Games of the Abstract: Gals Panic (1990)

 

Developer: Kaneko Co., Ltd.

Publisher: Kaneko Co., Ltd.

One to Two Player

Arcade

 

Having played Gals Panic SS (1996), the Sega Saturn game, going back to the first of the Gals Panic franchise is interesting for many reasons. Whilst this, among others, did get western arcade releases, Gals Panic became for developer/publisher Kaneko its staple of what title to make a sequel for over a decade until their closure. For context, this originates from Qix (1981), from Japanese publisher/developer Taito's American division, a game where you draw and claim space on screen whilst avoiding hazards, which can also take a life if they touch the line behind you out of your safe zone. A sequel was published by Taito and developed by Kaneko called Super QIX (1987), but Kaneko would take the template and make the first Gals Panic game, with Taito publishing it too. To be blunt, Qix became a game type good to use for erotic videogames, not necessarily only for simplicity, but because you could uncover the screen and see images as a reward, which Kaneko began with this game. Unlike Gals Panic SS, which was cute, this is back when Gals Panic was an erotic arcade game played for digitized nudity, and even then, context makes it quaint with hindsight.

Gals Panic, as mentioned, was released outside Japan by Taito, and with my interest with Sega Saturn games, the link between this, Taito and that console are fascinating in seeing where this franchise changed over time. The original game, mind, is in a modern context tame. This is also a cultural difference as, between 1970 to 2015, you had in a popular British tabloid newspaper The Sun with their Page 3 Girls¹, which as a controversial part of British culture I did grow up with and was copied by other tabloids. The Page 3 had topless models, in newspapers which you could find in supermarkets and could be seen by kids, and Gals Panic, the original in this arcade game, is rewarding the equivalent in that. The politics behind the Page 3 were controversial, but for a game designed for adults, not for children, the game plays with what is very quaint in mind to this, that over over three stages with each model, a digitized representation of real women who are credited in the ending, you get them in their costume, in their underwear, and then a topless page three equivalent and nothing more explicit when you succeed.

It is something you can still accuse as scuzzy, but honestly only one model wearing a schoolgirl outside is questionable nowadays. (And that is in knowledge that, to not throw stones in glass houses at Japanese culture only, the British were as bad; even if the age of consent laws in Britain are at the age of sixteen, knowing how young the Page 3 girls could be for The Sun is just as uncomfortable.) Knowing as well far more sexually explicit, and openly pornographic games, are more readily available decades later, even if animation for the PC, has to be considered when looking at this first game. Instead, this comes off playful and also openly silly. This is a first for me in an arcade game, for example here, where you can get in the mid round random chance section, a roulette wheel where you can get less or more time per round among other pieces, where one of the options is an interval dance from two gnome creatures operating the randomiser. There is a cartoonish nature to the proceedings even in the playfulness of the music, which contrasts the appeal for nudity in the centre of the challenge. Even with this too, there are sight gags in the backgrounds of the images adding jokes to what is meant to be erotic. A gnome toy on a shelf participates in the striptease with a suggestive butt shot, and one model posing as a female office worker has a crude painting of a man, framed in the background, getting a nosebleed when you reach her third stage image, nosebleeds for the unaware a symbol (found in manga and anime too) for sexual arousal.

The gameplay is as much as Gal Panic SS was six years later, having to avoid the big boss and their minions to acquire the stage. You do not need a 100% success for the three stages, but also you do not have the bonus missiles Gal Panic SS used, which were incredibly useful to keep the enemies at bay, be it here a giant spider with an annoying slow down webbing, a Sun who flexes his muscles to scatter molten flame, and a pyramid spitting out shapes. The one mechanic this has the later game does not have, and became a pain at times as much as a new challenge, is a bar where you need to vary your coverage or not just go down with your cursor, to avoid going into the minuses. It proved more of an annoyance, entirely because I had yet to figure out the exact rules of the mechanics, but it is a significant factor as, if you go in the red, your model of choice turns into a gag character. Be it ninja, octopus, female crocodile or a hippo in a bikini, even if you still succeed on the stage, if it is still with this image on the screen, you get laughed at and have to restart the section. Staying in the blue, by acquiring power ups and getting higher in the blue, by acquiring snacks and power ups, and you can continue on in the stages. If you are able to, with these factors or getting the right (and braver) clearances of space, you can get to the top level, and are rewarded with a level clearance regardless of the amount of the image uncovered. It is a way to balance out the challenge, but it’s seemingly unpredictable nature is a curious thing. It is of reward if you do succeed, and the quaintness of the reward, titillation, is succeeded by the six levels with their three stages (and background gags) instead.

This version of Gals Panic evokes the South Korean arcade game Miss World '96 (1996), Comad Industry Co., Ltd.'s game far more explicit and adult in nature (depending on which version of the machine it was). That game clearly took its inspiration from here but with mind to the sequels which brought in real photographs, which says a lot about how globally Gals Panic did create a niche for this franchise, even if for one game to exist from South Korea as an imitator. That game had real (and more sexually explicit) nude photos of models, with far more jarring (and copyright breaking) failure state images if you fell in the red. Truly, as a game that came to me as originally as a strange game, this was the game to complicate one’s masturbatory fantasies by introducing knockoff images of Freddy Krueger and Pinhead into the proceedings. That joke may come off as crass, but with mind that Gals Panic 3 (1995) brought in live action, and is just as tonally jarring and scuzzy, unfortunately it is a title to evoke in tandem to how these Qix-like games changed into the nineties.

And it is less the morbid fascination with these being erotic games, but more how this both eventually got a more sanitised Sega Saturn release, the best in terms of game mechanics which seem fairer, and how this became an obsession with Kaneko. This was not their only franchise or only genre they worked in, but since they since they worked on Super Qix with Taito, from here they started with a game that would spawn multiple sequels and spin-offs, the first game in 1990 ending with a neon light rich city as you are thanked upon for playing the game. Notwithstanding cancelled titles in the franchise, their obsession with this game in itself is curious, and structurally, whilst a difficult games at time in terms of meanness, you can remove the lurid selling point and the gameplay does not change, something to attest to when eventually this did happen for their games. "Ephemeral" genres of games, which anyone can make and are usually forgotten, fascinate me, and this franchise is one, for obvious reasons, which could be dismissed as just junk for the first ones being pure titillation, but Kaneko were also a company who made beat-em-ups (B.Rap Boys  (1992)) and scrolling shooters (Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons (1998)), but came back to this repeatedly as the breadwinning franchise. The tangent to the live action photographs does not help these Qix clones, as Gals Panic 3 proved for me, but considering Kaneko even made a spin-off for the original Playstation One called Silhouette Stories (1998), which was also without the erotic elements but brought in visual novel content, and the company with this tried and tested formula were clearly obsessed with pushing the francise onwards, even to the point in bringing in anime aesthetics and character designs which would have required much more work and care for. As a result, looking at this game, which feels like care and fun was brought into it, this proves an interesting production to scrutanise, and all of this is in mind to my obsession with the Sega Saturn. With how this managed to end up from here to that console alone was enough to fascinating, but seeing the strange progression for a type of game that could be dismissed is interesting in just beating them.

 

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1) Page 3: The Sun calls time on topless models after 44 years, by Lisa O'Carroll, Mark Sweney and Roy Greenslade for The Guardian, published on January 20th 2015.

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015)

 

Directors: Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma

Screenplay: Alec Owen

Cast: Alec Owen as Brent / Brock; Jon Salmon as Nedry; Paul Prado as Turbeaux; Greg Sestero as Derek; Jimmy Wong as Sizzler; Ben Gigli as Samzy; Joey Scoma as Todd; Kelsey Gunn as Samantha; Olivia Taylor Dudley as Motherface

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

I'm an immortal fuck machine!

Contextualised as an almost lost film, Dude Bro Party Massacre III was by all accounts demanded by President Ronald Reagan to be destroyed, likely for the plot twist in a dream sequence where he is secretly killing bros as a female serial killer. His censorship of the film, destroying it, was however thwarted by the fact one teen in Minnesota and his VHS player managed to record a late night public television screening of the film, the only copy we are able to see. Just in recounting the first two films, never existing outside this scenario, the amount of gore combined with female nudity, ridiculous deaths and a man getting his face pulped as an orange does in an electronic juicer is enough to catch one off guard. The story is recounted by Brock, twin brother of Brent (Alec Owen), who is murdered immediately after this exposition. This continues the curse of the "Motherface", originally a dorm mother burnt in a panty raid gone wrong, eventually leading to a daughter/copycat "borrowing" her face, with someone else now at it again in a film which is less a slasher parody, but does get in the joke about sequels managing to stretch out the premise over and over.

The real context of the film is that it is the creation of 5-Second Films, a group founded by Brian Firenzi in the spring of 2005, originally starting with films that are simple:  2 seconds of beginning titles, 5 seconds of film, 1 second of end titles¹. Naturally, 5-Second Films evolved to the point of making this theatrical film and creating this ironic parody, structured as being shot on VHS, a type of film going through this neo-grindhouse and meta-genre era of cinema in the late 2000s and early 2010s which I found at the time very uninteresting. Alongside the possibility I have softened to these films through this particular example Dude Bro is also aiming for something stranger in tone, something to use a Spinal Tap reference deciding to go up to eleven than merely just for the lowest hanging fruit. Considering someone gets a harpoon in the crotch, not even that is safe, and yet this is going to cram as many bizarre turns as it can in an era when YouTube was becoming a concept, and looking at the parody films of yore, in taking this absurdist tone to an extreme.

That is not including all the meta jokes and the adverts in-between, like the Pizza Goblins, which are seconds long and more there to knock you for a loop than for parodying advertising, as the film when it is staying on point with a plot is going to turn it on its neck in bizarre ways. The premise is a slasher, where after two previous Motherface spree attacks, the bro dorm for the third year welcome into their midst Brent, the twin brother of their fallen bro, welcome in among a vegetarian named Sizzler (Jimmy Wong) who will not get into the dorm unless he gets some "beef" and because of his dietary choice, a wheelchair bro who lost his legs to wolves, one whose trauma of his French handyman father leads to the subtitles being from someone sneaking in distress messages, and also among them one traumatised from the previous times. There is also a girlfriend of one of the bros who wants to join the fraternity despite being an all men's one, and whose boyfriend is stalked by the fear of her wanting to take his virginity and have kids.

The film befits the era it was made; now the 2010s became an old decade than lived in, where this type of humour is not within context of many "surreal" films from this period like this. Time has also softened this type of humour, and made the references more noticable, where suddenly you are taken aback by a cameo by adult film star and pro sex advocate Nina Hartley as a school principal, only to be bombarded by the fact this also has Larry King and Andrew W.K. among the cameos, a mad pot pourri of figures to have had. This is a film proud to write the most ridiculous dialogue, to have the silliest plot twists and play loose to its own plot, even point out its absurdities, which were once things I hated in these types of genre films. I have changed, but also Dude Bro is willing to push the joke to its extreme, taking the slasher and taking it the most surreal route of all. The plot is your traditional slasher in a body count, but you also have to factor in, where you also have to factor in the police being led by comedian Patton Oswalt, a Satanist who is rooting for the Motherface killer as the Bros have the power to summon the ultimate bro, one who needs to be stopped even if it involves sacrificing his virginal male police officer, a noble spirit even if his noble desire to "bang" kids with the power of literature is badly phrased. This would all be jokes I once hated, but now, something delights me in the lunacy of how the plot lines are interconnected in jokes that seem random but lead to extended pay offs, such as how this cop (guided by the female officer meant to lead him to his sacrifice) is told he needs to bop the bros on the nose, because they are actually sentient oranges behind a huge vitamin c decrease in the state, a bizarre joke that has a tragic and perverse pay off with the film ending with oranges raining from the sky.

The production - helmed by Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma, with collaborations by numerous people for the script by lead actor Alec Owen - does have a frenzied lunacy to it of clear improvisation. It exhibits the type of layered nudging humour of YouTube but in a case where, as an ultimate spoof, any joke which fails is matched by ten more afterwards, which is a huge advantage to the film tenfold. There are moments you will wonder if you have actually seen certain moments in this movie, such as the spirit guidance from a deceased foetus, and yet this has for the obvious gag of side characters, there to just pad the cast out for a body count, them making reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two Hamlet characters who only have one significant moment in that monumental play and, as referenced in this moment too, got a Tom Stoppard play around them which is just as well regarded and absurdist, a smart joke to pull among all the lewder jokes which also land perfectly.  

Back in the day, this type of irony undercut the absurdist and surrealist touches to these parodies, but with a film like this, even jokes which would have caused me to roll my eyes once, like an abrupt robot duplicate, now land especially as this takes the jokes to their extreme, especially as this is still also a super gory splatstick comedy where a man will slap himself with his own ripped out tongue against his will. There is also the willingness, for a joke about the bros having of killing many people for yearly pranks, to extend it to a long (frankly sombre and beautiful) extended gag with model shots and underwater imagery just to add to the punch line. Especially as the fourth wall gags are a factor too - in the adverts being mild aneurisms in their randomness, or the search for a lost bro to become a joke one expects from a Leslie Nielsen parody film - and I became to admire Dude Bro Party Massacre III as a gleefully bizarre spectacle.

Abstract Spectrum: Lurid/Wacky/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) 5-Second Films' About Us page, preserved on Web Archive in its October 3rd 2012 version.

Games of the Abstract: Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae (2013)

 

Developer: Zenith Blue

Publisher: Zenith Blue

One Player

Microsoft Windows / Nintendo Switch / Sony PlayStation 4 / Xbox One

We return to the world of button bashers here with Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae, which is from the polygonal and three dimensional area school of them, be it beat-em-up or hack’n’ slash. And yes, I admit an appreciation for them even when they are minimal in content and very repetitive. It is my reptilian brain vice, and also having grown up in the Playstation One and Two eras, where these games were prominent, that has made them of interest for me. It is compelling for me, a pleasure in just pure bloody-mindedness, even if with a limited amount of game play design, even if many are not fleshed out fully. If one was to look through them, you have alone characters within them who, with a lick of additional fighting moves or just being bunched together into one large crossover, would be fully of the most fascinating motley crew of eccentrics. Some are just idiosyncratic - Cinderella Escape 2 Revenge (2017) brings us Cinderella with her arms bond behind her back doing aerial kicks that defy gravity like a Matrix character – and others bring us a plethora of Mohawks, thugs, baseball bats and giant swords, and enough shurikens and ninja costumes to film a Godfrey Ho film with. This is not even factoring in games from big companies, including those famous for these games in the two dimensional era, who struggled at this time in these genres, be it Capcom with Chaos Legion (2003) to Namco’s Urban Reign (2005), which everyone have forgotten and died on the vine.

Mitsurugi, of the hack n slash variety, is ultra minimalistic, a test demo for an ambitious larger title which has (sadly) yet to be brought to life. This is a "doujin" game, or doujin soft game, software produced by Japanese hobbyists or hobbyist groups from their own resources, titles usually not readily available and sold at places in limited numbers, like doujin manga, such as Comiket, a semi-annual doujinshi convention in Tokyo, Japan of great note. A lot of bullet hell shooters have come from these groups, but Zenith Blue, who were quietly chugging away, made a hack n slash game, among the many of these titles which have become more readily available in the West through the likes of Valve’s Steam service. Mitsurugi has even managed to be available on the likes of Xbox One and Playstation 4, even getting a limited edition Limited Run physical release for these consoles¹.

The origins of the game has to be barred in mind as this is a sparse game, which could be dismissed for this but in what we got here was still an impressive feat for a doujin developer. Mitsurugi takes a visual image which would sell, a schoolgirl with a giant katana sword, and ran with it, another Japanese game dealing with the idea of “cursed” swords. Blade Templar Misa has to hunt down her best friend Suzuka, a blonde haired sword welding woman, who has been possessed by her own cursed sword, becoming more demonic as demons are brought into our world. One poor figure who has been marked in legend and popular culture for his swords being cursed is Sengo Muramasa, a legendary swordsmith from the late Muromachi period (early 16th century), arguably one of the best of all in crafting katana swords which became prized possessions to own over centuries. Things went sour however by the 18^th century, from this legend of their cursed nature, when they became taboo objects which had to be hidden^2a&2b. It would not be surprise this was one of the hugest influences on Japanese pop culture on the subject of cursed katana blades, even leading to the Vanillaware game Muramasa: The Demon Blade (2009) which explicitly touches on Muramasa himself, let alone likely influences Mitsurugi’s premise and the function of Misa’s own weapon.

There is an additional sci-fi slant – that your enemies include Geordi La Forge visor wearing goons, giant robots which bleed blood and monstrous hulks whose giant blades are more blunt trauma instruments than cutting objects – which is never explained, but adds personality, whilst the game structurally itself is a series of rounds, over three different locations, where you clear through the enemies, with bosses at the end of each location. This is differently an acquired taste as, only over an hour or so long, in mind to multiple difficulty levels and a new game plus mode, this does not have much in terms of variety in structure. The game is short, to its advantage, and replaying the game is in mind that, as you win skill points, you can unlock new moves, improve one’s stats and eventually acquire one of a couple new costumes which can be bought mid-game on the pause menu. There is, to the game’s credit, a solid production here in mind to its doujin origins; most games, least for their PC release, do not have a counter for frames per second on the top right corner as I had visible, but it is to the game’s virtue. This is a solidly put together production, with no rough edges, from Zenith Blue likely with only a few people involved. All the limitations are in what they clearly could not do, as you have to strip back on the aesthetic choices and cannot have too many varieties of enemy etc. without juggling too many resources.

The game play, or its most important aspect the fighting mechanics, are thankfully solid, enough to the point one wishes that Zenith Blue would return to this world and flesh it out with more ambition. There is the basics – hand to hand combat, a bar for the sword’s power which diminishes but can be replenished, and as you upgrade a variety of slashes and aerial moves. There is the sword’s attack power, and a sword unsheathing move which has different versions, and prominently, causing your opponents to bleed is vital for getting ahead in the game. There is a move called the Zanshin that, as long as you are not vulnerable to an attack, has Misa sheath the sword, causing blood in giant red globules to come to her blade, vital to use as it replenishes one’s health as much as the sword’s power. (Bosses, if you are not careful, have a self taught way to psychically cauterise their wounds which, alongside stopping the bleeding, can harm you if you do not get out of reach).

The game’s limits in variety beyond this are the only real issues for me personally, but in hindsight, it was the wisest choice Zenith Blue could have made, not biting too much they could have been able to choose. The reference to Cinderella Escape 2 Revenge earlier was not a jokey one either. Another independently made 3D beat-em-up, it is a festishistic game, where without the uncensored patch it still has you able to beat up someone so hard their clothes explode down to their underwear, but they are in the same ballpark of games unable to go beyond the basics in the variety of enemies (barring some bosses) and scope, but with ambitions to them. They are both games set in polygonal but restricted areas of combat, and yet between them having really solid fighting mechanics and some invention with the limitations of these. They only suffer from repetition, unlike the Playstation 1 and 2 eras of games they can be compared to, which could come from studios and feel shabby, because the developers wisely realised they had limited resources and time at their hands, and made games which at least played well.  

On December 15th 2022, Zenith Blue posted that the PV for "Thunder Gun Trial Version (V1.0)" had been released for Windows 10/11, taking inspiration from Mitsurugi’s game engine but envisioning a red haired anime girl against bug humanoids. A gun otaku was clearly involved as, rather than a sword, she is rolling and taking these bug eyed figures with an assault rifle³. A doujin group, their interests (and ability to develop games with the resources they have) means that whether Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae will get an extended sequel is entirely on Zenith Blue themselves. Doujin games, in the era of Valve’s Steam and GOG, and the interest in indie games in general, are becoming more widely available in the West, so Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae’s presence comes as part of this grow in access to this part of Japanese culture. A polygonal hack n slash game was still ambitious even in the early 2010s to have put together, still a challenge that could have gone wrong, so it is a success alone that this was put together as well as possible, let alone that it was game I enjoyed playing.  

 

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1) The Limited Run Games page for the PS4 version.

2a) Dispelling The Curse Of Muramasa Swords, published for Yamato Magazine on June 4th 2019.

2b) The Curse of the Muramasa, an extract from A Brief History of the Samurai, by Jonathan Clements, published on Schoolgirl Milky Crisis on January 31st 2019.

3) Zenith Blue's blog post on the PV of the “Thunder Gun Trial Version”, in Japanese, from their office blog and published on December 25th 2022.

Maelström (2000)

 

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Marie-Josée Croze as Bibiane Champagne; Jean-Nicolas Verreault as Evian; Stephanie Morgenstern as Claire Gunderson; Pierre Lebeau as The Fish; Kliment Denchev as Head-Annstein Karlsen

Canon Fodder

 

The opening dialogue, telling the story-within-a-story of Maelström (2000), comes from a talking fish. Right away, Maelström is not as strange as this bookend suggests, which I feel is something to consider as this is more of a mostly bleak tale of life and death which happens to end with a happy ending. The fish however is strange, and Denis Villeneuve, long before he crossed over into Hollywood with his own style, showed an eccentricity with this touch. Based on a prehistoric type, the fish befits the fishing motifs throughout, and is the idea of a fantastic narrator whose constant death and resurrection, because he is a fish being prepared for food, befit the tale of death and life here. Said fish, an animatronic which adds to this surreal touch, wishes to tell a story to us, and he (though note gendered, only with a male voiced narrator) does stand out for what is a film which is interesting, but does entirely depend on your taste in a bleaker drama with moments of black comedy.

What initially feels like a horror film as the fish is being prepared in a medieval hell chamber cuts jarringly to modern Canada in the midst of the most clinically done abortion. The patient is our female lead Bibiane "Bibi" Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze). The daughter of a famous figure, with the weight of this and her brother’s success on top of her, her high fashion store is failing, and her life between drugs and casual sex leads to an accidental hit-and-run whilst intoxicated of a Norwegian fish factory employee. This older man manages to drag himself to his apartment but he still dies, and she sadly already drove off unaware of what she has done, only realizing what she had done the morning after and sober.

Text introductions to sections makes this feel like a novel, with its silent film intertitles and the emphasis on a plot which begins with despair, about losing all, and eventually leads to romance and true love even if through her mistakes and death. The eccentricity is there just in how Tom Waits’ The Ocean Doesn't Want Me is use, proudly without any subtext but literal, with an attempted suicide attempt by Bibi where fate decides to keep her for a reason. Maelström is a bleak film just in terms of its grey aesthetic. It does come with happiness; one where fate intertwines hers with the adult son coming to pay his dues to his father, but this complete a drama whose characters find themselves in their lowest. The dark humour is there, where the ashes of the father end up considered down a toilet, but it feels incredibly bleak for a long period of itself, where the happiness is based in the matter-of-fact, with only our fish narrator the only thing close to a spiritual entity. It is through love, the burgeoning one despite the obvious melodramatic concern, in how you can love a person who hit-and-run your father, that offers a serenity and something magical in this world which the fish recounts. There is also the man who finds himself consoling our two central figures separately, telling them to live for the moment, as close to this tale's angel, if an older man abruptly tangled in the web of fate, adding another bow of light in this very grounded world.

The style of Denis Villeneuve at this point did not really change into the modern day, with films like Prisoners (2013) still possessing traits from Maelström, which presents a moment which was absolutely reassuring, regardless of your opinions on him as a filmmaker and personal taste. That being in the 2010s onwards, when I went through that decade with concerns of the auteur and idiosyncratic filmmakers being far less common than the blockbuster, one did appear and he seemingly did not get compromised at all, even when handling a licensed adaptation like Dune.

Games of the Abstract: Undercover Cops (1992)

 

Developer: Irem Corp.

Publisher: Irem Corp.

One to Three Players

Arcade

 

It can be easy to view all a genre as similar, which alongside the gameplay idiosyncrasies makes their personalities very important. Quickly establishing the context in a pre-start screen cut screen before you put the first coin in, this is a rundown futuristic world of 2043 A.D. where, in a metropolis between Robocop's Detroit and Judge Dredd, a secret cabal set up the "City Sweepers" to combat the criminal underworld, including a figure named Dr. Crayborn, using a trio of figures on the wrong side of the law but heroic and fighting for good. It proves a wise choice as, even in the tone and shading of the colours used in the sprites, Irem's Undercover Cops is gritty, like a Saturday morning American cartoon is there is a little edge and an unnerving amount of skeletons of victim laying about throughout the levels.

Right down to the dark shading, this grimy future world needed heroes to face the punks, lunatics and even invading mole men running rough shot here. One is Claude, a former martial arts champion who accidentally killed a man protecting his girlfriend; Bubba, an American football player who was ran out the sport by its corrupt underbelly on false accusations, and Flame, a young female vigilante whose revenge plot, with her lover and male partner in justice killed, is vastly contrasted by her "cute" appearance and how one of her moves running is a diving "thump", using pro wrestling terminology for an attack where you hit a person with your backside first into the face. (In mind that this is not factually checked fully, there is a far more interesting detail, in mind this was translated in its Western release, that she might have originally been called Rosa, and was both British and a former model^1,2). Everything in the world, where these three are to clear out the scum and villainy, is detailed and dingy, contrasting a cheesy tone, where each level clearance (including slot machines) has snapshots of the criminals apprehended battered, against the first level on a rundown city beach. There is junk everywhere and, when you scatter flocks of crows away, they have been swarming bodies stripped to bones, and as mentioned, there will be a literal pit underground of skeletons like a mass grave, so this is becomes a curious mixture of exaggerated pulp action with a slither of luridness. This goes as far as the one female enemy you find, as this duplicates grunts in different colours, barely wearing anything to how it is possible to chuck people (or fall out) the plane in the final stage of the final level with disregard of a criminal's rights.

It will become more cartoonish once the mole people come in, but it also feels like the full extension of all the Japanese videogames obsessed with apocalyptic cities and hoodlums as a result of American pop culture, be it mohawks, motorcycle rider hoodlums, and a first boss, a Terminator-like robot, who has a crusher on the right of the screen which enemies can fall under for one hit kills, but even you can (as happened to me) as his grapple involves grabbing you with his extending robot arm and chucking you in. The game does not reinvent the wheel for the genre, but everything is solid, if with some stiff opponents. Any of the taller ones with baseball bats, who will just knock you out of the air in diving attacks, and any ganging up is to be considered, as this does not follow any touches very different from the template of the time, from the crowd clearing move that takes some health to the one button for an attack in the first place, only is aesthetic touches that, as this is the future, burgers can still be found in strange places but apparent overlarge snails, mice and live frogs are a sustainable food source everyone in the City Sweepers enjoys. One of the most idiosyncratic and a cool touch, among all you can chuck and hit people with, is that here you may need to occasionally pull girders and pillars out of the ground in button bashing before using them as weapons, which will leave you vulnerable but is a distinct touch I have not seen in many other games worth taking, especially as the weapons are good crowd control.

Irem would go onto the likes of Ninja Baseball Bat Man (1993), but a distinct thing to point out, and can be seen in the art style here, and its mix of the goofy and the macabre, is knowledge members of Irem who worked on this would go onto form Nazca, the creators of the Metal Slug series, legendary in another genre for the arcades². The difficulty of the game is something to bare in mind with Undercover Cops, but beyond this, it has aged well as a distinct game oozing style, the one aging detail being one of the bosses being called the un-PC Fatso, something likely to blame on the Western translation in its renaming. Considering she is It has also aged well, barring one of the bosses being called the un-PC Fatso, but as a large woman with a clown on her chest, who cries when hit down before whacking you, and has a giant jackhammer that, when not hitting you, drives it down into the ground to cause motorbikes to fall from above that explode on ground impact, she is still a cool boss with just an unfortunate name. She and a man with a DEVO-like cone hat who, in the edginess of the game, accidentally is burnt alive, forcing you to bring in a charred skeleton to justice, is just among the many idiosyncratic figures onscreen you will encounter.

The Mole People, both among the most annoying and strangest of the cast, from their introduction in Level 3, show the eccentricities that Metal Slug would get up to. If their mention over multiple times may seem odd, I have always found mole people amusing as a concept. Not the same as the term "mole people", which is a grim term used for the homeless living in underground areas, the concept of subterranean mole people is more so for me as, barring The Mole People (1956) and Superman and the Mole Men (1951), the only other way I may have likely learnt of this pulp trope is the Sam & Max videogame franchise, who naturally embraced this niche piece of Americana, stranger knowing I had never seen either film before I gained an amusement of the notion of a mole man. And they are mole people in this game, as actual moles in Level 3 swarm about and occasionally attack. These enemies prove the biggest pain in the backside throughout, if admitting they are still distinct characters, pushing the game for its few lurid aspects into pure comic pulp, especially when the final boss is a mad scientist, wishing to drop a nuclear bomb on the city, who transforms himself into a monster to face you. Considering this is how, in the same year, Capcom ends their Cadillacs and Dinosaur beat-em-up game, with a same final boss type, feels less like an unoriginal idea but drinking from the same water of pop cultural tropes.

The game, unlike other beat-em-ups I have covered, got a SNES conversion, and it was released in 1995, if with some significant compromises. This also got a game called Undercover Cops: Hakaishin Garumaa, a turn-based board/card game hybrid spinoff game for the original Nintendo Game Boy in 1993, which has to be a first for me in terms of beat-em-ups which, as this one still did, sadly never got the original arcade versions released onto the consoles decades after. Barring a SNES port in this case, Undercover Cops, whilst not the best of the genre, is a casualty of this lack of preservation. Even in terms of its slight plot, promising in its post-credits coda a potential sequel, which sadly did not happen, there was a lot more that could have been done with this, only with the good caveat that Irem continued with this genre, and that we eventually got Nazca from Irem members, which with their relationship with SNK proved very fruitful in gaming history.

 

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1) Mobygames' entry for Undercover Cops.

2) Hardcore Gaming 101's article on Undercover Cops, written by "Bobinator" and published on April 27th 2020.

Terror (1978)

 

Director: Norman J. Warren

Screenplay: David McGillivray

Cast: John Nolan as James Garrick; Carolyn Courage as Ann Garrick; James Aubrey as Philip; Sarah Keller as Suzy; Tricia Walsh as Viv; Glynis Barber as Carol Tucker; Michael Craze as Gary; Rosie Collins as Diane; Elaine Ives-Cameron as Dolores Hamilton

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Terror was a film I once hated. I will not deny this, as Norman J. Warren was a director back in the day, as a prolific “Britsploitation” genre filmmaker, I could not appreciate and hated most of the films of. This as back when trying to watch them in the first era of my cult tastes, i.e. the naïve one narrower minded then presumed. Now would be the time, a decade or so on, to return to Terror, Warren among the most lurid of the British exploitation filmmakers from the seventies or so, and deserving my attentions again, who in spite of British film censorship managed to get away with a lot in his heyday. Inseminoid (1981) is the most infamous of the lot for what is, with a trigger warning likely to be needed here, an Alien rip-off with a scene of a woman being impregnated by the alien. Terror, returning to it, is a gory film, rampant in blood and deaths for a British film. It is also, even in how it ends up confusing its own set-up and sub-genre, a film marking how Italian genre films were making their influence known. I would be utterly surprised, even if released censored, that the Italian giallo mystery films from this time were not an influence on this film, as it proudly follows them in its black gloved mysterious killer picking people off, even if this gets into the supernatural and confuses itself.

The plot, truthfully, is slight and honestly confusing. On paper it makes sense – a curse of a witch from the past, possessing someone to murder for her from beyond the grave – but the plot is also more of a catalyst for the set pieces of death, which Terror is not going to be ashamed about, and Warren was frank in retrospect that this was a film meant to entertain in this way first¹. The film’s set up is that in the past, a woman was burnt at the stake as a witch, a film producer making a genre movie about her death, as opens the film around the sequence, with the added incentive that his family is the lineage she cursed. The giallo follow on is how this follows the trademark of faked stabbings in murder mysteries from Italy being more exaggerated in their violence, like the unfortunate sod here who ends up impaled on top of spiked metal railings. It is however meant to be a supernatural film, and gets overtly so by way of glass pane decapitation at one point, so Terror’s structure is going to frustrate some expecting some cohesion. The most important things are that people around the film producer are dying, and his female cousin may be the one in the centre of this. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a phantasmagoric witchcraft tale, was clearly another inspiration which Norman J. Warren has been honest about, seeing the Italian masterpiece as a “breath of fresh air” and taking inspiration from it¹. This aspect, knowing his respect, adds a joy to Terror, especially as deliciously this embraces the unnatural as it also soaks the screen entirely in colored gels and lights by the ending.

Terror’s true personality, which I can only appreciate decades after, is also that this is very British. Films inherit their nationality’s personalities, and setting this in the British film industry, as a cheap sexploitation movie involving a bath gets interrupted twice, was a huge virtue even if it was Warren being practical. Posters from Warren’s own film Satan’s Slave (1976) shares a wall with Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), and it is both an aesthetic touch to set the film within this context, but also a compelling one, playful in how the leads are mostly working actresses living in a hostel. Even if most of the cast will be killed off as archetypes, you see an interesting world of these women working between job interviews for films, preparing their lines for a wash powder ads, softcore roles, or working in a strip club where even as bar maids they get harassed by randy men. Even when the film is being titillating for the sake of it, there is the curious touch of the erotic dancer in that club being a punk goth stripper, with white short hair and a whip, standing out for herself in her ahead-of-its-time look.

All cinema depending on its source envelops their world’s personality, unless it fully compromises itself by stripping this away, but in terms of banal ordinary Britain onscreen, it is virtuous how much of this is gleefully in this realm. With a good sense of black humour to itself, there is enough also contrasting with the gory spectacle. In its world of closed independent film sets and smoky clubs, Terror is a more interesting production for me to now visit. The plot’s lackadaisical tone needs to be accepted, or this will frustrate, but I came to this with expectations and a complete forgetfulness for most of what transpired barring its Suspiria tribute near the end.

It is sleazy yet contrasts with a wonderful colloquialism of its country of origin and time period. The accents, or how one character is an eccentric older dame running the hostel, who is lost in her past in Hollywood, one which may have never happened, add a humour to everything, whilst the film making context is a history note of interest even if exaggerated, all the small scale or how the softcore film being prevented from being shot is an apt time marker for the period when Mary Millington movies were being made in real life, let alone the Confessions of… franchise with this fictional version involving the bathtub and plastic rubber ducks. Details like this I missed entirely in my youth when I was boring, whilst returning to the film now, these are the touches that make these seventies British productions more interesting to return to.

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1) British Horror Director Norman J. Warren Returns on DVD, written by Thomas M. Sipos, published for Hollywood Investigator originally on November 13th 2004.

Games of the Abstract: Guardians - Denjin Makai II (1995)

 

Developer: Winkysoft

Publisher: Banpresto

One to Two Players

Arcade

 

Surfacing as another arcade game tragically never ported to consoles, Denjin Makai II should be preserved beyond M.A.M.E., as not only is this one of the most deliciously bizarre scrolling beat-em-ups to appear, but also happens to be one of the best in terms of its gameplay inclusions, something even as simple as having an extra button offering a breath of fresh air to a genre which, for an outside, could be seen as repetitious. The game developer with the cutest name ever, Winkysoft, sadly had to file for bankruptcy in 2015¹, and most will likely know them for their importance for the Super Robot Wars franchise, which they developed the first game of for the Game Boy on April 20th 1991. A huge franchise in terms of anime fans, and one that finally got Western releases with the likes Super Robot Wars 30 (2021) despite all the copyright to deal with, there is a version of the series with original characters but it is the main franchise which entices, sanctioned and official crossover fan fiction where every anime series or film with giant robots are put into a series of strategy turn based games, where you can team up and pilot these famous giant robots and ships. Not only big ones like Gundam but cult hits known even to the mainstream like Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), it is a franchise, finally available in the West with all the licensing haggling to deal with, that Winkysoft were part of from the beginning even if other developers would be brought in for later titles.

They worked on other projects, and in the world of scrolling beat-em-ups, they threw their hat in with Denjin Makai (1994), which would get a conversion for the Super Famicon (Japanese SNES) as Ghost Chaser Densei. This is about the sequel though, which like many in videogames sadly got maligned. The plot is admittedly a vague cartoon, of a futuristic world where, following on from the first game, you control from a surprisingly large team of characters a figure to protect the world from evil doers. The personality does shine through just from the eight playable characters, which itself is a huge roster of figures to come in with for this genre. It is a good sign when even the typical generic male hero stands out as he was a villain from the first game. There is a pink dressed ninja named Girulian, a suave card welding magician, and Kurokishi, the stereotypical sexy female character with blonde hair and a revealing costume, but even these characters as the most generic figures of the roster are still standing out in the costume and design departments, alongside being good in game, such as Kurokishi having a freeze gun. More eccentricity starts to appear as the roster continues, from Tulks, from the first game, and more buff more naked then before, as your brawler, to P. Belva, a giant robot also from the first game. It is the last two, overtly out-there, who stand out, only challenged by the likes of Capcom with Battle Circuit (1996), part of a taste for strange sci-fi super cops/bounty hunters on alien world stories in video games.

Originally a hulking alien form in the first game, only to have been revealed to be in a “cocoon” form, Zeldia here, with the redesign, is both an example of drastic alien metabolism but also thankfully replaced in that role by Skullbyule, taking her place as the slow hulking monster on the side of good who still has the advantage of crowd control moves involving fire and, with everyone having a button for projectile/gun moves, firing alien flies from his arms at people. Zeldia herself, now a blue haired bird woman, becomes the best character, an incredible character design you could have seen in Capcom’s Darkstalker series. Alongside wishing a crossover brought her back, she is also the best character to see how distinct and cool the game mechanics are. As with the first game, you have a variety of special moves, more practical with a three button fighting system, and details like the ability to roll/flip up and down the fighting areas that are possible. With Zeldia for example, as a being able to fly, you can with a combination of the three buttons have her float to safety briefly, to committing to dive attacks.  

One additional button ups the choices, especially as the eight leads to choose from is an insanely deep roster for a beat-em-up, eight idiosyncratic figures which vary between optic eye lazers (like Cyclops from the X-Men comics) to grappling. Various move types come in, all before you have to factor in the one aspect meant to keep you from spamming powers without being too mean. In other games, there usually is a crowd control move from a limited number that takes a chunk of your health, and whilst there is one per character here, it does not take away health. Instead, alongside being part of an entire arsenal of moves to work with, there is instead of a chargeable power bar which, if you exhaust, can “Overcharge” but forces one to lose health to in powering it. Once you can try to play the game fully – i.e. not the infinite continues but actual strategy with less credits being used – this adds a challenge alongside the larger move set, which is really to the game’s virtue without feeling like it is unfairly putting a disadvantage on the player meant to spend more coins on the original arcade machine.

Denjin Makai II also happens to be bonkers too, and it is greater for this. Set in a futuristic world where an evil private army is storming the world, the tone is all over the place, between a brawl in Chinatown to a final boss whose aesthetic is riffing both on Swiss artist H.R. Giger but also body horror. But it does all make sense together in its own logic, especially as the aesthetic is luscious and brings a logic to the game even if still a curious mixture of tones. The villains, even the traditional grunts, got the message to be as idiosyncratic as the leads, and even the more conventional grunts have personalities, be it accidentally catching a group trying to create a playing card pyramid to the first stage’s boss, an ultra buff muscle woman who can grow further muscle mass, inhumanely proportioned, and can twist and extend her limbs in a combination of Dhalsim, the Indian character from Street Fighter II, and Stretch Armstrong, the American toy line where the titular figure was a doll made from rubber material you could stretch without breaking. Normal enemies can include monstrously cute purple crocodile creatures to monkey men with bound arms, and as mentioned, the sight gags and cues involving even the regular grunts can be vivid, such as a brawl in a model village for one of the levels where, when destroying one of them, you find a male and female grunt caught in the midst of some nookie.

Barring the first and last level, you have two choices per stage to go through, which leaves a lot of reply value, especially as you have so much personality in gameplay flourishes and background touches. A seemingly generic woodland level becomes interesting when you have to dodge trees being felled, or that the highway level ends with a tribute to Pablo Picasso in the statues present in the background detail. The same bosses are encountered in either option, but it allows for some change of pace, such as choosing the alternative to the highway level for the second stage, which leads to the awesome boss battle, against a samurai who duplicates himself with illusions and turns into a log as a defense tactic, on a virtual reality film set, cutting between horror in a graveyard, sci-fi and a cowboy western. This stage, and the highway stage you could have chosen instead, even has a bonus shooting gallery within them, never seen again but great in either version as a change of pace. The less said about the squid to, found in one stage and able to be broken free, only to appear in another to actually wave at the player, shows the level of detail and the strange sense of humour Winkysoft proudly embraced here.

The little touches like this, to details which are more grounded in reality, like the amount of graffiti in the subway level background, means a lot for adding to a genre which could be seen as repetitive, both in making the gameplay as fleshed out as it is, and in how vivid the world is onscreen. Only the music is not as distinct as the visuals and gameplay, and that is not to discredit the work either, merely it is the one normal thing in a game which is proudly eccentric and as diverse as it is onscreen, the kind of game where one of the collectables for points is even a cute kitten in a basket, which continually meows only a player collects them. The game, alongside the details talked of above, is a high bar in terms of beat-em-ups for me, even as a fan of these in all stripes in the genre blown away by the improvements on the genre and all the playfulness onscreen. Again, a reoccurring cruel joke, this was another which has been lost in limbo, which is more of a cruel fate as, controversially, for the ones known and held in high regards, like Konami's The Simpsons (1991), this surpasses a game like that even if both deserve their fans and to be available, just in terms of how much was added to the genre in touches here and in its personality. Everyone can enjoy whichever beat-em-up out of all of them, and one only wishes they were all actually available, but I would just want them to play Denjin Makai II and see what this brings to the table.

 

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1) CONFIRMED: Game Developer Winkysoft Files for Bankruptcy, written by Paul Chapman for Crunchyroll and published on December 1st 2015.