I went back to a few Megadrive titles that I remembered to be fun a long time ago this week, first off was Robocop Vs the Terminator. A side scrolling shooter, playing as Robocop as he visits locales from his movies and fights against bad dudes and robots from both franchises. In my hour or so I killed Robocop 2, 3 or 4 terminators,a small tank thing from the Terminator and ED209, weirdly enough the later of the four poses the biggest problem a hulking bullet sponge who disintergrates slowly until he's a comical, but deadly, pair of legs. The game seems heavily influenced by the Mortal Kombat era of gore and extreme gameplay, enemies splatter into bloody ooze and you use poor ED209s dismembered arm to whittle away the last embers of his life. All the weapons are extremely powerful, apart from the pistol you start off with and this poses the biggest problem in the game, the penalty for death is one of the two guns you've got equipped gets removed from your inventory, die again and you've left with just your pistol. Enemies who where exploding into a bloody mess now easily repel your bullets and poor Robocop is left screaming on the floor, at least he has a more dignified death than most. Back to the other weapons though its all fairly standard stuff, a shotgun, a flamethrower and an interesting take on a grenade launcher, the grenades follow the path you do very slowly, so you can redirect the trajectory of them on the fly, its very odd but also quite cool. Quite cool is a good way to sum this game up, its not overly serious and very arcady.
I then moved onto Alien 3 which bastardises the movie its set on it a similar way. Ripley now has a wide range of weapons to take the hundreds of Aliens on with, and its a lot more fun that translating the concept of the third film into a game. Your tasked with saving all the prisoners from the Aliens bursting out of they're stomaches in a short period of time (it doesn't imply whether your healing them or putting them out of they're misery), as well as a time constraint your also living with the pressure of a limited amount of ammo so along with the fiddly platforming and battery life on your scanner its all tense stuff. The Aliens make your life a little easier by dying with relative ease, but then some of them crawl about or drop from out of sight so they can be tricky, and thats without the multiple queens and face huggers darting about. I still like this game a lot, graphically it's not great, but its got some neat features plucked from the films, like crawling about in vents. It might be because I played so much of it years ago, but I enjoy it nonetheless.
Road Rash 3 was next. Ignoring the sparseness of the options from the outset, I couldn't see a track or bike/driver select option anywhere? Its another great game, I've not played a 16Bit Road Rash in so long, I couldn't remember if they all had gradients to the courses, but this addition of peaks and troughs makes riding the bike a lot more fun and dangerous. There was a generosity of the draw distance on the handful of tracks I played which meant oncoming traffic was easy to spot, but not so easy to avoid and adding the Streets of Rage naming and health to all the drivers on the course as you encounter them made me much more aggressive with my racing. Its still all very charming, cows slowly cross the road and your manic run back to an unmounted bike always raises a smile. Of the first three games I played this is the franchise I think really needs to come back in some form, its not hard to see a tuned version of this game (but not adding too much) being a lot of fun in 2015.
I'm also continuing to drop into Splatoon (WiiU) matches, the constant drops of new weapons and arenas seems like a smart way of keeping things fresh and people interested. The weapon drops themselves are little more than a distraction as i'm pretty pleased with the setup i've got going on. A gun with a fast rate of fire and a special of grenades suits my frantic approach to matches, the roller and paintbrush players I have an immense amount of respect for as I can't get to grips with them, but it can be really useful having someone on your team who can use these more abstract weapons. What becomes apparent with the new stages released is how much like the weapons, some stages really don't suit my playstyle, the skatepark and oil rig stages are perfect for me, giving me the space to spat ink and take out other squid-people. Tighter levels like the warehouse used to end with me getting annihilated pretty fast so I've adapted to them, I'll aim for the higher ground, or try to get deep into the enemies territory. As they add new stages it gives me the chance to work out the best approach on them and limiting the levels in use for allotted time forces me to use all the stages while allowing me to focus on how to attack them. Nintendo have built a shooter which has the dressing of a cartoony, child friendly game but with much more complex components once you get into it.
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