Beast Busters - Arcade

Some beasts need busting, take 3 machine guns.

SNK have a name for themselves in making some of the tougher games out there. In particular, and namely so, the SNK boss syndrome where the last boss (or every boss if you're unlucky) is nightmarishly difficulty, has higher priority over all your attacks and does moves you could never hope to do. However, this is a light gun game they've made called Beast Busters and it's... following the same suit that SNKs bosses do.

Sounds like a nice vacation spot.

Beast Busters is a tough game, there's no two ways about that. Despite it catering for up to 3 players at once, each with their own excessively meaty looking sub-machinegun, it's a nightmare to play and unless you really are watching carefully, you'll end up shooting things you don't need to shoot and getting shot by the things you do need to shoot.

Bedlam, carnage, guns, zombies. I love it.

However, jumping ahead of myself here, Beast Busters takes the idea that a town has suddenly become a ghost town and rather than send in the authorities, it's decided that 3 gun-ho pricks will meander in and take a gander at the situation. Shit goes down, stuff blows up and everything becomes chaos and hell within the first level. Though to be honest, as soon as the first person you met was BLUE and SHOOTING AT YOU, I'd have turned around and walked off if I was still walking at that point. Though that wouldn't make for much of a game.

Should that not be "recently found" ?

Our 3 "heroes" are now stuck deep in enemy territory while trying to figure out what happened, how to escape and basically machinegun, grenade, rocket, flame and electrify everything they can to escape. You get a set of magazines of ammo and have to kill a specifically reoccurring enemy in each level for more to drop in for you to shoot to claim. Most enemies in this game aren't dead however, until they explode, so if they go down, they may get back up and keep attacking. Invariably, this means nearly every enemy must be killed twice.

Most mid-bosses have a pattern and weak point.

The enemies within Beast Busters are a colourful lot at best and not because they're blue skinned. There's some really gruesome looking enemies and monsters, ranging from diseased dogs, to giant birds/eagles/owls (I don't know), mutated piranha, giant head-neck turd bosses (help me please) and even flesh-monster-car creatures that puke rockets at you. Creativity is not in short supply in this game. The problem is that you're likely to run out of credits a long way before you get to see most of the more interesting enemies and bosses.

This is why you should always scrap your car, yourself.

Audio, there's little really to have for music as it's drowned out for the noise of screams and slaughtered monsters and enemies. However the sound effects are loud proud and quite overbearing but you'll manage always to know when you're nearly did thanks to the klaxon sounding "Warning: Now you are about to die" signal. Incidentally you WILL hear that noise a LOT and then "YOU ARE DEAD" being broadcast loudly proudly and spoken to you too as if one method just wasn't enough to hammer home that point where in you died.

Who the fuck writes this?

Even with 3 people playing Beast Busters and unless you're perfectly in psychic synchronisation, you will find yourself heavily overwhelmed within the first few levels and the pressure doesn't let up in the slightest after that. The most annoying part is that the plot maintains that going along the river will be safer and then you're looking at the most enemies and most simultaneously attacking groups you've ever come across within the game, so much for the "easier" route. (Though why it's level 4 at that point and easier was pretty much asking for things to get a lot harder).

Lightning grenades, in case explosions weren't enough.

If you manage to find a means of playing Beast Busters effectively, you're in for a fun ride of highly imaginative enemies and settings, interesting use of transitions between one part of the level and another and a gore fest almost unparallel for the time. But it's still going to be a difficult slog through some of the toughest gun-game sections seen barring Mechanised Attack (Also by SNK...) and with little replay value, brought down by the difficulty, you'll likely play this once or twice and skip it beyond that.

Serious Sam 2 (PC)

Sam he is.

In this day and age of tactical shooters, games where you're running as part of a team that does all the hard work while you're standing around and occasionally allowed to do something when the game decides "ok, let's have you do this and see ALL THE HEAVENLY GLORY" (thank you Bruce Lee), it's nice to sometimes kick back, switch off the brain and let the reflexes take over as you, the one-man(or woman, let's not discriminate) army, takes the enemy down to ownage town and go overkill on anything that moves.

From standard, to fantasy, to shrunk/giant levels and beyond.

Doom 2 did it well, Duke Nukem too, though one game really brought it back to its roots of the one-man army shooter, was Serious Sam. While I'm reviewing that one today, I am however looking at the more overlooked sequel (one of many I should add, given the various versions on the Xbox original, GameCube and PS2), Serious Sam 2. Let's be clear here, this is not Serious Sam The Second Encounter. That's Serious Sam 1 part 2. This is the fully realised Serious Sam game and it's quite a bit different though not always in an better way.

That's right, the boss IS the building.

First of all, the game does not take itself seriously, at all. Within the first few moments you're talking to comically bad aliens about trying to find the various artefacts that will take down the evil overlord of the series, Mental. After a quick transition of things, Sam agrees to undertake a mission while taking a dig at the "Blondie Guy" that's taking "Forever" before the computer inside of the Sam's head begins speaking for the first time, to which this is lampooned immediately and explained by there being something called "A bigger budget", setting the tone of humour for the rest of the game.

Canyons and lava, there's a huge variation between each of the worlds, setting clear and distinct themes.

If this game was a household wares seller, it'd stock nothing but lampshades as it hangs them over almost everything within the game and First Person Shooters as a whole. Questions raised regarding who leaves the weapons around for people to find, weapons being bigger than in previous games, physics puzzles used once and ONCE only (Valve... Take note...), comical weapons ranging from parrots carrying bombs to large bombs with smiles on their faces that wipe out EVERYTHING (except bosses). The comedy in the game is paramount from start to finish though the jokes get a little thin towards the end when the levels get larger and longer. However bonus points given to the pre-fight conversation with a pink dragon that realised it doesn't want to have stolen a princess, that Sam doesn't want to rescue.

It might come as a bit of a shock, but games USED to be this colourful.

Your weapons range from the circular saw, to pistols, rotary barrel shotguns, sub machineguns, rocket launchers, cannons, laser blasters and beyond, while have grenades as an alternative fire that explode on impact with enemies, giving you a change to attack between rounds of the heavier fire powered weapons. As a result, you soon become a literal arsenal on legs, running and gunning everything from troops to tanks to monsters, giants and bigger. Taking on creatures of such enormity that almost defy the idea of what an engine for gaming can do. It's always an eye-opener when you're fighting human-ish sized enemies then something the size of Godzilla turns the corner and you're staring it right in the toenail, then blasting the monster repeatedly with a cannon while it hits back with lasers the size of buildings.

Arachnaphobics need not apply, they get bigger than this.

But that's this game in a nutshell, go bigger, go faster, go harder, go bigger again and then fight a skyscraper. Having said that, it takes a long time for the game to build up to the fun and chaos of the original games. The whole streams and swarms of armies aren't exactly in this game even though there's the potential as they show up in the final levels, but by then it serves to just pad out long levels and you really begin to feel the tactic dragging on, killing the enthusiasm you might have for the levels you would normally have had.

Sadly the action rarely lets up enough for you to fully enjoy the scenary.

Oddly, the bright colourisation and lively design of the game's levels come across as overly cartoony. However that's not because they're intentionally meant to be that buy rather the industry of gaming at this point doesn't use such a selection of colours within their design spectrums, opting for dulled colours and gritty, grainy browns. Seeing lush green grass and yellow dirt tracks, is such a shock on the senses that one can't help but feel the game is out of place, but it's not. Not when you realise that it simply NOT following the over-done realism bullshit of other mainstream games.

He LOOKS big, but he's the baby of the tank family. No I'm not joking.

The levels are rather linear, lamp-shaded again by the game itself with the amusing exchange "Let's take the main road there!" "Like there's any other roads to take" while amusing, doesn't deny the fact that the game will railroad you through many levels and the levels built around villages/towns can be a little jarring as it requires some actual exploration rather than trekking your way across a landscape and blowing up anything that shows an ugly face (or neck in some headless cases). Fans of the original games will be happy to see a return of old enemies (The Kleer... which I'm NOT happy to see given how infamous they are in the original. Love/Hate relationships...) while there's a lot of new enemies that don't seem to fit in with the original game but do fit in with the new art style and direction, it's a little jarring at first but you get used to it.

Run the gauntlet, before the clock zeroes out and so does your health.

Musically there's a lot of ambient tracks with some of the boss fights and levels more along the lines of hard rocking, fast tempo, pulse-increasing beats and power chords which add to the excitement, especially in the "game show levels" (Sam got captured by a banana under a box before having to run gauntlets on a game show while the resistance tries to rescue him) where you're not only fighting wave after wave of enemies, but also against a fairly lapse time limit of instant death. It's a welcome change to the mix though happens so late in the game that it feels thrown in and could have been used a little more often for it.

Tree huggers welcome too!

It's a fun, mad silly mess of a chaotic game, marred by a few broken scripts if you're kill TOO well but then upgrade the difficulty to counteract that, blowing up everything with impunity while running the gauntlet with whoever that wants to be filled with lead. If you want something other than the usual tactical, cover-fire, chest high wall syndrome games, try this one.

Brutal Doom v19 (mod for Doom and Doom 2)

This is going to bloody, fast.

It's an odd thing to do but I felt that rather than review a game, I'd review a modification for a game. Modifications are an interesting subset of gaming, taking the whole game and deciding "Yes, I like this game but I feel that it needs this..." and then going and changing the game in some manner from things like adding in new sound effects, replacing the enemies with large pictures of dicks or going above and beyond to the point of effectively re-designing the WHOLE game with just the core engine being the only thing that is recognisable in the first place. (Even then... it's hard to see it at times).

This is one of the latter modifications. Brutal Doom (v19, for those wondering what's the issue).

You just made a VERY big mistake...

As a comparison, I ran this mod over Doom 2. Let's get straight that right now the things that don't change are the levels themselves and the textures used in those levels and the music of the game. Everything is changed, modified, improved or different. (Yes I'm generalising and there's going to be a few things similar like the BFG sprite is still the same so let's not get pedantic, people).

Brutal doom, is often spoken about as being the game that turns doom into the game we would LIKE to remember. Ramp up the violence, the blood, the gore and the action and this is about as chaotic and gorefesty (yes it's now a word) as one could possibly imagine a game to be without having someone stood beside you and opening an artery over your face every few seconds.

Before chaos...

...after chaos

Let's start with the weapons. ALL the weapons barring the BFG are different. Your fists for a start can punch, rip, fatality and slaughter enemies if you have the right power up or sneak up on them for a stealth kill. Your pistol is now an assault rifle where you can aim down the iron-sights for headshots and pick off body parts, your shotgun can do the same. The double barrel shotgun is stronger and can fire off individual barrels. The minigun is now more like a minigun and can be set spinning for a faster rate of fire (with more judder from the recoil), rockets are kept in 6-pack drums and need reloading but they're faster and hit harder. The plasma gun can be reloaded and used to spray flames around while the BFG just paints the town red... still.

A wealth of fatailities just for you.

They also give you back health and you're untouchable while doing them.

The enemies, whoo! there's a list and a half. You can blow off limbs and they'll keep coming, you can watch them attack each other with multiple animations, some will assault you with others, some will animated differently, almost ALL of them will animated a fatality if they kill you in hand-to-hand combat (See the cacodemon for half-filling meal while it chomps your torso off and leaves the legs behind, or the Baron of Hell RIPPING YOU IN HALF down the middle of your chest). Some will crawl screaming along the ground or just stop there and try to attack.

The enemies aren't the only ones capable of being killed creatively.

Even here, large floating tomato monsters need feeding.

On top of this, you can take the rockets off the Revenants and the cannons off the Mancubus and use their weapons against themselves, kill the enemy with explosives or use a chainsaw on the corpse and you'll be able to steal and use it for yourself. The SpiderMastermind now has an explosive ammo chaingun and a LOT more health while the Cyberdemon now sports multi directional firing spread (no more easy sidesteps) and can stomp you if you get too close for comfort. He also doesn't appreciate being told to go "fuck yourself"... Seriously, don't do it.

10 seconds in and it's going to get far more bloody.

For many, the fun will be found in spraying body parts all over the place and the exploration in the melee fatalities if you have the berserker pack. Or just seeing how over the top one can go with this level of chaos and explosions. Coupled with the notion that everything can be ripped apart, players will end up experimenting to try and find various ways of acquiring all the deaths. Hit it with shotgun and you blow the upper half away, plasma rifle will leave a burnt electrified corpse, machineguns will make them dance a little while rockets just chunkify everything around themselves.

Before paintjob...

...after paintjob.

There are some downfalls though, with the high level of explosive giblets and everything having far more blood than is physically and logically possible, the game can suffer from having too much on screen and quickly identifying what is dead, dying and still a threat can be a hard task. The new approach to the game also will catch many players out with the faster AI and alternative attacks, enemies previously locked to sectors may start wandering to places the players will not expect and more quickly too. New scope is now feasible for ambushes in various places and players toes will be kept upon.

Yes you are seeing that right, and yes the revenant can STILL attack.

There's also the sad truth in that there's various situations and circumstances that make the game exponentially more difficult while in some places outright impossible due to the layout of the level, placement of the enemies and the modifications brought in by this near Total Conversion. Incidentally it doesn't stop it from being just outright, immature, gore fest fun.

You'll end up just staring when the action lets up and seeing the beautiful horrors.

So get this mod, grab a BFG and paint the town RED.