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.

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.

Super Smash TV - SNES

Big money, big prizes, I love it ~Mr Emcee

It's been a long time since I last played this game on the SNES, I remember seeing it on display on an old 24" TV (flat screen? what the hell is that?) and seeing the near-arcade replication and thinking to myself "I must have this game" I wasn't disappointed at the time and in looking back, seeing the game recently again and experiencing it again, I've found that it's one of those that managed to survive the test of time and be almost as incredible as I remember it to be.

 

Secret rooms not listed. (Hint: it's the blank room of the 3x3, approach from left)

The concept is based off The Running Man, a Bachman book that was actually Stephen King, which then was HEAVILY adapted into a film with the ARHNULD, before becoming a free-for-all bloodbath (and thankfully so) with Super Smash TV. The idea being across all of them, that there's a TV show where contestants are allowed to submit themselves to be hunted down and killed LIVE on TV. In the book, it's set in the outside world, in the film it's a game show against specific "gladiators", in the game it's against an army of enemies and huge bosses.

 

Mine, grunts, walking bombs, oh my!

Controls are simple and I'm thankful for that much. The D-Pad moves your character around and the 4 buttons are your attack directions, giving it a bonus over the arcade game in that the twin joystick just wasn't as accurate as this set up. Collect items and weapons by just running into them and they're automatically selected or dismissed as soon as you collect them, particularly weapons as you'll lose what you had and immediately gain your new weapon replete with ammo, at the cost of your previous weapon's armaments. You also can collect landmines, in the 'immediately blowing up your body' sense.

 

He's big, he's bad, he's... immune only to standard bullets, grab the weapons.

Oddly enough, the arcade game gave away free lives if they players could collect them and that's carried over onto the SNES version in that the game has a limit on the number of continues the players can use. Having said that, the rest of the arcades power ups and systems are in place, ranging from the enemies that you'd find in the original from mobs with clubs, to robots with lasers, rolling tanks, turrets, snake trails, snake segments, buffalo, small snakes, snake men (why the snake theme guys?) and including the bosses in all their glory.

You win! But it's not likely you'll live long enough to collect it.

It's a very faithful adaptation, all the powerups are still there from orbiting orbs that double your firepower until they're touched, five shuriken shield, invincible shields, socks/speed up, presents for points, cash for points and finally (as I like to call it) the breath-taker, a nuke or smart bomb that gives you a few moments of peace to take a quick breather. Unless I start to really dig into the game there's very little here that's NOT in the arcade original and in some cases there's MORE than the original arcade had.

 

ORBS! No really, there's orbs coming.

These bonus extras include the secret rooms with their special pickups that can unlock the super secret room later on as part of the pleasure dome to give you the best ending of the game. It's a monster of a room that likely has more fighting going on in that one room than most of the game has to offer. The game really does love to throw everything at you, including the kitchen sink, which it will happily beat you to death with around the head and neck if you're fortunate. If not, it will CONTINUE to beat you around the head and neck long after they're gone and all that remains is a pair of crappy shoes. Yeah I'm not impressed with what you're wearing.

 

See, told you it was in the bottom right.

Key grudges for this game is that it is significantly, undeniably, slower than the arcade original. How this is the case I'm not sure given that once you've beaten the game, you get the 10x speed option to play through and it runs that very well indeed, maybe doubling the normal speed and having 5x speed just wasn't an idea that came to mind for the developers. Oddly as well, nearly all the sounds of the game sound like they were sampled from the arcade rather than converting the files down, nearly every sound effect has a slight, and it is slight, hiss behind the noise that gives away that it's been recorded and re-sample in this manner. Despite this, the third level has its own music rather than the arcade version (which ran the first level music again) and I must say it's well worth hearing.

 

Outnumbered? yes. Out gunned? No.

Two players working together should be able to smash (ha ha... god that was terrible) this game with relative ease and one player, playing diligently, ought to be able to beat the game barring some very unfortunate moments. My advice, stick the game in hard mode and leave it there, playing on easy or normal will stop the game after the first and second level respectively, play it in hard and enjoy it for what it is, fun, mindless, chaos.

Bring on the gore!