Keio Yugekitai Katsugekihan (Saturn)

What a nice little game this.  I took an interest in it after trying the Sega CD prequel, which if I had I payed money for it, holy flapjacks.  I found the Sega CD shooter much more charming than any of the Parodius games.  They're both anachronistic Japanese scrolling shooters.  In place of Parodius's penguin's is Keio's tanuki.  I can't tell you what exactly made Keio charming to me and Parodius not.  Either way, I tracked down the Saturn sequel when I was in Japan in August and just now played it.

There's opening Saturn-compressed anime scenes setting up that there are some not-dragon balls that need collecting, and the young girl you play transforms into a bunny costume to get them.  You die in one hit, but if you have a weapon, you just lose your weapon and have two seconds of invincibility to rush around the stage and try to pick up your weapon. 

The stages are bright and colorful if not by themselves memorable.  There's a bizarre stage where you are in side  volcano riding a miniature train driven by rats.  The first shooter stage is a call back to Sega CD game, and the

I felt torn throughout the game, you have limited continues which drop you off at your last checkpoint, but if you run out you can just continue from the beginning of the stage.  Even if the game isn't particularly difficult, one hit kills give it a lot of tension and stress.  Running around to grab your weapon has a perfect sense of panic.  Most of the bosses have a way you can just game them as opposed to actually engaging them.  I tried to avoid this, but being easily able to kill the boss safely is a pretty tempting option in the face of try number twenty-one.

An extremely pleasant game that I'm glad I own though. 

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My few readers, you know I'm podcasting and putting more profess reviews on Hinge Problems right?  I'll have more actual words up there soon!  We'll have a podcast about Red Dead Redemption and my most recent Japan trip soon! 

Also don't play Dragon Fantasy on the iOS.  It is very boring.

Parodius (Various)

I've never really gotten into the Parodius series and last week I decided to go ahead and play as many as was convenient hen read the HG101 article.  Basically they're parodies of Konami's other shooters primarily Gradius.  There are a lot of cross over characters and most of the games also use Twinbee's Bells.  Twinbee is another series I plan on going through soon.  I played Gokujou Parodius, Parodius Da!, and  Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius S. 

It helps that I played mostly the SFC versions of the games and my emulator decided to recognize rewind.  I wasn't playing these for skill.  I was playing them for research more or less.  They aren't as interesting as I was expecting and even while I was playing them they sort of ran together.  The most identifying mark between them was the cast of characters I could control.  Also that Da! was incredibly hard possibly based on the character I was chosen.  After about 20 minutes of rewinding and dying in the same 30 seconds I quit.  It feels like some sections of the game are completely based on if you get an invincibility bell or not.  I know that saved my skin a 3 or 4 times across the games.

Jikkyou is notable because it has a guy narrating all the way through on a SFC game.  I believe the cart size is impressively huge.  Also you fight Twinbee with tits.  I mean Twinbee has breasts.  yeahh...  I guess I need something more than honk honk splurt bwaaoooohhhh humor.  I couldn't tell you a think about the music. There is a lot of non-necessary animation which in my mind reads "these guys really liked this project and were proud of it" than engaging to me.

I guess I'm just wired weird.  Sorry Parodius!  I might still buy Otomedius despite everything telling me it's not a very good game.