VVVVVV [distractionware, PC/Mac/Nintendo 3DS, 2010]

I'll be taking a look at something a bit more recent this time with distractionware's pronunciation-defying puzzle platformer VVVVVV which, despite its 2010 release date, features an unashamedly retro aesthetic and gameplay straight out of the '80s. The game's sole designer and coder, Terry Cavanagh, drew heavy inspiration from the Commodore 64 games of his childhood when creating VVVVVV; a fact which becomes immediately obvious the second the game starts and you're confronted with the classic blue load screen and flashing colours of the C64. The graphics themselves are incredibly simplistic and generally monochromatic from room to room (all individually named à la Jet Set Willy), but if you grew up playing these kind of games on the C64 or Spectrum you'll be in bleepy, pixellated heaven. 

The plot of VVVVVV centers around one Captain Viridian, who at the outset of the game finds himself lost and alone in a strange dimension, seperated from his starship and the rest of his crew. Naturally, your goal is to navigate fiendish challenges, rescure the five stranded crew members and find a way to escape back to your own reality. Oh, and there are twenty "shiny trinkets" to collect along the way which, while not strictly necessary to complete your objective, will cause loss of sleep at night knowing you've left one behind in favour of taking the easy route out.

On the surface VVVVVV is an incredibly simple game: with only three buttons used to control the Captain, your capabilities are rather limited. As you'd expect, you can move right and left just like every other platformer ever made. The challenge (and subsequently the fun) of the game arises from the fact that poor old Captain Viridian is completely unable to jump. He can however reverse gravity when stood on a solid surface, causing him to fall in either the classic flavour of "down" or, more interestingly, "up". You must therefore ensure the Captain's safe passage past a whole manner of obstacles, enemies and goddamn motherfucking spikes through a clever use of gravitational inversion and the wonderful possibilities it brings. 

Initially this ability seems to make things almost unfairly easy: the second room of the game features a deadly pit of spikes which can be avoided by simply flipping yourself onto the ceiling and smugly walking past. It isn't long though before things take a turn for the frustrating and you're cursing whatever deity you identify with for the fact that you don't have a damn jump button. 

Take for instance what is possibly the game's most evil, demented and frankly downright mean puzzle "Doing Things The Hard Way": you reach a room in which a shiny trinket is placed tantalisingly close; the only thing preventing you from reaching it is one small block about half your height. In any normal platformer this wouldn't present any problems; simply jump the block and grab the trinket. Unfortunately, you can't jump. Instead, you've got to reverse gravity and navigate no less than seven rooms of non-stop spike-filled death as you fall upwards at frightening speed with no safe zone or hint of respite in sight. Once you reach the top of the seven hell-rooms you must land on the sole, tiny, spike-less platform available before throwing the gravity back and doing the whole thing again in reverse as you fall back down trying desperately to remember to land on the other side of that block at the bottom. Oh yeah, did I mention that the one safe platform at the top crumbles away as soon as you touch it, giving you about a second to react and start your descent? Fuck. That. Shit.

Sadly, this is far from the only devilishly difficult challenge you'll face over the course of VVVVVV, and there are plenty of moments that will cause serious thoughts of unplugging your computer and throwing it out of the nearest window. Yet for some reason, you must keep playing. It's impossible to let that one trinket go, and the thought of leaving one of Captain Viridian's poor crew members lost forever is just not an option. Luckily, the game puts no limit on lives and offers very regular in-case-of-death checkpoints which mean you can keep trying that one bastard-hard room until you finally manage it.

Completing certain parts of the game, or indeed the game in full, will open up various unlockable extras in the main menu for a bit of added replayability, such as time trials for the main levels, a "flip mode" in which you can play through the whole game again upside-down, and a simply unfathomable "no death" mode which requires you to complete the whole thing without dying a single time. Frankly anyone capable of this herculean feat of faultless skill and platforming prowess deserves a fucking knighthood for services to gaming. Full completion of the game opens up the "secret lab" area which holds among other things a trophy room for challenges completed, and access to the dreaded "Super Gravitron"; a kind of mini-game in which you try to survive as long as possible as Captain Viridian is continually bounced back and forth vertically while obstacles speed in from the sides trying to kill you. Due to the bouncing mechanic the only control you have is movement left and right, and this makes the whole exercise keyboard-smashingly difficult. There are awards for surviving increasing lengths of time within the Super Gravitron, but the best I've managed so far is a whopping ten seconds. The superhumans who manage to complete no death mode might just be able to survive the full minute for the top prize.

A special mention must also go to VVVVVV's utterly fantastic chiptune soundtrack courtesy of Swede Magnus Pålsson, a.k.a. SoulEye. Its perfectly hits the sweetspot of intelligently composed oldschool-game-bleeps-meets-proper-electronic-music and really is just as good as the game itself. If you're so inclined, it's available to purchase separately from iTunes and Bandcamp.

If you love retro games and being frustrated the the point of embolism and rage-induced internal bleeding, VVVVVV is definitely the game for you - do yourself a favour and purchase a copy immediately. Plus you can feel all warm and fuzzy knowing you've supported a true one-man indie game developer just like back in the day.

Armed Police Batrider [Raizing/Eighting, Arcade, 1998]

Over the course of the past few years I've made it my mission to play as many bullet hell style shooters as possible. If you're into this type of game, one company that will frequently rear its head in the quest for shooter heaven is Japanese developer Raizing/Eighting. Another of the big producers of scrolling shooters to be spawned from the now-defunct Toaplan (along with the likes of Takumi, Gazelle and the almighty Cave) Raizing/Eighting have developed a number of highly-regarded titles among genre aficionados over the course of their existence. One such title is 1998's Armed Police Batrider.

Stylistically, Armed Police Batrider recalls many great '80s and '90s futuristic police styled anime, with players tearing through high-tech dystopian cityscapes (in the amusingly named 'Violent City') on hover bikes, blasting the ever-loving crap out of everything on the streets and in the skies. There's a plot buried in there somewhere, but when you're playing a game in which the sole purpose is to fill the screen with as many bullets as possible, frankly, who cares.

While on the surface the game appears not too different to the usual bullet hell fare, Armed Police Batrider actually brings a few new ideas to the table. Most immediately noticeable are the sheer number of options you're given when staring a new game. APB features four different modes or 'courses' tailored to suit players of varying abilities. The cut-down 'Training course' gives novice players three stages of action, while the 'Normal' and 'Advanced' courses knock the total up to five and seven stages respectively. The game also offers a 'Special course' which consists of a hardcore Advanced mode boss rush. All of these courses are available straight off the bat, without any conditions needing to be fulfilled or PCB dipswitches being set (unless you're playing the Japanese version of the game).

The other interesting addition in Armed Police Batrider is the character system. Unlike most shooters where the player is given a choice from maybe three or four characters/ships, APB contains a grand total of eighteen different characters (nine standard and nine secret), each with different shot patterns and bomb moves. The nine standard characters are divided up into three teams: the Police, the Psychics and the Criminals, and the standard 'Team Select' game mode enables you to select one of these teams to play as, with one life per character. The game also offers 'Team Edit', 'Random Edit' and 'Player Select' modes, the first of which enables the player to choose three members for a custom team, the second randomizing a team of three, and the last enabling a more standard "choose one character" style of play with three lives. The nine secret characters are taken from Raizing/Eighting's Battle Garegga and Mahou Daisakusen series, and when these are all taken into account along with the different power-up modes available, Armed Police Batrider has a massive 59,640 possible team combinations available – in other words, a shitton of replay value. I should also just briefly mention that fact that the music in this game is awesome, and with song titles like "Let Ass Kick Together!" how could you possibly go wrong?

As good as Armed Police Batrider is, it's still a game with its own share of problems that prevent it reaching the level of true greatness. First and foremost as far as I'm concerned is the way the game controls, which I can only describe as "slidey". The sensitivity of the control stick is just slightly too high, and while on the one hand this adds as element of precision, it also tends to mean you'll find yourself moving more than you intended and ending up with a face full of bullets. Repeated play alleviates the problem somewhat as you become used to the way the game handles, but at first it can be extremely frustrating.

The second problem is a graphical one. As someone who's used to predominantly playing Cave's shooters with nice bright neon enemy fire, one of the most annoying aspects of Armed Police Batrider is the subdued colour palette that's been used for the bullets. To put it bluntly: they're really fucking hard to see at times. Couple this with the overly sensitive controls and you've got a recipe for frequent disaster as you over-steer into a hail of bullets you didn't even know were there.

It's several steps short of 2D shooter nirvana, but even with its problems, the unique character and gameplay elements really raise Armed Police Batrider above your average bullet hell shooter and make it a game definitely worth your time.

Street Fighter [Capcom, Arcade, 1987]

I made a brief mention of Capcom's original Street Fighter (1987) in my previous Final Fight article, and thought it only fair to give it its own few moments in the spotlight, despite the fact that the game's legacy has been completely eclipsed by its far more successful younger brother Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991).

At the time Capcom released Street Fighter into arcades, very few one-on-one fighting games had appeared anywhere. While games like Konami's Yie Ar Kung-Fu (1985) had begun laying the groundwork for the fledgling genre, Street Fighter marked the penultimate step in the evolution of the fighting game as we know it, and whose conventions would be firmly established in the early '90s. This is undoubtedly the main reason for the original Street Fighter being relegated to mere footnote status in the annals of gaming history; it's a game that perfectly demonstrates a genre balanced right on the cusp of breaking into the big time, and as a result has dated in a way many other games of its time have avoided. After the advances brought in only a few years later, its a hard game to find truly enjoyable over twenty years on.

Street Fighter essentially plays like a proof-of-concept for its monumentally successful sequel. Almost everything you remember from the later games is here, but executed in a decidedly half-baked manner. Anyone who's never played this first chapter in the series will likely ask the same questions when they first fire it up: "Why do I have to play as Ryu?", "Why is he ginger?", "Why does the game control like shit?", "Why is it so hard to throw a hadouken?" and "Who the hell is Joe?". Really, the answers to all of these questions boil down to the fact that Capcom were still trying to figure it all out when the game was made.

Stylistic oddities aside, the issue of Street Fighter's controls is an interesting one. When the game was first released, Capcom came up with a novel method of controlling the on-screen action. While Ryu (and Ken in two-player mode) was moved around with a standard joystick input, punches and kicks were dictated by pressure-sensitive pads rather than the now standard six-button setup. Tapping lightly would result in a light attack; a moderate hit would give a medium attack, and a solid smack would deliver a heavy blow. Naturally, this significantly increased the difficulty of play in comparison to a traditional button configuration. Later releases reverted back to a standard control scheme (as is also mandatory when playing the game through MAME), the knock-on effect being that the resulting gameplay becomes far too easy. Once you've mastered the special attacks (which doesn't take long), you'll tear through pretty much every opponent with relative ease – the only seeming increase in difficulty comes when fighting the final boss (Sagat in his only pre-scar appearance). Additionally, the fact that it only takes two or three hadoukens to down most opponents means that the challenge is frequently non-existent. Factor in the brick-smashing bonus rounds which originally required a real hammering if you wanted a good score – here all that's required when using standard controls is tapping the hard punch button as quickly as possible.

At this juncture you may be asking if there's any reason to play Street Fighter at all. Other than its value as a historical curiosity, I still enjoy a playthrough every once in a while for one simple reason: the game is hilarious. Other than the fact that Street Fighter is extremely rough around the edges in terms of gameplay and contains some amusing early imaginings of now well-known characters, one of my favourite aspects of the game is the digitized "Engrish" announcer voice that pops up sporadically throughout the course of the game. While the enthusiastic call of "LOUND WAN!" at the start of every brawl never fails to elicit a snigger, the real stars of the show are the short dialogues that appear whenever you're either victorious or defeated in battle. A loss will result in "You've got a lot to learn before you beat me. Try again keed! EH HE HE!", while winning two rounds against an opponent gives the immortal "What strength! But don't forget there are many guys like you all over the world" – clearly the best piece of dialogue in the entire history of video games.

I'd be lying if I said that Street Fighter is a good game – clearly it isn't, especially with the benefit of hindsight. However, it's definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in the history of arcade gaming, particularly that of fighting games. If the worst comes to the absolute worst, you still can't fail to find at least some amusement in the game, even if it is for completely the wrong reasons.

Judge Dredd [Midway, Arcade, Unreleased]

Judge Dredd is an interesting little oddity. Based on the long running 2000ad strip of the same name, the game begins as a scrolling beat 'em up in the Final Fight mold before switching to feature shoot 'em up and platforming stages as you progress. Doesn't that sound that interesting?

Fair enough, but here are two slightly better reasons: firstly, whilst it is available for MAME, the game was never actually released; getting cancelled after the prototype stage (on account of it being shit, probably, but we'll get to that). Secondly, it was developed by the now defunct Midway using the Mortal Kombat II (1993) engine and the 'digitised' graphical style of that series. This in turn brings to mind Atari's ill-advised, dinosaur themed fart 'em up Primal Rage (1994), which helped put the 'digitised' graphics fad to bed.

 So what would a roaming fighter based on Mortal Kombat technology play like? Well…

I'll be the first to admit that it's a bit harsh to lay into an unreleased prototype, but considering the amount of cash that must have been spent creating it, I can't imagine that the final product would have been up to much. The graphical style is a sickly blend of early '90s CGI and character sprites created from photographs of actors in costume (with a special mention going out to the poor sod playing Judge Dredd himself, presumably an out-of-work actor forced to wear a ridiculous prosthetic chin and a metal chicken on his shoulder).

As a big fan of Dredd, I can attest that the character designs and roster of baddies are pretty accurate, so no complaints there. The problem is just that everything looks so… cheap. The quality of animation doesn't help: Dredd struts around swinging his arms back and forth like a toddler that's been asked to impersonate a robot, and most of the enemies crab walk across the screen like they've soiled themselves. These allegedly 'photo-realistic' graphics always gave the Mortal Kombat series a sort of playable B-movie feel, which was entirely appropriate for the story and the style of gameplay. On that logic, surely Judge Dredd should strive to feel or look like a comic? Except that it doesn't – and instead it's a kind of gaudy plasticine mess featuring waves of lazily palette swapped enemies.

As far as the mechanics of the thing go, it plays about as well as it looks. Furthermore, if it wasn't for the shooting stages, this choice of genre would make no sense whatsoever. Why would Judge Dredd, well known for shooting people that drop litter, suddenly decide to take on all street-level crime using just his fists?

The controls are stiff and unresponsive. Poor old Dredd has a pretty arthritic looking punch, kick and flying kick on the first beat 'em up stage, none of which have much range or do a great deal of damage. Luckily, that's balanced out by a number of fairly stupid and weak enemies, though in fairness there are some opponents with projectile weapons and some more varied attacks are leveled at you as you progress. Lastly, if in doubt, you can do a sort of silly looking crouch move for no reason whatsoever.

Once you've completed the fighting stage, you enter a sort of Duck Hunt style bonus level which takes place in what I assume is a futuristic firing range – but might be a haunted branch of LazerQuest. I assume that this section would have been controlled with the joystick had the game ever made it to the arcades as it hardly seems worthy of a dedicated lightgun peripheral, and it's all pretty stiff on a USB gamepad let alone a proper arcade joystick. This section is also an excuse to reuse a number of the enemy sprites with an added green tint, but since this is a prototype I'm sure we can gloss over this little bit of corner cutting.

Finally, you end up in a Contra (1987) style shooting stage that is outrageously difficult, but at least actually lets you use your gun rather than just punching everything. A slightly shrunken version of the same Dredd sprite has to navigate a number of platforms whilst using his comparatively weedy gun against every badly designed robot, ceiling mounted turret and flying green… thing in the fucking universe. I'm not kidding, this level is way too hard. The whole section sticks out like a sore thumb, and it feels much more like something you'd find on a home console than in an arcade. It completely lacks that sense of grandeur that made playing games in the arcade worth spending your pocket money. I imagine that Midway may have settled on one style of gameplay for the final product and simply tried out everything they could for this prototype to see what would stick. Whatever the reason for this scattergun approach, I'd rather have paid 50p to be disappointed by the beat 'em up level than made to suffer a difficulty-induced aneurysm by the platforming one.

A bit of credit has to be given for including a multiplayer co-op mode, but frankly that's something of a given for this sort of thing. I actually got the most fun out of the sound design; every time you use a credit and your newly revived character drops back into the game, he loudly announces his name as if forced to do so at gunpoint: "JUDGE DREDD!". Thanks to the miracle of MAME you can rack up a few credits then mash all four 'player start' buttons in rapid succession and make the game scream: "JUDGE DREDD! JUDGE DREDD! JUDGE DREDD! JUDGE DREDD!". That is genuinely the best part of the game.

Ketsui Death Label [Cave/Arika, Nintendo DS, 2008]

Over the past few years, Cave has quickly become one of my favourite game developers thanks to their genre-defining danmaku ("bullet hell" or "bullet curtain") shoot 'em ups. The Japanese company was formed from the ashes of Toaplan, who themselves produced many shooter games throughout the '80s and early '90s including the now-infamous Zero Wing, whose Mega Drive/Genesis incarnation gave us "All Your Base Are Belong To Us". Cave's first release was the legendary Donpachi (1995) which set the standard for bullet hell shooters for years to come and, along with Toaplan's penultimate game Batsugun (1993), defined the genre's conventions – namely scrolling shooters turned up to eleven with extremely dense and complex bullet patterns, swarming hordes of enemies and a tiny player hit-box to help you navigate the madness unscathed.

Fast forward to 2003, when Cave released Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi, another stellar danmaku game with all of the company's hallmarks. Massively popular in Japanese arcades, the game was later ported to the Xbox 360 and, oddly enough, in a limited edition to the Nintendo DS – which didn't take long to become one of the rarest (and therefore most expensive) games available for the system.

The DS version of the game is actually a cut-down boss rush version of the original Ketsui as Nintendo's handheld was nowhere near powerful enough to handle a full port. Does this mean it's a bad game? The answer thankfully is a resounding "no". Granted, the fact that this is the only option available to players who want the bullet hell experience on the go does help matters, but Ketsui Death Label is actually a decent title on its own merits. The removal of the main stages and emphasis on boss battles gives a much more focused approach to learning all of the game's bullet patterns and finer details. The chaos is rather more ordered than a play-through of a standard stage in any given bullet hell shooter (the full arcade version of Ketsui included), and as a result it becomes a great way to learn the ropes of this seemingly impossible-to-penetrate genre.

That's not to say Ketsui Death Label is an easy ride, though. The game features a grand total of nine difficulty modes or "courses", each of which increases the savagery of the onslaught significantly. A first-time player should be able to master the Novice course with relative ease, but by the time you get up to Very Hard and above you're going to start running into serious problems. The game starts out with only the novice and DOOM Mode (a series of battles against increasingly difficult versions of the arcade game's true last boss) available, and each successive mode is unlocked by completing the previous one. I'll be honest: right now I've still not managed to unlock the Death Label and Extra modes as Very Hard has been handing me my arse consistently. And this is before you even get into the intricacies of the scoring system – wherein you're awarded more points by hammering away at foes at shorter and shorter ranges. The more danger you're in, and the less time you have to react, the more points you get. It's a system and encourages perfection and punishes greed in equal measure. Practice definitely makes perfect when it comes to bullet hell shooters…

Despite the scaled-back nature of the DS port, it's clear that the guys at Arika (devs of this version) put a lot of effort into the package as a whole. Alongside the main game there's also a feature titled "Tell me! IKD-san!", in which the game characters appear to have conversations with one of the developers about play tips and strategies. Unless you can read Japanese this section will be all but useless – the only clues to what's going on being the occasional screen grab or video clip illustrating a technique. Ketsui Death Label also features unlockables in the form of boss artworks which can be accessed through the EVAC Report feature, wherein fulfilling certain in-game conditions reveals part of a picture. As an added bonus, the game also shipped with a DVD containing video of the current arcade Ship A world record being set.

If you like danmaku games and own a DS, Ketsui Death Label is a release you will not want to miss. Unfortunately the rarity of the game means you'll be paying big bucks to get your hands on a copy, but it really is worth it for fans of the genre.

Final Fight [Capcom, Arcade, 1989]

Beat 'em ups are without a doubt one of the most beloved genres in the history of arcade gaming. Despite the relative brevity of the genre's popularity – lasting roughly from the release of Technos' Double Dragon in 1987 until the one-on-one fighter explosion that followed in the wake of Capcom's Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in 1991 – it has nevertheless produced some of the most fondly remembered games of its time, and to many, Capcom's 1989 release Final Fight is the pinnacle of the genre. Originally conceived as a sequel to the "everyone forgets it existed" original Street Fighter, Capcom decided to created a new IP when it became clear that the gameplay differences were too vast to link the two games.

Clearly, Final Fight was not the first game of its kind to emerge. Along with the aforementioned classic Double Dragon, there were a number of other earlier games such as Irem's Kung-Fu Master in 1984 that had begun to lay the groundwork for the side-scrolling beat 'em up formula. All these earlier games featured the same "walk left/right and beat the crap out of anyone you come across" style of play we all know and love, but Final Fight really cemented many of the more subtle gameplay and stylistic conventions of the genre.

For me, Final Fight is the absolute archetype of beat 'em ups. It's got it all: a strong but slow/middle ground/fast but weedy choice of characters (featuring one Mike Haggar – the most badass former pro wrestler turned city mayor in the history of mankind); a stereotypical "save the girl" plot; '80s cityscapes ranging from decaying slums and the obligatory subway stage right up to the inevitably palatial hide-out of the main villain; a tidal wave of generic punks and thugs to smash your way through; the pop-up name and health bar displaying the details of whoever you were pummeling (all named after pro wrestlers and thrash metal bands), and the beefy cheap-tactics-using boss at the end of each stage. In retrospect Final Fight couldn't look more generic if it tried, but it's only because it defined so many of the genre's cliches in the first place. It's also part of the charm; if you want to play "a beat 'em up" you couldn't find a more satisfyingly traditional experience than Final Fight.

But nostalgia and trend-setting are by no means the real reasons that Final Fight is the best beat 'em up ever; that honour goes without doubt to the gameplay itself. I adore 2D beat 'em ups, and have played a hell of a lot of them as a result. While there are many great games in the genre, none just "feel" as right as Final Fight does. The main reason for this seems to be that the controls are so tight. Everything just responds perfectly, and while you'll frequently be the one on the receiving end of a barrage of fists it never comes down to sloppy controls hampering your performance. Sega's Streets of Rage series on the Mega Drive/Genesis comes close, but the controls in Final Fight feel that little bit more solid.

As well as the great gameplay, Final Fight is one of the most graphically pleasing beat 'em ups out there. The sprites are large, detailed, colourful and classically Capcom, and the fantastically cliched stage backgrounds are just as good. If you want a game that has a really strong "late '80s" feel, this is it. The sounds and music are of a similarly high standard, and the game has a great, satisfying "hit" sound – something of paramount importance in any good beat 'em up to make you feel like you're really dishing out some punishment.

If by some miracle you haven't already played Final Fight, in my eyes you cannot pick a better beat 'em up. The game's fully playable in MAME, and there are ports for a myriad of different systems, including a recent double pack release with Magic Sword as Final Fight: Double Impact, available on XBLA and PSN and which also features online multiplayer – a must for that classic two-player experience. Pick it up now and punch some face.