Much better than the original. Weird, kind of grotesque designs and Winkysoft doing a Winkysoft as hell soundtrack. Final boss music just sounds like a Masou Kishin track, which is a-OK by me.

A little too samey throughout but it's cool that they tried it. They managed to make the mechs feel really big and heavy, and of course Blodia is just a cool design. Glad they reused it.

Okay, by this point I'd played a bunch that were better so it didn't do that much for me.

Essential Amemiyacore. Very fun movement and awesome art direction - the Zeiram hat is flying around in here! Watch out!!

Replay. Same story as VSav. Weird game. Love Omega Red's theme.

Replay. Hell yeah man. A super ambitious game that combines Cool Adventures with some absolutely primo Capcom art work. I went through it solo but I bet this'd be a total blast on Fightcade. Only complaint is that the controls can be a little fiddly.

Just a very average game. Apparently a Playstation launch title in Japan? Only thing really notable about it.

A better beatemup than the original game is, but still not particularly great.

Licensed game for an instant noodles brand. I would like this to be good but it's extremely basic.

Replay. Actually feels kind of satisfying to play but the enemies and environments are so bland.

A triumph. It was super hard and reading up on how the difficulty works made me do a big laugh with zero humour in it, but that's completely secondary to the music and the visuals here for me. A game I really, really wish I had played at the time because I would never have seen or heard anything like it. Maybe I'd be a completely different person now. That's the power I think Darius Gaiden might hold!

Metal Slug-ish, but before Metal Slug, by the folk who would make Metal Slug. Covering a wider arc because of your dual guns is cool!

It took me a bit to realise how you actually speed up, and then when I did I found I was either trying to win the race or trying to shoot stuff but trying to do both wasn't really working out. Interesting experiment but I'm not in a hurry to replay it.

Pretty bad, but I at least appreciate any game that has Hiroshi Hase in it.

Very dope. I was halfway through it before I got "Hard Corps". I played as the wolf guy obviously, he has shades.

Looks and sounds great and I love Pulseman's look and concept but it's not much cope otherwise.

Replay. Linn Kurosawa is so cool, man. What a good game.

Completely terrible. There ought to be a law against shit like this.

I feel that I have nothing but hate in my heart for Kunio-kun and his dumb little buddies.

You walk along a perfectly straight level and then you fight a boss. Way too long for how simplistic it is, but you do have way more moves than I would expect.

This is Video Games.

This Legend has been entirely forgotten by me.

Played the Japanese version. It's very good! They've refined the SoR formula to a fine art. And yet the best was still yet to come...man...

Replay. Now this is a Castlevania. Great game and the story - WW1 as an impetus for Draculaic resurrection - is a hoot.

The first cutscene was taking too long to load so I skipped it, and then the second cutscene loaded straight away and I was like oh, this is a porn game isn't it. Well, they made a pretty okay shmup when they probably could have gotten away with a lot less effort, so well done!

Thought this looked cool but was otherwise unremarkable. Outdone by the sequel.

Another one where I think it's conceptually really cool but doesn't quite live up to it in play. Maybe I'll give it another shot at some point.

Definitely seems like Psikyo games follow a formula. Not my preferred style but this game still has some charm to it.

Pretty good from what I remember!

This is a Troll game. As in the little pencil toppers with the hair. That's all I remember about it.

Replay. So, so boring, which is a huge shame considering the license. Come on.

Replay. Remake of the arcade game that is better than the arcade game. Love to see it! Only complaint is it doesn't have Daddy Mulk.

Replay. This game is very, very boring, and at no point do you ever actually feel like Superman in it. Why am I not punching all these little Igors and weird goatmen into space? Why am I having to combo them?

When you're sufficiently powered up in this one, anything flying up close behind you gets annihilated by engine wash. I think more shmups should do this.

Replay. Went through this again for Halloween. Cool game! Tim Curry's attempt at a New Orleans accent is very endearing.

Rival Turf 3 continues the legacy of the Rival Turf name (being bad).

Doing A Henshin in this game does not make you any more powerful than you are as normal-ass Takeshi Hongo. What the fvkk. This one hurt.

Pretty standard gameplay-wise but the horror setting makes it stand out. I definitely want to give that fan remake a bash.

Also very cool! Good name to say as well. GUNSTAR

Konami does X-Men x Altered Beast. Solid, except for the fact that your health is constantly going down. Playing through this genre exposes you to some of the most heinous shit ever designed to take money from kids. I played as MacGyver.

Super creative designs and a very fun core concept (what if Power Rangers were ninjas who did baseball), but I don't think the gameplay quite matches up to the heights of the presentation. This is one game where I actually would want to see a remake that punched things up a bit.

Gave up on this pretty quickly, just not very good.

Not quite as punishing as Revenge, but also more simplistic in level design. That's my only complaint, though - this game rules otherwise. You can tell they're really pushing the Mega Drive as far as it'll go. Looks awesome, sounds awesome, bunch of new movement options, good game.

I think this is the one where you can possess enemies? Not great but an interesting attempt.

Can't really remember it. Looks good from screenshots though!

The Golden Axers Once Again. It's still much the same, I still enjoy it, and I think the stage on the back of the giant eagle is badass. Good music here.

Another clunky SNES brawler. I remember being completely incensed that this has an obvious Metal Heroes ripoff name but does not share anything of the supreme Metal Heroes aesthetic.

Wasn't really all that into it, but it's at the very least better than Final Fight 2, which is kind of embarrassing.

Replay. Snake Pit, Clinger Winger and Rat Race are all worse in this one than they are in the original game. Rare is made up of the most extreme sadists on Earth.

Replay. Absolutely the best Battletoads game, probably better than several Double Dragon games, still not really that great.

Doesn't really have any of the energy of the first game, sadly. Just kind of a slog. And it introduces Maki, who I think is chiefly liked by anime boys that you would not want to talk to. Not the fault of the game but it's hard to look past.

An Elvis impersonator as a playable character is real nice but this game is otherwise not very good.

Think this was an Eighting one? Tiny bullets. Tiny!

The start of a run of PC-Engine/CD games I decided to play. Pretty rough and unpolished but it looks cool and the soundtrack is awesome.

This shifted between regular respawning and moving back to checkpoints on death, which was very annoying!

Replay. The final evolution of Capcom's Final Fight remakes. What a cool game! Really sucks that it's likely lost to the wilderness forever.

Replay. Isn't it kind of wild that this exists? It's hilarious how massive the Kingpin is in the final boss fight.

Splatterhouse but with a time limit mechanic. It's fine!

Genuinely pretty cool, slamming people into the background rules. I didn't really feel like finishing it at the time but want to go back to it. Boss fights are a bit crap though.

Cool idea that doesn't quite come together. I can't say I've read Mazin Saga; maybe it's the same!

Replay. Very cool concept but sadly a little clunky in execution. A game where you wish there had been a sequel to really refine things.

Cool game. Iceman's post-mission dialogue is incredible.

Never let something like a license stop you from making the Gundam game you want. This is pretty cool but it's also a shooter where you're bumped back to a checkpoint whenever you die, which is infuriating when you're as bad as me.

Konami's best effort by a country mile, probably because it's just a Final Fight remake in all but name. Super punchy and satisfying to play, absolutely awesome soundtrack accompanies the carnage. Buy me Violent Storm or go to hell!

Absurd amounts of creativity, just throwing wild scenarios and locales at you constantly, but feels pretty dated to play. SNK Style! There it is!

Digitised guff.

Did not feel good at all to control, so I dropped it pretty early on.

Replay. Loved Bucky O'Hare as a kid, played the arcade machine and had no idea what I was doing and kept walking into stage hazards. Didn't blow me away playing today but it's okay by Konami standards.

Decent enough for an arcade movie adaptation, although it's a little long. It's Irem so it looks good.

I remember this being fairly basic but fun. A lot of these PC-Engine games have good music that is totally overpowered by loud, bad SFX.

Controls can be quite awkward a lot of the time and there's some real bullshit sections, but it's a good take on a mech game still.

I'd probably be interested in checking out some of the later Gradius games, but this one didn't do much for me.

Same story, just can't match up to the main games.

I guess this is okay, but I'd rather play SNES Turtles in Time if I've got to play Turtles in Time.

Rival Turf 2 - still bad.

Replay. It's Streets of Rage 2, you know the score. Easily one of the Mega Drive's best.

Another Three Kingdoms one. Not awful, but there's not much in the way of variety so I didn't feel like finishing it.

A much worse NES platformer that I played for the license.

All I remember is that it was a mech game. I finished it, so it must have been decent!

Really disappointed with this one. It looks good, I love the parry system and the animations that come out of it, it's really satisfying to catch a strike and then kick the shit out of the guy, but it takes 100 years to kill anything at all. A slog in the purest sense. Really sad.

I really wanted to like this, but it's too slow. Put Sonic Blast Man in a better game please.

Replay. More Splatterhouse. I think this is my preferred one of the trilogy.

Oh jeez, I played this last week and it's completely left my head already.

It's cool that an SD Go Nagai World game exists but that's all I can really say.

Super cool, Metal Squad goes extremely hard.

Impossibly fast. Possibly made to see how much the NES can't handle? If there's anyone out there who has 1CC'd this they should be preserved in a museum.

Probably the best of the bunch overall that I'd played on PC-Engine up to this point.

Very cool game! Combat isn't really anything all that special but all the stages are so fun and adventurous and, well, magical. Made me want to watch a Sinbad movie, a feeling I have never had before in my life.

The title of this game is so funny. It's like a weird post-apocalyptic setting! Undercover cops for what?!
Anyway it's decent, it's Irem so everything has that slightly Metal Sluggy look.

Can't really remember it, just know I didn't finish it.

Extremely short game apparently made for a game dev contest? Well, it's cool anyway!

This, D.D. Crew and DJ Boy form an unholy triumvirate of terror.

This is probably one of Konami's better licensed efforts if you're a fan of the comics, but I don't really give a shit about Asterix, sorry.

One of the best - maybe the best-looking arcade games of the era. Seriously, it's ridiculous! I'm amazed this has never had a home release. Gameplay-wise, well, it's yet more Golden Axe. If you like it you like it. I like it!

The essence of the arcade game. You're on a hoverboard, you punch stuff. It's good.

Forgot I played this. Not very good.

Horrendous. Avoid.

I've got no problems with avoiding this particular turf altogether. Stinks.

A better game than Lords of Thunder despite coming first.

Don't remember much, other than it being pretty bland outside of the player character being a kabuki guy, which is cool and more games should do.