Yes Please! More Heroes!

Marvellous! Wednesday saw an exciting Tokyo Game Show reveal from Suda 51 and Grasshopper Manufacture; people living in disaster year 2010 can expect to be charmed smiley by Wii colon sequel No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle. T2 teaser tribute trailer here! Quite apparently the only gaming outfit dedicated to the knockout combo of exciting wavey Wii controls and PS2 prowl beater aesthetics, Grasshopper have returned to the well for another grin 'em up. 2007's No More Heroes is mainly noted for letting you smash about the local criminal element with a George Lucas laser sword, whilst it succeeds manfully in this department, it's also worth remembering for packing in directionless young male melancholy and in-action adventure yarn deconstruction thesis. That game had chops! No More Heroes narrative backbone was a brutally aimless assassination competition in which our hero Travis Touchdown must off a succession of ranked murderers. In encounters patterned after Chilean psychedelic western: El Topo's Four Master of the Desert sequences, Travis' showdowns were neither heroic nor uplifting. Aim for the top! The only thing that matters is being the best! But not before you've completed a raft of (actually really fun) dead-end mid 20s gopher jobs. Travis can only get his foot on the ladder by engaging in repetitive time-waste tasks designed to ingratiate himself with local folks of note who can make pally pally big money hook-ups. Lawns mowed and thugs vapourised, you'll find yourself cash-heavy. You can either blow it all on Wrestling VHS' and gnarly threads, or stump up your union fees and battle those with which you have no quarrel. Be the best! Fingers crossed and shaking for much more of this.

21 Year Old AM2 Game Is News.

If you've ever seen Terminator 2, or more accurately, if you saw Terminator 2 aged 10, you're definitely a bit in love with the gyroscopic death-rolling plane game John Connor wastes ill-gotten gains on whilst Robert Patrick stalks him through a Cali mall. No, trust me. You are.

"What was that wonderful game?" you more than likely ask, unable to sleep at night - any night - until you know the answer. It's probably ruined your life, unable to commit, letting all those nice presentable significant others slip through your fingers. You're a mess! Well luckily, Doctor Red is here to save the day (and re-heat an oldish review to boot)! Exciting! I'm kind like a Christian.

That wonderful game was After Burner. It was great. It was also created by Sega supremo Yu Suzuki. He's Sega's answer to Shigeru Miyamoto don't you know. Mr Suzuki is likely a kindly sort, I'll wager he regularly (and generously) donates to all manner of charities. I bet he even leaves a platter of food out for night animals every evening. Probably gets the first round in too. What a gent. Mrs Suzuki, you're lucky to have him. Fumbling through his Wiki CV, he appears single-handedly responsible for the Summery blue sky love-hug I associate with Sega's arcade division. Mr Suzuki produced / directed Space Harrier, Hang-On, Outrun and of course After Burner. I bet he's ten feet tall.

Did Mr Suzuki have any part in the game under review (it's the Master System port of After Burner, doubt I mentioned that)? I cannot say. Information such as this is a trifle thin on the ground. I can tell you that Tengen are responsible for the NES port. Not very helpful though is it? Who Knows? Maybe he did. Maybe he was very happy with the final result. Maybe the work experience kid did it? Oh dear. That's coloured the review slightly. Jumped the gun there. Ruined the end a bit. Definitely don't want to mention that the arcade experience was woefully represented on home consoles the world over do I? Keep you on the edge of you seat and all that. Anyway, if anyone does know who is responsible, I would dearly like to know. Dearly. I assume there's a comments bit below. Go nuts!

Look! It's my first blog review! It's quite purple.

After Burner - Sega Master System

An enormous, gorgeous jet-plane sprite blasts along luxurious regulation blue Sega seascapes. It is flanked on all sides by dastardly rival camo-fighter MIGs, and scored with a slow steppin' bare-bones electro hum beat. Catchy, catchy. This is Master System After Burner. It is on a FOUR MEGA CARTRIDGE (512k)! Your jet fighter blasts along at a criminal pace, battling for it's life! Occasionally, zero progressive animation flicky death spheres appear right next to your craft and utterly obliterate it. This is war!

Played straight, success in Master System After Burner is so arbitrary that the whole exercise plays like a tre hip pixel art installation piece snidely commentating on the futility of modern techno warfare. You might well have a state-of-the-art 80s death arrow fighter jet and infinite missiles, but sooner or later you are going to blow up and die. Bet you weren't expecting a fatalist treatise on combat life expectancy when you booted up Sega's 8-bit were you?

If you're a cheater though, you can breeze through the whole game by jamming your plane into the top-left corner of the screen - no enemies need to be killed to progress, in that sense After Burner is more a survivalist race ride than a screen clearing maths shooter. Master System After Burner is less a conversion than an impression of Yu Suzuki's hydraulic arcade giant, skill and clarity are jettisoned in favour of getting the largest and prettiest possible F-14 Tomcat sprite dead centre on-screen. That's what you're paying for. That's what you're still paying for.