One favorite activity of mine has been digging around MAME, aided by that handy filter-by-manufacturer feature in MAME32: I can download myself little publisher retrospectives in the space of a couple hours. One of the companies I took a look at was Banpresto, because I knew that, save the Super Robot Wars franchise, most of their work was halfass at best. Hopefully I'd be in for a bunch of awful licensed games where Kamen Rider doesn't do anything you tell him to. Even the first SRW game was total shovelware. What actually happened, though, is I found a bunch of pretty damn good Banpresto games, and the one I'm going to get into detail on is my favorite of the bunch, Guardians.
Guardians is a 1995 release by Winky Soft, developers of early SRW games up until F Final on the Saturn and PS, and a sequel to their earlier and currently unemulated Denjin Makai. This is a side-scrolling beat-em-up, though, and it's got an extremely developed system: way ahead of its time. First off, though, it has a large (for the genre) and odd character selection: you can be an alien out of The Guyver, or an angel, or a half-naked giant, or a big ol' robot, or a prototype of Excellen Browning! Second, these characters are all pretty distinct from one another, and they all have large, developed move lists, which leads us into the simple but powerful combo system which forms the heart of the game.
It works like this: you hit a guy a couple of times, and you hold down the attack button on the last hit. Special moves in this game are done by holding down an attack and hitting, usually, either down then up or left, then right. They're cancelable just like in Street Fighter, and you can get a damaging string out of them. However, many special moves in this game can start long juggles, and better yet, there are a lot of spots where you can wall bounce a guy, as we see here. In situations like this, you can really go crazy and get in ten or eleven hits at a time.
As you might expect from what I just told you, this game has wonderful attention to detail: levels are satisfying but don't go on too long before breaking it up, and the characters have different moves for nearly every situation, including character-specific weapon attacks with completely different animations: when the alien picks up a bomb, for example, his arm turns into a flamethrower. And to seal the deal, the game has the move I loved to do on the old Batman Returns SNES game: the one where you grab one guy in each hand and bang their heads together. Smashing!
Though I loved Spikeout, I'd really like to see this whole genre make a big comeback: so long as you don't repeat yourself and bore the audience into submission-- Streets of Rage 2 is a favorite of mine but I rarely play past the second stage for this reason-- it's just a hell of a lot of fun walking down the street and punching people. It would be a shame for the current gaming generation to miss out on that simple pleasure.
Glad to see you're back on the blogosphere. We've met only twice before, but you're love of 80s anime has compelled me to read your entire blog archive, as well as everything you've ever written on livejournal. This took an entire day, mind you. Hoping to read more about Fist of the North Star was certainly another reason for this.
I must say that I really enjoyed watching the gradual disintegration of Otakon. As someone who has never been to an anime convention and will most probably never go it was fascinating to imagine, especially since you are the only person that I've ever met who's managed to talk about anime without making Mike "dhex" O'Connor cry inside.
Posted by: Seryogin | January 10, 2008 at 12:16 PM
I assume you've played The Combatribes? Another great beat'em up that features the grab-two-guys-and-clonk-their-heads-together move.
Posted by: Steve | January 14, 2008 at 09:10 PM
I thought I'd played this before, but I wasn't sure until you made the Excellen Browning comparison. I am deeply ashamed.
Posted by: Kid Fenris | January 20, 2008 at 02:33 PM