Betty Doe (Missed a trick there, should have been called Jane).

Rocket, grenades, machineguns, swords and more to use.

Each character has their own level and the missions are all to kill the other spies for cash. Levels range from cargo planes while in flight, to circus tents (complete with their own human cannonball cannon), to boats on the oceans in storms, an aquarium and a train while it goes through tunnels. The levels themselves are dynamic in that things change all the time. The train will periodically go through tunnels, forcing combat inside the carriages. The ship and plane levels will tilt and sway violently with the combat that takes place, the aquarium will flood and fill with chompy little critters at the first opportunity and each level will generously spawn a variety of weapons.

Obligatory "I Win" sticker

Combat takes place in Outfoxies with a simple interface, the joystick moves you around while the attack button will generically attack and the jump button, naturally, jumps you from place to place. You can jump and down through levels and floors, climb onto things, pick up and toss barrels and crates and assault your opponent with a mixture of guns, machineguns, rocket launchers, grenades, flamethrowers, swords and weapons based around the level in which you fight. As such your own fists aren't all that powerful and as such, you'll often be scrambling for death-dealing weapons, particularly the explosives.

Hi-explosives at the Hi-Top

Each round takes about a few minutes, combat can be fast paced or get bogged down in a simple exchange of blows back and forth as one person gets floored only to rise and floor the other. If one character has higher strength/defense then it's clear who the winner is going to be at that point (usually the CPU player), otherwise it becomes an issue of who gets the explosives and who gets slapped hard with the death cannon rocket launcher.

"I'm on a boat, I'm on a boat..."

The sounds within the game are your usual set of explosions and booms with a little focus on the music but with so much going on you barely will be listening to it. However the digitised speech for every item pick up, enemy interaction and as an announcer voice, serves the game well, as does the final few speeches given by the Last Boss within their mansion (bonus points for 3 attack dogs and the more vicious fluffy, yappy dog too) really add to the overall experience of the game.

Last level, run a gauntlet into a bossfight

That said, Outfoxies has flaws. The screen gets far too small to see clearly unless the fight is very close together, which is ok if it's human vs human but against the computer, you're disadvantaged by an algorithm process that negates the need to be able to see clearly. In 1 vs 1, the game is a lot of fun and the sheer size, scale and scope is remarkable for an arcade game to the point that I'd like to see it redeveloped, though once you add more weapons etc, you're looking at games that already exist. Certainly an overlooked game and if you find one of them around, play it, you won't be disappointed in the entertainment.