"Will blaze lasers be enough?!"

“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

Console ports of arcade SHMUPs are far from a rarity. In times past, the market was flooded with them. But something about that tried and true formula always keeps me coming back, even today.

BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge is a horizontal-scrolling SHMUP, which just happens to be my favorite kind. The visuals look similar to the R-Type series, but with more emphasis on mechanical than organic elements. Unfortunately, the game moves in a fairly “choppy” manner, giving the impression of slowdown even when there are little to no enemies on the screen.

One of the strangest things about BlaZeon is that defeated enemies never drop anything. There are no powerups or score modifying items whatsoever. But that isn’t to say that you’ll never have access to new weapons and abilities.

The core mechanic behind BlaZeon is the ability to take on the form of enemy ships. By using your secondary fire button, you can freeze certain ships and even flying robots (perhaps Bio-Cyborgs?), fly into their frozen silhouette, and morph into them. This will give you that enemy’s unique weapon as well as allow you to take a few hits before reverting back to your normal ship.

This is definitely an interesting feature, and by far the game’s biggest strength. But it isn’t without its problems. Taking on the form of too big an enemy can do you little good in certain situations. Between now impossible to dodge bullet patterns and a few tight terrain sections, you’ll wish you weren’t suddenly four times as large as you were before. Some of them just control downright awful. One ship in particular is so fast that even so much as a slight tap on the d-pad will have you move several ship-lengths away. I would usually lose this form shortly after receiving it by crashing into two asteroids I was attempting to move between.

Unfortunately, this cool mechanic can’t save the game from what has to be some of the worst pacing I’ve ever seen in a videogame. First off, there are often short pauses between waves of enemies leaving you to just wait. Worst of all, though, are the long pauses.

On the way to one of the game’s bosses, there is a moment where you’re just floating through space waiting. After that, you dodge a couple of slow moving asteroids. Then, I kid you not, from the moment the last asteroid leaves the screen until the moment the boss BEGINS to enter the screen, there are literally 37.5 seconds (counted by stopwatch) of floating through space with nothing but your ship and a slow moving star background on the screen. Considering that I failed the boss a decent number of times, I can confirm that this wait time is not a fluke.

While the game does re-spawn you right away when you die and there are infinite continues, parts of the game still manage to be surprisingly difficult. Part of this is due to the fact that most of the levels are actually two levels combined, despite what the game would like you to believe. This means if you finally beat that boss you’ve been retrying, you’re really only halfway there. Lose the rest of your lives fighting the next boss and you’re back to fighting that first boss (as well as getting to him in the first place). Stage 4 decided to keep going after I had already defeated two bosses, complete with uneventful waiting periods.

Why did I pick this game?

I love SHMUPs. Even though I’m not particularly great at them, there is some charm that they have that I just can’t get enough of. Despite how similar many of them are, I always crave more. There is a certain purity to the reflexes displayed while dodging and shooting that I hope never leaves gaming.

That being said, it’s becoming increasingly rare as time goes on that I find a SHMUP for the Super Nintendo that I haven’t already played. Not only had I not previously played BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, I had never even heard of it.

How does it hold up with time?

Not well. The ability to transform into enemy ships and utilize their powers is great, but it is virtually the game’s only strength aside from some catchy tunes in its soundtrack. The pacing kills any potential enjoyment of the game. The bosses are also pretty disappointing and occasionally have very cheap attacks. The game manages to straddle the line between bad and mediocre. With the countless other SHMUPs out there, you can definitely do better than BlaZeon.

"Raise the roof!"

Movie tie-in games have a history of not living up to the source material. Movies based on TV shows have the same problem. So what chance does a movie tie-in based on a TV show have? As it turns out, not a lot.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (SNES) is a beat-em-up that does not even attempt to follow the plot of the movie, other than having the same final boss, Ivan Ooze.

At the start of each level you and a friend, provided you can sucker a friend into playing this game with you, pick one of the six power rangers that were in the show at the time. When they are in their regular human form, each has slightly different moves, though there is no difference in their effectiveness on enemies. They simply vary in ridiculousness from a scooping motion and a slap, to the only Asian character having a jump kick (everyone else jump punches). Our own MrColinP has thoughts on the racism present in the Power Rangers franchise, but I’ll let him lay those out in his own way. In your Power Ranger form, all the sprites are re-colors and they all use the same move set.

In each level, you make a standard left to right progression with no options to backtrack, similar to most brawlers. Instead of having the Y-axis to move along, you are only allowed to move in a straight line. There is one exception: You can hit either the L or R button to jump to and from a second straight line in the background. I’m not sure what the thought process behind this was, other than that it alleviated the need to figure out the hit detection for up and down movement.

Enemies consist almost solely of the shows’ generic baddies, the Putty Patrol, of which there are a few different versions. White ones, purple ones that are slightly stronger (but only until you are in your Ranger form), orange ones that sometimes crawl along the ground pointlessly, etc. There are also bosses taken from early seasons of the show. Why they didn’t use any more characters from the movie is beyond me. The other strange part of their behavior is that, unless you are right in front of them, they will usually walk off screen without ever trying to stop you .

"Background Characters Don't Mind The Fighting"

When an enemy is defeated, they drop a lightning bolt. Collect enough of these and you can power up to your ranger form. If you haven’t managed to do so by the time you make it to the boss, it will power you up for the heck of it.

"It's Morphin Time!"

This is one of the few times when a game was so ridiculous, words just weren’t enough. So I bring you a crappy YouTube video I took on my digital camera:

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers the Movie The Videogame is not great. It is the kind of game that is silly enough that you can play it with a friend and have a few laughs at it’s expense. There are a lot of better brawlers out there. Heck, there are even better Power Rangers games out there. Unless you have a very high tolerance for cheese, I would give this one a pass.

"The Good Ol' Days"

As I had mentioned in my Tetris article, we had always had game systems in our household growing up (much to the chagrin of our parents). The NES had served us well for many years. So many years, in fact, that it completely stopped working. Jesse still blames that copy of Mappy we rented. It was the last game that ever worked on that console…

We were surprised when our mom came to us with a deal. If we were able to come up with half of the money, she and our dad would make up the difference on a new game system. The Super NES was out, but the price point was just too high. The Genesis had been out for a while, and one of my older brothers, who was coming up with the majority of our share of the money, preferred the Genesis. He had rented one a few months before this and was taken in by Altered Beast. I can’t speak for him. I wasn’t allowed to play it because of all the monsters and the killing. Still, the Genesis now came with Sonic the Hedgehog, which I was dying to play.

Jason, my older brother, was given the money. Jesse, Jason and his girlfriend (no idea what her name was) and I all packed into his car and drove out to pick up the console. I was very excited, and yet, it still felt a little odd picking up a console box that didn’t say Nintendo.

On the ride home, Jesse and I poured over the box, looking at all the games listed on the back that were exclusive to the Genesis and now available to us. We kept making fun of Decap Attack’s mascot “Chuck D. Head”, which lead to Jason’s girlfriend thinking we wanted that game. We had a good laugh.

Once it was home and hooked up, we took turns playing “Sonic the Hedgehog”. I was blown away. Everything in the game was so bright and vibrant. There was so much personality there to love. Even the “baditute” wasn’t enough to sour me on the experience. It was at that moment that I realized something: Fanboy loyalty to a single console was foolish.

There were some really strange and unique games coming out back then like “Toe Jam & Earl”, where you are two funky aliens trying to repair your busted space ship, “Global Gladiators”, a surprisingly good game in which you save the world from pollution, but which is also a strange McDonald’s tie-in, and “Ecco the Dolphin”, where you, as a dolphin, save the world from an alien invasion.

It also had the better versions of some games that were for both consoles. The game based on Disney’s Aladdin was actually a port of the arcade game from Japan, unlike the kiddified SNES version. Jurassic Park, which was huge at the time, was a much different game for the Genesis. The SNES version was a terrible port of the PC game while the Genesis version let you play as a tricked out Dr. Grant (with a rocket launcher) or the velociraptor.

The crazy part was that a lot of the games were pretty easy to get through in a weekend’s rental, but then the end boss was impossibly hard. I don’t know what it was about Genesis games, but there were a lot that did this. Difficulty curves aside, we had a lot of fun on the console for a few years.

Then, out of nowhere, Jason bought Jesse a SNES. Those old fanboy tendencies started to well up inside of me once again, and the Genesis was rarely played after that. Part of me still looks fondly on those odd couple of years with the Genesis, but it never hits that same nostalgic spot that our old Nintendo consoles do.

I recently picked up “Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection” on the Xbox 360. Browsing through it’s forty plus games, I was surprised to realize that, while I have played most of the games on the collection, the majority were not from when I owned the console. Many were either on other game collections or were the arcade versions. However, I was pleased to find that many of the games were still fun to play. I had missed a lot of what are considered classics on the Genesis, like the “Streets of Rage” series. Even without the nostalgia, I am enjoying the collection a lot. I think that is a testament to how good some of those old games were.