I was gonna play more PC Engine games, but a dried up grape threatened to strangle me to death with piano wire if I didn't play this.

Gadget Twins is brought to us by the innovators at Imagitec Design, their imagination led them to try and combine horizontal shooting movement with terrifyingly awkward beat'em up mechanics. I would like to ask you something, what would your preferred weapon by in a flying-style shmup like this? A machinegun? A laser? Wasps? How about a short-ranged spring-loaded boxing glove? I dunno about you, but that sounds like a galaxy-brained idea. You can also set your short-ranged boxing glove to a cardinal direction by awkwardly pressing another button until it goes to your preferred direction. It's every bit as moronic and unwieldy as it sounds. You can also go into these Forgotten Worlds-esque shops to replace your shitty boxing glove weapon for something remotely competent at some point, but I don't care.

I should also ask, what kind of moves should you give your bosses when the player's main attack is this fantastic weapon? If you said an untelegraphed sudden charge forward, then you are correct. It's also worth note that there's no post-hit invincibility, so you can be endlessly combo'd by enemy hitboxes if you don't pull yourself out of them immediately. The first boss is also an airplane (named "Thump") piloting a submarine that has dentures for some reason. It's astounding to me, because the submarine seems clearly shark-inspired, but sharks shouldn't need dentures their teeth grow back all the time!

Part of me wants to like the game's cartoonish-style, but the mechanics are so dickbrained that I can't even force myself to play it for longer than five minutes.

GameFAQs has this with a user rating average of 2.56 atm, fuck that site.