Satoshi Kunsai
Reviews
Ninja Gaiden (NES)
Slice and dice! Ninja know no fear!
The Good
First, we had Sega's Shinobi. When I was 9 years old, I spent many a quarter on the arcade version (and much of my allowance, to my mother's dismay :p). Why? Simple: ninjas are the video game world's greatest and most versatile heroes. So how do you 1-Up an awesome game like Shinobi? I found out that Christmas, when I received Ninja Gaiden for my NES.
I popped that box open, grabbed the cart, and bashed it into my NES so quickly it nearly choked on it. I flick on the power, and sit back. And THAT'S when it caught my eye...
HOLY CRAP!! CUT-SCENES!! CUT-SCENES ON MY NES!! I was floored: I almost thought I was watching a movie; I had NEVER seen this high-quality look on my system! So I watch one ninja fall to the ground, and then I see the guy who would be the hero: Ryu Hayabusa...Ninja, Ladie's Man, Professional Ass Kicker.
I didn't even hit Start yet, and I was too impressed already!
Anyway, Ninja Gaiden's got it all. Ryu's quite fleet-footed, quick on the draw with his sword, and slices and dices like no one's business. He listens to your every command (read: dead-on control). He does about 50 flips in the air during a jump. He's got cool Ninja Arts to aid him on his quest, including shuriken, Windmill Shuriken (they boomerang all over the screen!!), the Spinning Blade (jump and slash in a circle), and the Invincible Fire Wheel (TOASTY VILLAINS!!). And he'll need them, too...I'll explain why later.
Although I did explain the cut-scenes already, I think I should go into a bit more detail and cover the in-game graphics, sound, and music while I'm at it. The cut-scenes in this game, for 1989, were amazing. They conveyed the story in such a way that it almost seems like an anime OVA (incidentally, there was a Ninja Gaiden OVA in Japan, but it was poorly written and animated, and Ryu was only a bit character in it. BLASPHEMY!!), and you get such a feel for the characters that you would think that they were alive and for real. The story is nothing short of excellent, and the game plays it out perfectly, breaking the action up into six acts of 2 to 5 stages each, for a grand total of 21 stages. The difficulty level in the game slowly progresses from very easy to hardcore gamer tough, but it progresses steadily from stage to stage. The bosses fall in the same category as well, with a very easy first boss to a hair-yanking hard final boss. More on the difficulty later.
The graphics in this game are pretty good, albeit a little grainy. Everyone is of a decent size but oddly drawn, but the animation in this game is just stunning; it's so fluid that you wouldn't think at first that this is still just an NES. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, has at least 3 to 4 frames of animation; even little details like Ryu throwing a weapon look awesome in motion! The sounds are pretty good for an NES, although a few sounds are a little odd like the "FWP-SPLSH!" sound enemies make when they're killed (sounds like an explosion splashing into water!), and Ryu somehow makes this blasting sound when he gets hit. Is he laden with nitro or something? ^_^
But never mind that, the big draw in the sound department? The MUSIC!! Mark my words: MUSIC MAKES OR BREAKS THE GAME!! In this case, it doesn't just MAKE the game, it's the BLOOD WORK!! The music in this game is just TOO FING GOOD!!! The composer made some excellent use of the NES's sound system, including the ever so neglected PCM drum channel (one of the other games to really use this channel was Castlevania II: Simon's Quest). It's so awesome that I used to use the Sound Test code, then tape all the tunes off the TV with a portable tape recorder held to the speaker, just to listen to it later. It's THAT GOOD!! Every single tune, even to this day, rings in my head for all eternity, and out of every track, my personal favorite, the track from Stage 4-2 (Bazlisk Mine Field) just RULES! Thanks to emulation (and the Internet!), I now have the entire soundtrack in MP3 format, and I still can't get over how amazing the music is!
*The Bad
Like I was saying about the difficulty...
All you little rugrats raised on today's modern systems have it easy. We old-timers had it tough. And Ninja Gaiden, while easy in the beginning, begins to show its true face about halfway into the game, and begins to become insanely hard! And one stage in particular, Stage 6-2 (all you old-timers who know what I'm talking about...raise your hands! raises hand), has been known to drive gamers into a furious rampage. Things are coming at you from literally every angle, and you need to put your skills to the ultimate test here. Come out unscathed, and you get to eat a whole box of Girl Scouts Thin Mint Cookies, on me. ^_^
Just thank Tecmo for one thing: infinite continues.
The Bottom Line
Even though Tecmo now is taunting and tempting us with voluptuous ninja girls and sexy women wrestlers, who can forget their roots? Ninja Gaiden is one of the best NES games of the time, and anyone who has had an NES in their home as a kid will agree.
But hey...sexy ninja girls are still good! ^_^ deep voice Bathe Kasumi...and bring her to me...
By Satoshi Kunsai on November 22, 2019
Action 52 (Genesis)
By Satoshi Kunsai on November 8, 2007
Mortal Kombat: Special Forces (PlayStation)
By Satoshi Kunsai on March 31, 2004
CheetahMen II (NES)
There is no God if games like this exist.
The Good
At least it was impossible to find.
The Bad
Remember what I said about Action 52? Take that and expand upon it million-fold.
Our favorite basement dweller from Florida, Active Enterprises, thinks that the world needs even MORE crap to choke their NES systems with, thus Cheetahmen II, the AHEM "sequel" (more like 10 more minutes of another kindergarten kid coding while on a massive Kool Aid/Oreo rush) was thrown in our faces.
The game begins with a little storyline involving some evil guy named Dr. Morbis creating an Ape Man, one of many in his line of Sub-Humans, to beat the Cheetahmen once and for all. That's what the game says, anyway. To me, it looks like some reject performance artist with a goofy mustache and the worst fashion sense ever (just HOW hard did he try ripping off the costumes of both Electro from Spider-Man AND Kid Flash from the old Superfriends show??) teams up with some other guy with a nose large enough to feed a third world country and sends a Bigfoot he caught in his backyard out to beat up on bipedal cheetah guys who always used to steal his lunch money when he went to Evil Scientist Schools for the Special Children. And so, like the first Cheetahmen, you have six stages, and switch between the CM after two stages.
And like the first game (as well as all the other 51 games on Action 52), you get some of the WORST graphics on the NES (hell, now he's making the old Atari 2600 look pretty damn close to NES levels!!), horrible music, sounds that'll make you think your NES is about to explode from the sheer torture of having the cart shoved into its precious innards, and control and gameplay so asinine that even the kindergarten kid (see above), wouldn't program on his own accord! And of course, don't expect to get very far in the game, because you'll lose all your lives within the first five minutes due to the controls, and at that point the cartridge will too when you rip it from the NES and throw it into the trash compactor.
The Bottom Line
Just be lucky this game wasn't available in stores. If it were, this guy would've been found and executed YEARS ago.
And we never found out what became of our pal, the Ape Man. Legend has it that he decided to gain a lot of weight, dye his fur white, and joined the cast of DarkStalkers...oh wait...wrong guy.
Actually, I last saw the Ape Man living in a cardboard box in an alley in New York...no one wants him for any more video game work...poor Ape Man.
By Satoshi Kunsai on March 3, 2004
Action 52 (NES)
BWAAAAAA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
The Good
I've got 52 OTHER games to pick from in my NES library, and then some!!
The Bad
You wanna talk about jokes? Here's the ultimate joke for you: 52 piles of CRAP, meant to be games...no wait, I take that back...52 MISTAKES OF HUMAN LOGIC passing themselves off as the ultimate game collection!!
What's so bad about this miscreation? All of the "games" on here look more like BASIC games a kindergartner could write while hopped up on Kool-Aid and Oreos! There's ZERO variety between any of the games; in fact, this is my worst nightmare: I'm shopping for new games, but I can ever find is the SAME game just packaged many, MANY times over! cold sweat
Anyway, just how bad can they be? Here's some examples: the game "StarEvil" is a VERY generic vertical shmup, with lousy controls, no weapons, and the same stage repeating itself and almost NO enemies!! "Haunted Hill" is a pitiful excuse of a Castlevania clone with no power-ups, no threat from enemies, and...lousy controls! Need I continue? Very well...the cart's apparent flagship title, "Action Gamemaster", has about the only amusing scene in this whole pile of schlock: a kid having massive seizure while playing his video games...er...not really, but the intro is so badly drawn that I don't blame you for thinking the same thing. And from initial impression, you think you MIGHT be getting at LEAST a slightly mediocre platformer, you instead get a stupid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES version, of course) clone, with...WOW!!! Lousy controls!! And asinine gameplay! And no power-ups! No ways of recovering lost health! Sound effects that sound like my NES just blew its top! And...horrible graphics!! gasp OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH....HOW IMPRESSIVE!! Sarcasm Meter: BOOOOOOOOM!!!!
Last but not least, this was a collection unleashed onto an unsuspecting world by some guy in a basement in Florida who thought that 12 year old kids who owned an NES would rather spend $200 to get ONE cartridge full of schlock instead of 4 or 5 excellent, top-notch, AAA NES titles available at the time. Someone should find him and execute him in public.
The Bottom Line
To the crackpot who thought unleashing this collection of his "games" was a good idea: when I was 12 years old, $200 got me Ninja Gaiden II, Mega Man 4, Tetris, Castlevania 3, and Final Fantasy....I love Christmas! ^_^
By Satoshi Kunsai on March 2, 2004
Powerslave (SEGA Saturn)
Only place where it feels most at home...
The Good
I used to have a time where 1st person shooters were my thing, despite the fact that I am more of a console person than a computer person. So naturally, my first crack at PowerSlave was the PC version.
Despite some cool themes, ideas, and more, I had one big problem that plagued me as I played the PC version: it didn't feel like a computer style FPS. I'll explain more on that later.
So, whilst hunting through a store some friends of mine own, lo and behold I came across the console versions of PowerSlave. Needing to fill a few gaps in my severely lacking Saturn library, I picked up the Saturn version of PS, and just for comparison's sake, the PlayStation version.
Out of all three, the Saturn version is the best one. More on that, but first, a retrospective look on the game itself.
The game starts with a small cutscene explaining that the Egyptian city of Karnak was taken over by hostile alien forces (aren't they all now? ^_^), and sealed off from the rest of the world. People were being mummified alive and horribly mutated, and from one survivor's testimony, the aliens wish to find the mummy of the great Pharaoh Ramses, thinking that he will hold the key to conquering all of Earth. So, as a rough and ready commando armed to the teeth, you're parachuted into the valleys of Egypt, hoping to stop the alien forces before they can resurrect Ramses.
So, as in any other 1st person shooter, you shoot enemies, solve some puzzles, and make your way to the exit. Along the way at certain levels, the spirit of Ramses will inform you of the alien's progress (for a dead guy, he's awfully well informed, ain't he? ^_^), and let you know of certain nasty surprises in some stages. You also have to fight a boss after every 4 stages, and some of these are quite nasty, especially the fight with the evil God of Egypt, Set.
But should I leave out mentioning the enemies? Hell no! Keeping with the Egyptian theme, most of the enemies you fight are pulled straight from Egyptian mythology, from Anubis soldiers, to scorpion demons, from scarab beetles, to Set himself, most enemies look right at home in the stages, which have some nice layouts and designs. Some stages are a bit long, so you get checkpoints to return to in case you get killed.
Weapons in this game are quite minimal, with only 7 normal weapons and one you can get only by letting a certain enemy (okay, okay, the mummies) shoot you. You get a machete, a six-shooter pistol, a machine gun, grenades, and a couple of mystical weapons like the Gauntlet of Ra, which will make crispy work of any nearby enemy. Your secret weapon is the Mummy's Staff, which is activated by getting shot by a mummy's skull, and being TURNED into a mummy! Quite a simple and SICK weapon too: raise up, mumble something, slam it down (BOOM!!!!), everything around you is instantly dusted, and you revert back to yourself laughing quite sadistically, heh heh...
For control, the Saturn version DOES take the cake. There's support for the 3D Control Pad that came with Sega's NiGHTS: Into Dreams, and trust me: I can't play the game without it. You get the analog stick to move, the D-Pad to strafe, and plenty of buttons for every function needed in the game. My biggest problem with the PC version was that you could barely reconfigure the controls, and there was lack of joystick support. The PS1 version lacked analog support, and the control scheme there was too wonky to even work half right.
Graphic wise, the game's graphics are best on the Saturn version. Everything is nice and crisp, moves quickly, and is chock full of detail, even up close. Looks like Lobotomy managed to wring every ounce of power the Saturn had in it, because unlike the PS1 version, there's no slowdown, and the game seems to be running the Saturn's hi-res graphics mode. The sounds are rather good, with lots of variety in the enemies, ambiance, and weapons, but they sound a tiny bit "boxy" on the Saturn. Not enough to really warrant a downpoint, though (then again it just may be my TV that sounds like that). It is, however, the music that shines through. Some people don't get it sometimes, but music IS a driving force behind a lot of games, and PowerSlave's soundtrack, while it may be overshadowed by other games, fits EXTREMELY well with the game's environment, and has plenty of variety between tracks. And since it's also playing straight from the CD, you can use it as a CD soundtrack for on-the-go fun. (Note: the PC version has the same thing; a CD soundtrack, but the PS1 version uses XA audio, so you can't use that version as a CD soundtrack.)
The Bad
I did have a few niggles about the game, though. This isn't the BEST game ever, mind you...
One thing that bugged me was that a lot of the stages were just too damn freaking LONG, and you got two checkpoints per stage, and you didn't get to save until you completed the ENTIRE stage. It did get annoying because some stages took up to FIFTEEN minutes just to complete!!
Another thing was that you had limited lives (see what I mean by this being more of a console shooter?), but at least you could take an unbelievable walloping before biting the dust, and at least there were a few 1-Ups in some stages, but you could only have up to 5 extra lives...no more.
And finally: a limited assortment of weapons eventually meant that it was all going to come down to just one weapon that you'd really need. Yep: the machine gun was about all you really needed since it could damage anyone. The mystical weapons were more novelty than anything, and the machete and pistol were just too weak for anything. At least you had that Mummy's Staff to look forward to...
The Bottom Line
Although not the crowning achievement of first-person shooters, PowerSlave was still quite fun, and most enjoyable on consoles. I would recommend, however, that Saturn owners find it for their giant black tank, as that version had the best features. The PlayStation version unfortunately suffered from a wacky control scheme and often nasty slowdown, and the PC version was just too plain for my tastes.
And beware of Set...EVIL, I tell you!! EEEEEEVILLLLL!!!!
By Satoshi Kunsai on February 26, 2004
Fatal Fury Special (SEGA CD)
Great game...on another system, that is...
The Good
I'll try and keep this short and sweet.
Fatal Fury Special, the "special" version of Fatal Fury 2 as many put it, improved quite a bit over its predecessors. For one, fan favorite fighters Duck King and Tung Fu Rue are back, in all their wacky (and old! ^_^) glory. Old man Tung's learned some new tricks, and even better: the four bosses of Fatal Fury 2 are fully playable, as well as the Big Man himself, Geese Howard, making another wicked appearance! worships Geese...worship him, I say!!! ^_^
Although no one has generally changed from FF2, a few of their stages have gotten minor, almost subtle face lifts, and the new music for Duck King and Tung Fu Rue sounds excellent. And yes, Geese's theme is back and remixed for more evilness! And don't forget the REAL final boss of Fatal Fury 2 and Special: Wolfgang Krauser, with his WICKED stage (a massive German palace), and unbelievable music...did I mention the orchestra in his stage that PLAYS the theme?? No? Okay, I just did now. ^_^
The Bad
Nothing, but what I'm talking about here is the Sega CD version, and...well, here's where it gets ugly.
First, and foremost, SNK didn't port this game directly to the Sega CD. Instead, European development house Funcom ported this (as well as Samurai Shodown) to the system, and it didn't turn out pretty. I'll list as much as I can wrong about this port:
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Missing character animations. What's missing the most is the characters' fight poses (like when they start a match). Plus what's there looks incredibly choppy.
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On the subject of missing animations: the backgrounds are ALL missing LOTS of animations, and Geese Raging Stormed someone for screwing his stage up horribly (especially cutting out the intro for the stage: going through the screen doors one at a time.) Oh, and Krauser found the guy who removed the orchestra from his stage and...well...it wasn't a nice sight...
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Nearly EVERY SINGLE vocal sample is missing. What's left is some of the characters' grunts and yells when they get hit or use moves, and what is there must've been downsampled to the point where the PC speaker of my old 286 sounded better than this! And for Chrissake, even the ANNOUNCER voices are MIA!!
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The difficulty levels might as well not exist. There are NO differences whether you're playing Easy mode or Expert Mode. Everyone fights the same in EVERY difficulty.
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Some music is missing; it's most noticeable on the (mute) victory screens. Surprisingly, everyone's themes are all there. The music gets at least two points, though: it's recorded directly on the CD, and it was sampled straight from the original Neo Geo game.
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Funcom even screwed the guest star!! Ryo looks WORSE than he did in Art of Fighting 1 for the damn GENESIS!!! The. GEN. ES. IS!!
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Fatal Fury 2 on the Genesis looked AND felt more intact, and that's on a freakin' cartridge!! This is a CD-based system with more RAM, stronger video capability, and additional CPU power! I'm appalled!!
The Bottom Line
I find it utterly embarrassing that a system that could EASILY handle a Neo Geo port with only minor differences (like slight color loss) gets this HORRIBLE port of such an excellent fighting game.
And I find it funny (yet sad) that Eternal Champions (a Sega CD fighter that came out later) showed what you could do with the system when it comes to fighters. Too bad it wasn't around to help Funcom save Fatal Fury Special...
Bottom line: I'm glad SNK handles their own porting now, except when it comes to PS1 ports...-_-
By Satoshi Kunsai on December 31, 2003
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES)
Oh my God it's so CUTE!!!! ^_^
The Good
Okay, so I'm male, but big deal. I've got a weakness for cute. Not only is Yoshi's Island sickeningly, ridiculously cute, but there's one thing it's got in that cute undercoating: a fun as hell, challenging platformer starring Mario's dinosaur buddy, Yoshi!
The game opens with a cute little story of two babies being carried in the early dawn hours to their parents by the stork, when the evil MagiKoopa, Kamek, zooms by and snatches one of them. The other baby drops to the ground, landing on Yoshi's back. When Kamek realizes he only caught one baby, he sends his goons out to find the other! Meanwhile, Yoshi brings the baby to his friends and discovers a map the baby has with him. Yoshi and his friends decide to reunite the two brothers, and they set off to bring them together!
So in every world, you have eight stages, with one different color Yoshi per stage. The gameplay is basic platformer stuff: walk, run, jump, you know. Yoshi can lash out his tongue and swallow enemies, and either turn them into eggs to hurl at more enemies or parts of the stage, or just spit them out again. He can also transform into different forms (a sub, a borer, a helicopter) to get through various stages as well! But his one big concern is Baby Mario, who quietly sits on his back throughout the game. If Yoshi gets hit by an enemy, Mario gets knocked off his back and starts wailing, and if Yoshi doesn't get him back quickly, Kamek will come by and snatch Mario, costing Yoshi a life.
So what also makes this game a winner? One word: secrets. Yoshi's Island is so chock full of secrets that it's almost insane. You can spend an eternity searching out every single nook and cranny, and to make it even better, you can constantly go back through stages and attempt to beat them with a perfect score. With 60 stages to play through, I don't think anyone's gonna get too bored anytime soon!
So, onward to graphics, sounds, and music. The graphics in YI deserve special mention. They are absolutely BEAUTIFUL! The SNES version of the game is powered by the SuperF/X2 chip, making for a TON of wonderfully animated effects, especially the morphing effects of Yoshi's transformations and parts of certain stages. The colors and styles of the backgrounds and foreground make the whole game look like a giant picture book, and definitely have their own unique style to them. The music is simplistic, but very cute and fitting. Thanks to Koji Kondo's score, YI is made double cute. And the sounds are for the most part very well done, save for one...
The Bad
Hearing Baby Mario wail when he gets knocked off Yoshi gets really grating after a while.
The Bottom Line
Yoshi's Island is great for girlfriends, old-time Mario fans, or people who just want a wonderfully crafted platformer from one of the greatest game companies to exist in this modern world.
Now you wonder why the name Nintendo was chosen: "acsend to heavenly temple"!
By Satoshi Kunsai on June 28, 2003