Games of the Abstract: Night Slashers (1993)

 

Developer: Data East

Publisher: Data East

Three Players

Arcade / Windows / Nintendo Switch

 

I barely caught the golden age of arcade machines. Thankfully, Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, which I went to with family in my childhood for holidays and days out, used to have an arcade whose machines, before the ticket winning ones took over, which were the old coin guzzlers. That in itself was dubious in hindsight, forcing you to shell out coins to play, but I can proudly say with my older sister we beat an obscure beat em up like Night Slashers, more grounded in its own action film influences, which I hope one day to track down, preferably without having to use as many coins as we did between us to bulldoze through it.

I was able to play Konami's legendary The Simpsons (1991) game and their Bucky O'Hare (1992), different from the NES game as it was also a beat-em-up. Even the push to polygons was felt as, unsure whether I played on it or not, even an obscure place nearest the north of England between Sutton-on-Sea and Mablethorpe had a Tekken 3 (1997) cabinet among the others in their arcade. Sadly these cabinets are gone and whilst luck can be on your side - with Guitar Hero Arcade or a Daytona USA cabinet in its various guises still possible to find in the East Midlands sea sides - there is also the additional factor, honestly, that pushing coins into these machines at a steady pace, rather than finding an arcade which allows free-to-play for set paid hours, makes less sense nowadays as a hardcore gamer when the free-to-play arcades are becoming more prevalent. For an hour of fun at the seaside, yes it is a pleasure especially if you can put your name in the high score tables, but that has to be tempered with this and that the others, which give you tickets you collect to win prizes, are inherently uninteresting especially when you realise the ticket system is rigged to not let you win anything special unless you get really good at cracking certain types of games.

This childhood was one of the reasons, as you can tell, beat-em-ups have always been interesting for me, and Night Slashers was one I never encountered in the wild during this period in the mid to late nineties. So many arcade machines were produced at the time, even those which never left Japan, which we only have MAME to thank for preserving, but thankfully, Night Slashers with a selection of Date East titles were preserved, the company Zigguraut Games with 612GAMES bringing them to the likes of the PC in 2021¹ with a Nintendo Switch version available for this game. It was an odd yet delightful change of pace for Zigguraut Games, usually focusing on idiosyncratic PC titles or weird FMV edutainment games about talking dinosaurs (Zombie Dinos From Planet Zeltoid (1995)), but they helped signed a collaboration to bring Data East's titles to various consoles and computer game sites like Steam and GOG. Data East were a prolific company at the time of Night Slashers, whose reputation in the eighties beforehand was as much for pinball machines, something which at that time, when founded in 1985, was created from purchasing the pinball division of Stern Electronics, an America company, but would, ironically a year later from the game I am covering here in 1994, would be sold to Sega². Data East would go bankrupt in 2003, with most of their video game library (with exceptions) acquired in February 2004 by G-Mode, a Japanese mobile game content provider³, another example I have tackled of the period into the Millennium tragically slaying legends of the arcade era of videogames in Japan, such as how SNK went.

Windjammers (1994) is one of their more famous titles, a cult Frisbee based sports game, even managing to get Windjammers 2 (2022), a Dotemu creation off its legacy, and theirs is a fascinating career even in the titles they publish and did not develop, which makes the growing number which are being released more enticing. There are quite a few fascinating titles I wish were released or on a wider amount of platforms - Boogie Wings (1992), a horizontal scrolling shooter whose success was so minimal that, tragically, it has never been re-released; Strahl (1993), a Full Motion Video interactive anime movie in the vein of the Dragon's Lair games; and two of the most infamous arcades titles ever made, Tattoo Assassins (1994), from their American Data East Pinball team, a cancelled riff on Mortal Kombat's success which, having been able to play in an actual arcade cabinet, needs its own piece on its bizarre and misbegotten nature, and Trio the Punch (1990), from the Japanese side and surprisingly released on Nintendo Switch in 2022⁴, which makes the bar for the weirdest beat-em-up ever conceived extremely difficult to top with its existence, something I can attest to in having played and completely it to its bizarre apocalyptic conclusion. 

Night Slashers among these titles is more conventional, more your classic beat-em-up than whatever Trio the Punch conceived, but even if you do not fight Colonel Sanders, (yes the KFC figurehead), Night Slashers makes up for it in its Halloween tone. Beat-em-ups, like scrolling shooters, are a fascination for me knowing full well I do not have as much skill with them as I should have, that as much of their experience for me was the hope you had a lot of coins or infinite continues to bulldoze through them, the pleasure instead the experience of going through their rollercoaster of visual and audio experience as much as the gameplay. Challenge is one thing, but infinite continues and the chance to improve each game feels more meaningful and fun, something the modern day has an advantage over the past even if these types of games no longer appear at seaside arcades. Especially for a game which fully embraces the fact it is the horror based beat-em-up of the era, evoking the nineties fully, Night Slashers thankfully came to the likes of GOG with the ability to have infinite continues, the challenge an incentive to play this over and over, getting better to the possible one credit victory.

Night Slashers evokes that era of the nineties where video games could exist outside of narrative logic, something uniquely their own as mechanics stabilised a reality but what cohered as a game would be incredibly imaginative in perplexing ways without logic being involved, the kitchen sink thrown in for go measure. Here, there has been a zombie apocalypse before that plot point became popular in the Millennium, but with a variety of different monsters and mutants also appearing to make this worse, the ultimate of apocalypses with the dead being experimented on to turn into zombies and portals to demons needed to be sealed. You have three characters to choose from - Jack Hunter, a North American and a heavy hitter due to android arms; Christopher Smith, the balanced figured of the trio, and an English vampire hunter whose martial arts ability has additional elemental powers; and Hong Hua Zhao, sticking to the cliché of the female characters being the faster and light weight ones, but in itself not a bad thing here in the slighted as the figure I played the most in the game, a Chinese exorcist who even has paper charms as an animation in her attacks, and whose speed here is not with her being weaker either.

Mechanics are far less the concern for me to talk about, which might upset some readers but thankfully comes from the knowledge true experts of these games will have hopefully gotten to Night Slashers, whilst for me I am entirely vibing off a game like this like other beat-em-ups for their style and fun playability. For those who have never heard of this genre, these are different from fighting games in that you fight in stages, where you progress in environments you can (almost) fully move in, only able to progress as you clear enemies out the way. Many like this have basic attack buttons, throws and a special, thought this one has the annoying trait that said special drains health which has to be factored in as a huge risk to make, especially if you play in single player, for a game whose enemies swarm on mass eventually with knowledge this could have three players at once, at least two on the arcade cabinets. There is more to the controls, and what you can pull off will improve as you "get" the game as any, including the fun trick of planting enemies into the ground to be able to punt their exposed heads.

The really interesting thing for me coming to this is as a Japanese game tackled Western horror tropes. It is not the only one and has been a constant - say hello to Castlevania as a franchise where they have likely covered every major type of monster in global mythology and folklore - but Night Slashers as a beat em up feels like it is fetishising this in its own distinct way. Data East was like many who, in the era when arcades were huge, were making countless games but were proficient in them. This, like Konami with Castlevania and Capcom putting together the Darkstalkers franchise - a cult one-on-one fighting game where a succubus became the iconic figure among its variety of monstrous figures - feel like the creations of game designers who, not only fed on the likes of Universal horror movies from the United States, but also started cribbing from pop culture on a variety of folklore creatures and entities, even if out of their original context in peculiar ways.

It is strange, admittedly, Dracula despite being the figure we see in the mid-game cut scenes, is beaten halfway through. Even the Grim Reaper is not the final boss, despite the pleasure of grappling him and kneeing him over and over, leading to a giant demon robot with an unfair habit of putting up a personal electrified field as effectively the mastermind of this apocalyptic scenario. So many beat-em-ups were made at this time, so Night Slashers at least has the memorability to embrace this ghoulish tone, be it the large and rotund ghouls in suits who do leaping dives and rolls, or the bosses themselves, such as a golem to fighting a mummy in a cargo plane, made more memorable as the Pharaoh learnt martial arts and pro wrestling suplex moves in his era, and proves a solid challenge.

In terms of game play, originally for three players, you will be swarmed as you go on, which proves a challenge for one credit, as is the fact that, until fighting games could have sidesteps, this is absolutely a case where side stepping or moving around the environment, allowing you three dimensional movement even on an isometric 2D plane, is a requirement, with the added advantage that this was not one of the games in this genre, despite there being a jump button, where you have platforming elements. The combat here can be seen as much slower than a fighting game, and instead the concern is using the movement set to the best you can, dodging/blocking set patterns of attacks, and using the props/health pickups when you can, this from the era where eating a hotdog found on the floor does not cause food poisoning but much needed health. It is of the era, not in being dated, but that alongside beat-em-ups being once a concept big companies like Capcom invested heavily in, it feels of a different time. Nowadays you have re-releases or new games from indie developers, but there are traits to this which are sincerely of the time this was put together, from the 16-bit chiptune rock score, by Tomoyoshi Sato, to the inherent absurdities taken as matter of fact such as a sub-boss being a helicopter you have to punch and kick to death up in the air, or that an earlier one is effectively an evil Geppetto and Pinocchio team up. Some of it is the technical aspects available at the time, and translation, such as voice over sound bites and the cheesy text when facing bosses, adding to the pure gorgonzola on display.

It is not a scary game, merely a ghoulish one, where one aspect which is unutalised, the two bonus stages, shows tongues were firmly in cheek. One is punting zombies stuck in the ground, the other zombie bowling, and the advertisement for zombie fast food for the undead audience visibly shows someone was having a whale of a time with the silliness here. The one factor which did not carry over, in the Zigguraut Games version, is that the original arcade version for Japan was considerably gorier, with red blood rather than zombies decaying into goo, and little cool touches which would have been appreciated, such as the "Go" sign, used in beat-em-ups to tell players to move on, switching "To Hell" written in blood a moment afterwards. That version and the version I played would have been a nice thing to preserve together, but that is more a preservation issue. The game as we get it, and which ever version, is still a morbid campy experience, between facing a mad scientist experimenting on corpses in a morgue, to the fact one of your playable is your stereotypical blonde muscular American who is a "psychic android".

This type of game, even if such eccentricities are thankfully still to be found in the modern day, is nonetheless with its tone distinct, which is interesting as in 2021, an announcement was made that Forever Entertainment, in partnership with the new license owners G-Mode, were going to remake Night Slashers⁵. Forever Entertainment are actually a Polish company, and they have been interesting in how, whilst they have a few titles under their belts, they have come known for work with Sega licenses, the 2020 remake of Panzer Dragoon (1995), and their 2022 remake of House of the Dead (1996). Remakes are something I am wary of if the remakes replace the originals - wishing the original nineties polygons of both those titles and the work of Forever Entertainment co-existed - but it fascinates that Night Slashers, an obscure title for such a long time, has gained enough potential that even came about back in 2021 as a plan. It is, for those interested, a very fun experience just playing the original spite version back in 1993.

 

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1) Ziggurat Interactive Releases Five More Data East Arcade Titles On PC, posted by Gavin Sheehan for Bleeding Cool and published on June 27th 2021.

2) What are STERN, Data East and SEGA Pinball Machines?, taken from Home Leisure Direct and their Pinball Machine Buying Advice articles.

3) Data East goes bankrupt by Gamespot Staff, for GameSpot and published on July 7th 2003.

4) Wacky Beat-Em-Up 'Trio The Punch' Is The Next Arcade Archives Title, by Ollie Reynolds for Nintendo Life, published on May 18th 2022.

5) Forever Entertainment Announces Remake of 1993 Beat ‘Em Up ‘Night Slashers’, written by Mike Wilson and published for Bloody Disgusting on September 14th 2021.