Werewolf: The Last Warrior

Data East, 1990

So let me start off with one for the NES, since I just said that.

Data East made a game about a werewolf with swords for hands and released it in North America several months before releasing it at home in Japan. I like to imagine that the conversation leading up to this decision involved the statement, “the Americans will eat this shit up.” That’s what I’d say. And I’m American. We love our nacho hot dogs and our spicy-ranch burger nuggets, and we love our idea mashups too. We’re basically a nation of five-year-olds. I’m lumping myself in too, don’t worry. I am thirty-seven years old and still struggle with the idea that I’m not supposed to eat cake as a meal. I’m not looking down my nose at anyone here. Especially since the idea of a werewolf with swords for hands is pretty fucking cool.

I, a proud American, am in fact eating this shit up.

There is a plot, but you can throw it in the trash along with the cellophane the box came wrapped in. Something about an evil doctor who takes over the world with mutants and how the world’s last hope is some werewolf with swords for hands. You have an ANGER METER that you fill with bubbles to get stronger/jump higher, and you pick up W’s to transition from man to beast and back. Being a man sucks. Be the beast. The beast that can still totally handle ladders with his sword hands and whose hourglass figure is the envy of all the ladies about town.

Pictured: them hips and them knife-hands totally working it… into a sewer.

I have no real complaints about Werewolf: The Last Warrior, nor does it really distinguish itself too strongly in terms of presentation. It has some pretty cool cinematic bumps in between levels, but after a little while it gets irritating to start a level and have a cut scene immediately interrupt it after you take like three fucking steps. I enjoy the separate mechanics of being a werewolf and being really fucking mad. Our hero can be absolutely furious AND/OR be a ravenous wolf-man, and I think it’s important to teach young people that being as pissed off as possible gives you superhuman power independent of any separate moon-shifting curse you may have. It’s part of the human condition. The music and sound are adequate, and most importantly, the fun factor is there. I got tired of WTLW less quickly than I expected. 7 out of 10 for a novel (if silly) concept done decently.

Cross Fire

Sanritsu Denki/Kyugo, 1990

Imagine if Contra kind of sucked. That’s Cross Fire.

I’m sticking with “kind of sucked” because this game is playable. It’s just not as awesome as Contra and made me want to play Contra again instead. It makes me imagine an executive showing Contra to some desperate and underpaid developers and suggesting they also make Contra. Compared to the werewolf with sword hands idea, this is fucking shameful. So, to risk sounding repetitive here: it’s Contra with a life bar, and instead of defeating an alien menace intent on ruling the world, you’re just some soldier asshole who “fights evil” (looks for trouble) worldwide. But be ready to basically play a slower Contra with shittier everything.

This is to art what a hammer is to a delicate porcelain plate.

I won’t call the graphics terrible, but I could. What I will call them, out loud and with a sneer on my face, is lazy. This is low-effort shit for 1990, and I’m including placement in that assessment, not just quality. Your audio experience will not be much better. Fuck it, it won’t be any better at all. I won’t lie or sugarcoat anything. I will give Cross Fire one positive appraisal: it isn’t totally unplayable if you can deal with:

1) looking at it

2) hearing it

3) feeling vaguely insulted by it

It doesn’t totally suck. It just mostly sucks, and only because it was allowed to. 4 out of 10 out of sheer contempt for Cross Fire.

Atomic Runner Chelnov

Data East, 1988

In real life, the only powers that radiation will give you are the superhuman power to always be sick and the special ability to eventually die of radiation. Chelnov is another classic example of the trope we’ve never truly let die: a man who became a superhero instead of a charred corpse or a short-term hospice patient due to nuclear radiation. He’s an Atomic Runner now, and he’s running for his goddamned life from the KGB or some other “secret organization” that wants his powers for evil. Slings and arrows, man. Every fucking time.

I don’t feel like it’s entirely outlandish that this makes me uncomfortable on some small level.

I know this is a forced-scrolling game, but it’s still very much a platformer; it’s like playing those “athletic” self-scrolling Mario levels in sequence while Data East throws some giant zombie arms and metal-helmeted fire dinosaurs in there for good measure. The scrolling only stops when it’s boss time. There are a variety of weapons and power ups (six counts as variety, shut up) to find, and you’ll want them. Part of what’s so fun about this game is just looking at it; both the arcade and Mega Drive versions are gorgeous for their time, especially some of the background art like the weird person-tree jungle and the Aztec-esque temple area. Chelnov also offers fantastic gameplay, combining a little bit of constant pressure (the nonstop movement) with a ton of action (everything is intent on murdering you, as usual).

My only complaint about it is possible burnout; I’m glad I took a shot at it on emulator so I could save my game state, just so I had a few minutes to look away now and again. I cannot imagine playing this shit in the arcade. Not only do I hate being watched by strangers, I also sweat at the most inopportune times and I’m sure I’d look like a Butterball turkey in a convection oven while playing this. 8 out of 10.

The Incredible Hulk

Probe, 1994

“At least it’s not any Spider-Man game.”

I am so tired of superhero-themed shit, especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’ve had force-marketed to us as a combo of sociopolitical “message” and barely-written entertainment. Feel free to email me if you would like to defend milady Marvel Comics at court. I have always liked the Hulk, though. The Hulk gets shit done in perhaps the most honest and cathartic way of any of Marvel’s woke-soap-opera characters: by absolutely losing his shit and stomping the bad guys a new asshole.

Pictured: Hulk tearing Abomination a new, improved, second asshole.

This is one of the few playable early-console-era games licensed by Marvel. I’ve talked about LJN and their sins against us ever since I started writing for NRW, and I will let God smash the gavel on that shit. This game is decent, despite being published by the eternal shit-puddle U.S. Gold. Probe kept this game simple without making it too vanilla. When you give me a controller and the Hulk is on the other end of it, I expect to be tearing shit up worse than Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel on a bender.

You don’t really get that here, but what you do get is a game where the Hulk isn’t a hapless clumsy asshole like every digital version of Spider-Man you saw during this era (except Maximum Carnage, that was fairly good). They can’t have you tearing down buildings all over the place or taking antitank rounds to the chest while laughing, but the Hulk still feels pretty Hulky. You get a decent set of special moves to beat up the Leader’s robots with, including bear hugs, head butts, and a very MK-esque uppercut. It is also decently difficult to harm the Hulk, despite his invulnerability being watered down for a video game. Things don’t get too challenging until they get weird later on in places like space. That’s where shit should start getting challenging for anyone.

Everything looks great, very much arcade-quality without diverging too far from the comics feel of the source material. The Hulk’s walk is kind of goofy, this weird arrogant stomp-march, but I guess he can walk however he wants. He’s the Hulk. Non-shitty digitized sounds are accompanied by an OST that sounds vaguely like the one for Sonic Spinball here and there (which is far from a negative thing). 8 out of 10.

Jewel Master

Sega, 1991

This game is totally my kind of shit. Deep-ass fantasy lore intro (here is a link), elemental magic, a demon lord… shit, what else do you want?

You punch fireballs out of your hands and collect elemental rings to combine for use in your mystical ass-kicking of evil. If you ever played Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, it’s a bit like the DSS Card System, but way less frustrating and slow to build. Another neat angle is how certain types of monsters may be more or less vulnerable to certain elemental attacks; it’s a small but welcome element of basic strategy that adds a bit of additional satisfaction to giving the demon king’s minions an ass whooping.

This dragon doesn’t stand a chance against me in the dance-off.

Like too few of its run-and-shoot platformer buddies, Jewel Master allows the player to aim and shoot upward, instead of just having things come at you from overhead and fuck you up while you sort of waggle your arms forward like John McCain and look foolish. I will never stop dunking on two things in this world: politicians and Mega Man.

It’s a Genesis game developed by Sega, so Jewel Master is pretty damn good all across the board. Its audiovisual artisanship is on par with arcade games of the era, as one would expect from the console itself, let alone games made by the console’s developer. The composer was apparently really into prog-rock, and it sort of shows in the soundtrack, which is probably my favorite part of Jewel Master by a nose. 8 out of 10.

That finishes out May, RetroFans. See you in June! Stay Retro!

Beat em ups.

I’ve said so much already. What more can I add? The style was super hot in the 16-bit era, and still weaves its way in and out of the limelight from time to time. The formula is classic, even timeless, to speak boldly… one or two protagonists (maybe more, if hardware permits), punching and kicking their way through hordes of baddies, occasionally facing down a lieutenant or three on their way to the Big Bad Guy(s). The format allows game designers to go way out into left field for enemy and level design, and that’s unfailingly where developers were at in the early and mid 90s.

Crude Buster, alternately titled Two Crude Dudes, fits that bill precisely; it is wild, colorful, and just-beyond-real. Released for arcades by Data East in 1991, the game is hailed by many as a classic entry into the beat em up family, and the game did so well in arcades that it was released in 1992 for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Players control one of two hulking mercenaries hired on by the government to take back a ruined New York from a group called “Big Valley,” who (literally) nuked the city and claimed the rubble as their own.

Now, I don’t know if “Big Valley” is one of those “lost in translation” things, but it isn’t a very heavy-sounding name for a terrorist organization full of tattooed punks and mutant bio-monsters. They make up for it in action, though. Your unreasonably buff nuclear warrior is first assailed by shirtless frisbee aficionados and what look like mustachioed elf men; things soon turn a bit more dire as you face the first boss – a brute rivaling you in swoleness, in face paint and KISS shoes, wielding snakes.

He wants to rock and roll all night, and murder everyday.

As you progress through the nuclear ruins of NYC, shit only gets more serious. The most annoying enemies early-on are the little hunchbacks who latch onto you and sap your vitality as they gnaw on you. However, it gets far worse as weirder and weirder mutants come crawling out of the rubble to make your Brian Bosworth-looking ass wish you never shook hands on that government contract.

Thankfully, your crude dudes are pretty monstrous themselves. They can easily lift set-pieces as big as junked cars, as well as most enemies they can grab. These make great projectiles to supplement your determined (if not terribly graceful) punching and kicking. If you get low on health, look for soda machines. JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE, drinking some fizzy water loaded with coloring and corn syrup will save the day. These also usually show up in little vignettes between levels; the arcade version just puppets you through, while the Genesis port makes you whack the cans out of the machine yourself.

Just guzzle it down, big guy. Make all the pain go away.

The graphics in the arcade version really don’t suffer much in the crunching-down for the 16-bit Genesis port. They are on par for their time; things are a riot of color, and there’s a comic book level of detail to everything (not to mention the cool visual popup sound FX a la 1960s Batman). The sound is where some effort clearly went in; the arcade version features a lot of digitized FX and some good music. The Genesis port actually has better music with a more fitting pace to it, but it loses a lot of the digitized stuff out of sheer space efficiency.

All things considered, I’d give Crude Buster an 8/10. It’s challenging, fun, colorful, and definitely deserves mention in any conversation about the beat em up format in video gaming. Crude Buster is different enough to interest you, but it’s still a red-blooded beat em up hit through and through.

See you in August, you big goofs!

The arcade… dark, weird lighting. Gnarly carpeting. An omnipresent riot of sound and color as you walked in and wrapped yourself in the electronic arms of sweet, sweet diversion. For many of us RetroFans, it’s a golden, soft-glow set of memories we keep well-polished and stored within our minds’ more secure vaults. Some of us were around in the late 70s and early 80s, when titles like Space Invaders and Donkey Kong were waving the banner of arcade gaming’s golden age. More of us remember the era when arcades saw some shrinkage; my own formative exposure to the format was in the smaller realms tucked into the side areas of bowling alleys and the nooks of theme restaurants. The early 90s saw the Neo Geo and a host of other innovative releases, breathing some life into the old arcade room… but nonetheless, the sad truth is that the phenomenon has continued to deflate over time (except in Japan, where it’s kept vigorously alive).

I consider myself lucky to have been an awe-struck young man in my pre-pubescent years when the early 90s brought us a small revival of the arcade. My venues were still within the greater confines of bowling alleys and Chuck E Cheeses, but the games we were playing in those places made it feel like its own circus… its own arena. Everyone can think of a couple off the top of their heads, and while I’ve already had the honor of discussing the gems like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, I hope a few of you will recall the games I’ll highlight in this article. Many are both bizarre and wonderful, like our first childhood crush or that recurring dream we had about MC Hammer growing to Godzilla size and destroying our hometown with his brutal dance moves (was that just me?), but it didn’t stop us from throwing quarters or tokens in to give them a shot.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Developer: Midway

Released: October 31, 1991

Everyone just about lost their shit when the Terminator sequel came out. At least that’s what I remember. It had a good-guy Terminator, an even worse bad guy Terminator, and more catastrophic violence than a train wreck giving birth to a nuclear detonation with no epidural. Even though it was way rated R, we all did what we had to do to see it, and whoa… it was nuts. It even sort of made Guns n Roses cool (who am I kidding, a lot of us misguidedly loved them anyway). On Halloween of ’91, we got to live the whole thing out in one of the better shooter-style arcade games of its time. The demo sequence claimed that the game was also rated R, for Righteous. No shit.

No need to label what specific type of weapons are in the crates. You’ll find out when you blast them open with all your gunpower. The enemy T-800 has gone so far as to ignore the hated humans behind it to focus on you, who are known as Machine Judas. SkyNet wept.

T2‘s difficulty was harsh, but it was still a blast to see how long you could last on the battlefields of 2029 against your loyalist robot kin and the massive death machines they served. Some of us even got really sharp and made it back to John Connor’s 1995… but I never did. Not even with 2 players. No matter what, the game’s graphics were super-crisp and it had a ton of really fun digitized voice clips in it. I for one couldn’t help but get into it.

Captain America and the Avengers

Developers: Data East, Realtime Associates

Released: 1991

This is one I dutifully played the absolute shit out of. I was huge into superheroes as a kid, both Marvel and DC (but a little more Marvel, and I’ve never been able to fully articulate why), and I was thrilled to see The Avengers when it first arrived at the smoky bowling alley my family frequented. They wanted to bowl? That’s fine, suckers are born every minute. I wanted to stop the fucking Red Skull.

Vision and Hawkeye stand fascinated as Mandarin shows them his special squat thrusts for keeping his glutes “mandariffic.” Captain America, always the histrionic one, shows off his vertical leap. Iron Man stares at nothing, thinking about his offshore accounts.

While the ports of the game got mixed reception, the arcade version itself is often praised as a classic beat ’em up. I liked it because four of us disinterested junior bowlers could play at a time, and I could play as Vision, whom I found fascinating as a superhero. The team plows through an army of generic robots and lesser villains to chase after the Red Skull, even making a foray into space and some other bizarre places in the Marvel Universe. Each character has melee and ranged options, and you can even hoist a motherfucker and throw him into another motherfucker. That was my go-to move. The graphics were great, fitting the comic book source material wonderfully; the sound and music was almost honest-to-god inspiring. “AMERICA STILL NEEDS YOUR HELP!” Well shit, I’d better pop some more tokens in.

WWF WrestleFest

Developer: Technos Japan

Released: 1991

“Jesus, dude, shut up about all these goddamned wrestling games!” No, though, because this one is incredible. You don’t even have to be a wrestling fan to get into it. Technos had released WWF Superstars in ’89, which did pretty well, and they took everything they learned from that in ’91 and produced an incredible mat-fighting arcade game.

Ultimate Warrior adds “slapped half-dead by a fat guy” to his resume, while Hogan and half of each featured tag team use Mr Perfect as a boat to cross an imaginary Potomac. Hogan, of course, is Washington!

The legendary Road Warriors/Legion of Doom are the “boss” characters in this one, replacing Andre the Giant and Ted DiBiase in Superstars. You can team up with a friend or go it alone in various match types, but it was easily the most fun to try for the tag team titles against Hawk and Animal (who were fucking impossible to beat unless you had a grocery bag full of change). Team-up moves, berserk tag-ins, and digitized announcing from Mike McGuirk and Gene Okerlund make this a bona fide classical-era WWF product. The graphics are a little goofy, but they’re good for the format; the action doesn’t suffer. While the actual “Sport” may be choreographed or pre-determined, WWF WrestleFest isn’t short on real entertainment.

Lethal Enforcers

Developer: Konami

Released: October 8th, 1992

This time period was also all about controversy. Lethal Enforcers didn’t become quite as notorious as games like Doom or Mortal Kombat, but it did cause quite a stir upon its release. Konami’s action-cop shooter game had photo-realistic graphics (for its time) and was somewhat intense. It didn’t matter to the self-appointed moral crusaders of the era if you were the good guy or not; they were pissed that you were shooting at an animation of an actor dressed as a stereotypical goon.

Aside form all that, the game is immersive and pulse pounding. Split second decisions must be made as you confront thugs with hostages, fleeing civilians, and lightning fast criminals. You can easily lose the game, in fact, if you’re not precisely accurate in order to avoid harming the innocent. There’s chase scenes, power-ups that give you guns the police definitely shouldn’t have, and even “training stages” that lighten things up while still maintaining the theme. Aside from the great visuals, the music kicks ass and Lethal Enforcers is another game that heavily incorporates digitized samples. I liked this one enough to get the Genesis version a couple years later, and it was pretty faithful to the source.

Virtua Fighter

Developer: Sega (Sega AM2)

Released: October 1993

You were wondering why I was studiously avoiding fighting games in this particular article… I was saving this one for last. With the dawn of Virtua Fighter, the whole playing field of the genre was changed. Virtua Fighter wasn’t just showing us 3D polygon-based graphics, which we still considered pretty far-out and futuristic; the revolutionary fighter was making an earnest (and effective) attempt at fluid realism in its characters’ moves and techniques.

The “Model 1” hardware rig used for the game was jointly developed by Sega and Lockheed Martin. Yes, Lockheed fucking Martin the aerospace firm. The people who have a knee-deep resume of building cutting edge military technology. This hardware not only handles the revolutionary 3D rendering, but also allows for stunningly realistic movement and nearly true-to-life physics. The game’s plot was minimal and loosely resembled those of its ancestors, but literally no one cared. The game has spawned a thriving franchise that has continued to break ground in its genre. I remember seeing this shit and thinking to myself, “it’s pretty cool to live in the future.”

Towards the middle of the decade, the phenomenon of the arcade took a sullen plunge once more, though it’s remained alive through the 00’s and 10’s (or at least its heart beats). Our friends in the far East keep things going, and there’s of course been a small resurgence here as the retro gaming movement has gotten wind under its wings.

Between the years that the market drank Atari, and the years of the rise of the sons of Sony… there was an age undreamed of.

Thank you for reading! See you in June! Stay Retro!

Today we’ll tackle another notable game that’s long overdue for a NRW once-over. I’d been saving this one, because I’d really like to pluck heavily from 1987 this year, and Karnov is one of the most laughed-at yet loved games from the era. Karnov is a nested set of dichotomies; It’s nothing complex, yet a deeper look reveals it as far from simple. It’s a fairly silly game in some regards, but its solid gameplay and decent overall production value make it difficult to casually disregard.

Karnov was originally released in 1987 as an arcade game by Data East. I won’t wast a lot of time on the “fluff” because there isn’t much. Karnov (Jinborov Karnovski is his full name according to original Japanese material) is a strongman from The Soviet Union who has set off on a quest to find the ultimate treasure. I guess it’s good not to get bogged down in a bunch of lofty morality-play crap every time we want to shoot some fireballs or murder some dinosaurs. It’s nice to just have some buttons, a joystick, and an army of bizarre monsters begging you to slaughter them as you stomp your way to glory.

Pictured: Jinborov Karnovski, strongman/firebreather/adventurer/pimp, literally stomping his way directly to glory. Those gold bracelets ain’t gonna finance themselves.

Karnov’s main weapon as he treasure-hunts across a monster-filled wasteland is his ability to breathe fireballs. Despite being a strongman, who would likely consider using a baseball bat or even his massive fists, Karnov didn’t settle for being a one-trick pony. He learned how to breathe fire. No big deal. You wouldn’t get it anyway. You don’t even lift, bro. You don’t even look good in Zubaz like he does. Just leave this shit to Karnov.

“Your girl wish you look like this. Flex like Karnov. FLEX!” To be fair, all the non-digital art is incredibly flattering to Karnov. In-game you see that he’s taken to eating rich foods and drinking cheap beer, and has just really let himself go. The treasure is to hire a really good personal trainer because he knows he’s lost the willpower to fix it himself.

Anyway, inexplicably breathing fire isn’t the only trick Karnov has up his sleeve. As you move through the game world, our broad-shouldered buddy can pick up trick shoes, magic ladders, and even disposable pairs of wings. There are also power-ups that will improve your fire breath, and one even makes you crazy fast and super dangerous for a while. It doesn’t last long, but you’re basically a tubby little volcano god while it does. The more mundane tool-like power-ups go into an inventory below your field of view, and you can select and activate them from there. The only maddening part is that you select them using the same controls you use to move, so being precise with something like the ladder can be a tricky task until you get the hang of it. But then, who’s ever as precise as they’d like to be when they’re using a magic ladder? Shit, my insurance premiums are through the roof just from the last incident.

After minimal power-up seeking, you become the burly, land-based equivalent of an A-10 Warthog. Notice the birds at the top of the screen, understandably reluctant to swoop down and witness this science.

There aren’t a staggering array of baddies in Karnov, but what’s staggering about them is their sheer weirdness. My personal favorites are the fish dude who tosses shit at you out of his purse, the disturbingly undressed regular human dude who jumps down on you, the skeleton riding the ostrich, and the prominently featured dinosaur who ends up being an absolute bitch. If you’re fast and can keep from getting whacked (and losing the power-up that turns your fire breath into the equivalent of three hardworking artillery crews), then you’re probably in good shape. If not, your gaming experience with Karnov will probably be short. The game does two things that aren’t uncommon elsewhere in gaming, to keep things spicy: it recycles bosses later as regulars and it has no shame when it comes to using huge fuckoff crowds of monsters. You’ll also find that birds win their usual award as “most annoying enemy,” and they’re not the only thing that flies. Only the later bosses are super hard, but Karnov‘s daunting feel diminishes when you realize it’s kind of like a shoot-em-up game, except your fat little ship walks and jumps, and you’re able to move forward at your own pace.

A goofy punk-ass dinosaur braces itself to catch a lethal dose of a disease called “these hands.” Karnov’s current inventory contains some kind of bubblegum bottle, some fluffy Charmin wings, and a pretty princess’s party mask. He took one look at what he had in his pockets and knew he had to do this shit the Chicago way.

The arcade version’s graphics are pretty good, being standard for 1987 and comparable to most other similar titles released around the time. They take a huge hit on any of the console/computer ports, but that’s to be expected. The sound is minimal, and the music is comprised of only a few tracks. It’s not bad, though… there’s just not a lot there. Karnov is all about the game itself, and the dressing is served on the side.

The game was officially ported to the NES, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC machines. Karnov himself went on to star in a series of fighting games, one of which is titled Karnov’s Revenge. He also makes appearances in other Data East games, most notably in Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja as the boss of the first level. He’s become something of a staple in that region of pop culture where video game stuff sticks well… just search on YouTube and elsewhere and you’ll see what I mean. Jinborov Karnovski may have started out as a weird but novel protagonist for an arcade game, but he’s found a place for himself.

Screenshots of the NES and ZX Spectrum versions. The C64 version looks remarkably similar to the ZX, and the Amstrad one looks horrible, so you can look that one up yourself and blame you, not me. Click to open either image in a new tab at full size.

Karnov gets a 7/10 from me, mostly because it’s just a solid platformer with some good style crossover. It’s not what one would expect at first glance, and while it’s a bit bland on its broad face, it delivers once you start playing it. Even the ports are decent fun, although the NES one rules the roost. The game and the character have ended up etched into the collective culture of retro gaming, and it’s not just because a chubby Russian fire-breathing weightlifter is a funny idea.

“Hello, ladies…”

Well, that wraps it up. More coming throughout February. If you’ve got a game you’d like to see covered in an article or video, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or stop by the Facebook page to chime in. Later, gamers!