Tag: controller support

Golden Week is behind us now in Japan, and that means Hamster is back to its quest of putting seemingly every NEOGEO game SNK owns the rights to on iOS and Android. Before the break, we saw the release of the quirky Savage Reign, a fighting game from the middle of the long-lived console’s lifespan. It appears we’re back to filling out the library with the titles from early in the console’s life, as the latest release in the ACA NEOGEO line is The Super Spy ($3.99). It originally hit the arcades in 1990, and now you can have it in your pocket. But do you want it in your pocket?

I’ve written quite a lot of reviews of these ACA NEOGEO games already, and I hope that one of the things I’ve managed to express is that this console’s early days were really bizarre and subsequently charming in a particular way. Before Street Fighter II laid out the path the arcade business as a whole would take throughout the 1990s, SNK didn’t seem to have any clear idea where to go with its new console’s library. Clearly, it wanted some games that would show off what the hardware could do. Beyond that, the library reflects a company throwing an awful lot of mud at the wall to see what would stick. Fatal Fury would show the way forward, but that didn’t come until deep into the NEOGEO’s second year of life.

The console was more than thirty games deep at that point, and we can see a lot of different kinds of releases in that early bunch. Sports games of various types are a given, and there were plenty of those. A couple of shoot-em-ups, a couple of platform games, a couple of beat-em-ups, a couple of puzzlers. But perhaps the most unusual of these early games was The Super Spy. It may also have been one of the more ambitious. You play as international man of mystery Roy Heart, who has been sent on a mission by the CIA to infiltrate a building that has been occupied by terrorists. Hey, I’ve seen this movie. This set-up could work for a bunch of traditional genres, but SNK decided to make a first-person beat-em-up.

For some reason, our boy Roy has entered the building armed only with a knife and a gun with twelve bullets in it. But worry not, as his martial arts skills are impressive. You’ll have to get used to them, as you’re going to be using them a lot as you make your way through sixteen floors filled with enemies. You’ll find weapons now and then by rescuing hostages that temporarily add some sizzle to the steak, and you can use your knife until it rusts from overuse (that’s not how that works at all), but most of your kills are going to be with your bare hands or well-toed foot. There is some extremely light exploration here as well, and I will say that this was all very dazzling to look at in this game’s time. Really big characters, decent scaling, lots of impact.

The hand-to-hand combat takes a lot of cues from Nintendo’s Punch-Out!!, with the ability to block and duck the attacks of your foes between your own swings and hooks. If you try to slug it out without making use of these features, you’ll end up emptying your wallet of coins in a hurry. You know, if you had to worry about that with this version. You don’t, you can feed virtual coins as often as you want to get through this sheer endurance battle of a game. But I beseech you to actually engage with that melee combat system, as if there is enjoyment to be found in The Super Spy it is through mastery of it. Once you get the hang of how it works, I dare say you might even start having some fun.

I wish I could tell you that fun lasts for the duration of the game, but we’re all too old to believe in faery tales. It gets monotonous after a few floors’ worth of similar-looking ninjas, and I’ll remind you that there are sixteen in total. Worse, things step into the realm of frustration a bit too often as enemies step out of the range of your dukes. Hope you saved some ammo. Once you learn the game and know when and where to make use of your limited weaponry, things can go a little brisker and more pleasantly, but I’m not sure how many people would set their minds to do such a thing unless they paid a couple hundred dollars for a cartridge.

Sounds like bad news for The Super Spy, then. Wrap it up, prepare a couple of stars, and we’ll all get on with our day. Except! Except Hamster has done what it usually does for its releases here, and one of those usual things actually makes The Super Spy a lot more interesting. The extra modes that the developer always adds are included here, complete with online leaderboards. That means you have a score attack and timed caravan mode to play, both of which limit you to but a single credit. And that in turn means that if you want to make any headway at all in these modes, you must come to grips with the game’s distinct mechanics and intentions.

It is in doing so that you’ll find that The Super Spy is a bit better than it sometimes gets credit for. Sure, beating the game is a bore and a chore, but I could say the same for Capcom’s 1942. Arcade games are so far away from their context here in 2023 (or whenever you’re reading this) that I think we sometimes forget that they weren’t necessarily meant to be beaten the first time you sidle up to the machine. You weren’t supposed to have infinite credits, dropping in another coin every time you fail instead of learning the game properly and building your skills. I’m not going to sit here and say The Super Spy is fine art, but I will say that if we appraise it under its original conditions, it’s alright. And Hamster’s stock extra modes force you to do that, albeit to an extreme.

I suppose it’s time to go through the normal bit. You can play with an external controller if you want, and honestly it’s a much better way to go about things if you have the option. The button layout isn’t especially complicated here, but the emphasis on dodging and replying with speedy timing can make the touch controls a little unreliable. You get a lot of options to play around with here, and we’ve already talked about the extra modes and online leaderboards. The emulation is good, but I’m sure we all expect that by now. A more bespoke set-up might have benefited The Super Spy, but I get how the whole business model works here.

The Super Spy is a game that is perhaps at its worst if you choose to play it by credit-feeding your way through its tedious campaign. I can understand why it wasn’t particularly well-liked by AES owners back in the day, and I similarly get why modern reviews don’t have a lot of nice things to say about it. But I don’t think it’s totally without merit, and the extra modes in this ACA NEOGEO mode make the game interesting enough to be worth tossing a few bucks at if you’re a curious retro gamer. It’s extremely Early NEOGEO Core, and if that sounds cool to you then I will give this a hesitant recommendation.

With a lot of big games checked off the list already, it feels like Hamster is circling back around and filling out the ACA NEOGEO line with titles from the earliest era of the console’s life. This week saw the release of yet another one of those games, this time the ninja-flavored beat-em-up Ninja Combat ($3.99). It’s one many of you have likely played at some point, but is it any good? Was it ever? Shaun investigates.

Honestly speaking, there isn’t a whole lot to say about Ninja Combat as a game. It’s not very good, especially in the sober light of retrospect. It has a few interesting ideas, some good and some bad. Having your characters toss shuriken instead of using their fists or feet as a basic attack was unusual, and it accidentally robs the game of those nice oomphs and thwacks that drive a lot of the satisfaction in brawlers. It has unlockable additional characters that you’ll get access to as you play the game, which helps keep it fresh all the way through even if those other characters aren’t very cool. In general it tries to be different, and I think that’s where it often trips over its feet.

Hamster has done its usual job here, with the same extra modes and options we’ve seen in all of the ACA NEOGEO line. That means you get external controller support, which isn’t a bad idea at all here. You’ll need external controllers to play in two-player mode, which is local only. Online leaderboards are here, even if this isn’t really the sort of game where score attacking is much fun. If you’re stuck with touch controls it isn’t the worst thing in the world. You can credit feed your way all the way through after all, and it doesn’t take a lot of finger wizardry to play a beat-em-up this basic.

Well, let’s digress a little. Ninja Combat, as it turns out, was not a launch title for the NEOGEO console in Japan. It was very close. Close enough that it made it for the North American launch a few months later. And that’s why I tend to think of it as a launch title. When the NEOGEO launched in the West, I was about eleven years old. I was spending a lot of time at arcades with my friends, and I remember the first time we entered our usual arcade and heard those booming speakers on the NEOGEO MVS. I don’t remember all four of the games loaded on there, but I do know that Ninja Combat was one of them.

Like most kids born in the era I was born in, I thought ninjas were just about the coolest thing ever. Not real ninjas, of course. But the silly superhero-ish ninjas that pervaded pop culture in the 1980s. So the twin protagonists of Ninja Combat, with their Day-Glo outfits and complete lack of stealth, appealed greatly to me. I thought it was cool that they threw shuriken instead of punching. There was a button that made them do backflips! There are so many weapons they can pick up, too. And heck, look at the way they walk. Carefully putting one foot in front of the other, as ninjas do.

Perhaps because I didn’t have access to NEOGEO games at home, a couple of these early games really stuck in my brain, and Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip were probably the two biggest. I would daydream about them. I would draw the characters on the back of school worksheets. To me, these games were among the very best one could find anywhere. When they were shuffled out of the MVS’s rotation for keeps, I mourned them. I waited for ports to the Super NES or Genesis. I mean, we got Fatal Fury. We got Art of Fighting. We got World Heroes. Surely those ports of Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip are coming. But they didn’t. At that time, I really couldn’t figure out why. Eventually they faded considerably from my brain. Street Fighter II, you understand. Mortal Kombat. Easy to move on.

I didn’t get the chance to play these games again for well over a decade. Ah, time to play Cyber-Lip and Ninja Combat again, those fantastic arcade classics of my youth. It didn’t take long with either title for me to realize why they hadn’t been ported. Why almost no one else talked about them. Why no other kid around me had been obsessed with their characters and gameplay mechanics like I was. These games were not good. They were not good at all. They weren’t memorably bad, either. They were plain toast. An unsalted cracker. As consequential to the NEOGEO as half the songs on the average pop music album were to the person who bought it. They filled the slots, grabbed a few coins from people gawking at the new cabinet, and faded away when it became clear they weren’t catching as much attention as other games.

Why on Earth would anyone play Cyber-Lip instead of Metal Slug? Who in their right mind would play Ninja Combat instead of Sengoku 3? The lies that nostalgia likes to tell were laid bare once I had fired up those games again and memory clashed with reality. Bad games. Boring games. Boo. Another one for the pile with Bubsy the Bobcat, Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally, and The Rocketeer for the NES. The fool loves of a fool child whose imagination could fill in any gaps left by an over-worked development team.

And yet, and yet. And yet I still buy Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip when they are made newly available on a console or device that I own. I know exactly what kinds of games these are now, and I know I’m not going to have an overly good time playing them again. But I buy them, and I play them, not exactly fully sure as to why. Probably chasing my childhood, like many of us do. Perhaps hoping to find something good to latch on to, so that I might tout them as a hidden gem in some sort of fancy list of games where I’m trying to look like an iconoclast. But there just isn’t that sort of thing in Ninja Combat. Nothing but a pair of Day-Glo ninjas awkwardly swinging clubs at considerably less snazzily-dressed opponents, their hair flapping in a perfect rhythm as their bodies heave with each breath.

I buy, I play. And so I have again. And it’s here in this meandering essay that I say the only reason you should pick up Ninja Combat ACA NEOGEO is if you, too, are affiliated with this particular shade of times gone by. I can’t imagine most other people getting much out of it, as it may well be the blandest NEOGEO beat-em-up of them all. So yes, this one is only for Shaun and people who have read all of these words and nodded their heads to at least half of them. The rest should simply wait and see what next Wednesday brings instead. Maybe Cyber-Lip?

It’s somewhat surprising how clearly one can draw a line between SNK before NEOGEO’s launch and after. The likes of Psycho Soldier and Ikari were relegated to cameo appearances, and only a few lucky pre-NEOGEO IPs ever saw follow-ups on the multi-system. Perhaps the strangest of the rare bunch was Prehistoric Isle, a 1989 side-scrolling shooter that wasn’t particularly well-liked or successful. Somehow, some way, someone decided ten years after that it needed a sequel, and thus there was Prehistoric Isle 2 ($3.99).

So yes, this is a late 1999 NEOGEO game. One of the last before SNK was swallowed up by pachinko company Aruze and went into perhaps its darkest era. Prehistoric Isle 2 is one of the last non-fighting, non-Metal Slug games SNK released on the system. By this point the system was very mature, which meant a couple of things. First of all, SNK’s developers (Saurus and Yumekobo in this case) had a pretty good handle on the hardware. Second, the system had fallen woefully behind the competition in terms of pure processing power. SNK must have taken notes for what Nintendo did in a similar situation, because Prehistoric Isle 2 uses a ton of prerendered CG for its visuals, often using it to create a faux-3D look that was mildly impressive at the time but is more than a little obvious today.

Prehistoric Isle fans were likely disappointed, though. This sequel really doesn’t share much with the original game aside from also being a side-scrolling shooter where you fight dinosaurs. The original game bit pretty hard off of R-Type for its core mechanics, but by 1999 that wouldn’t have been very trendy anymore. Instead, the follow-up takes some cues from the popular Cave shooters of the era for its power-ups and basic gameplay. You have two different helicopters to choose from, each with their own basic shot type and limited bomb attacks. You can tap the fire button for concentrated more powerful shots, or hold it down for continuous shots that fan out more but deal less damage.

As for the power-ups, they can be picked up from destroyed crates or from people you manage to rescue. They’ll switch you between a few different kinds of weapons which can in turn be leveled up. You can also add missiles to your arsenal and pick up additional bombs. Prehistoric Isle 2 is a bit lenient in one sense. Instead of a stock of lives, you have a life bar that can take five hits before you die. You can even find rare health pick-ups to restore a portion of the meter if you’re very lucky. If you continue, you’ll be dropped right where you left off. It’s an easy game to coin feed through if you want to, in other words.

Taking hits has its costs, though. Each hit downgrades your weapon by one level, and if you’re carrying any rescued people you’ll lose them. Some enemies drop stars that will give you extra points at the end of the stage, but continuing wipes out your whole stock. If you want to maximize your score, you need to collect and keep as many stars as possible, rescue as many people as possible by escorting them to a helicopter that will take them away, and max out your weapon level to activate a temporary score multiplier.

This can be a little tricky because the regular enemies are sometimes bullet sponges, generally appear in large numbers, and love to rain holy hell down on you with their bullets. The bosses by comparison are surprisingly easy to deal with. Their patterns aren’t too tricky and as long as you’re patient they will eventually go down. There are six stages in all and some of the bosses can take more punishment than others, and the last boss in particular is a rather memorable set of encounters. All in all, this game is enough of a silly spectacle that less skilled players can probably enjoy credit-feeding their way through, while the scoring mechanics are deep enough that those who want to dig deeper will unearth something for their efforts.

The biggest problem with Prehistoric Isle 2 is that it just doesn’t have much going for it beyond its unique theme. There’s no defining mechanic here, so it ends up feeling like a very generic shooting experience. Given how late in the game this title arrived, it’s disappointing how plain it feels to play. That said, it’s not bad either. It rides that middle line very closely, perhaps content to lean on its visual punch to carry it through. I’ll grant that it can sometimes be very pretty for what it is. The dinosaurs and other monsters look rather plastic, but the backgrounds often carry a depth and life that you don’t often see in SNK’s shooters. Certainly worth the ride at least once just to see it all.

After that one trip around the proverbial town, it falls to Hamster’s usual tricks to extend the game’s life. Score Attack and Caravan Mode both shine nicely here thanks to just how many scoring opportunities are present in the game. You always feel like there’s room to notch a higher score, which is a nice source of replay value for a game that otherwise lacks it. You can also choose between the Japanese or overseas version of the game to play, though it doesn’t make much difference in this case. Shooters take very well to these kinds of extra modes, so if you love the high score chase then you’ll have things to do here.

Prehistoric Isle 2 plays fairly well with touch controls, though you also have the usual option to use an external controller. You can bring in a second player through external controllers as well, and that does add some spice to the game. Half of the fun in this silly game is in the content tourism, and it’s always more enjoyable to take a trip with a friend. I wish there was some kind of online or wireless multiplayer option, but I’ve been banging this drum for a while and don’t expect anything to change there. Fortunately, the rest of the options haven’t changed either; you have access to just about all of the settings you could ever ask for to mess about with to your heart’s content.

What else can be said? There are better shoot-em-ups on the NEOGEO and we’ve seen a couple of them in the ACA NEOGEO line. There are also some worse ones, and we’ve seen a couple of those too. But I’ll say this: none of them look quite like Prehistoric Isle 2 does. It’s very much of its time and place, and that dated nature has a charm to it. Nothing on the NEOGEO looks quite like it. The sheer zing of that visual presentation helps what is otherwise an aggressively average shooter, and Hamster’s usual fine work makes it shine the best it can in the present era. Worth a spin if you’re looking to shoot some dinos on your mobile device, at least.