A text review of F-Zero Maximum Velocity for Game Boy Advance

 So if F-Zero X made me a fan for life, how did this game slip under my radar?

A text review of F-Zero X for Nintendo 64

Come to think of it, probably one of the other reasons I never bought F-Zero in the SNES era was because I only got to play it near the end of that generation, and by then the hype for the then called Ultra 64 was at fever pitch! All my pocket money was being saved for those tasty Silicon Graphics. Nintendo was on fire with their early N64 releases and so when F-Zero 64 started to appear in lists of upcoming games, you can bet I was excited!

A text review of F-Zero for Super Nintendo

Who else misses old games magazines? I would read and re-read my magazines as a kid and truly miss those days. A video review is nice sometimes too, but often there isn’t as much detail about the game as you’d like in these reviews. This review of F-Zero aims to be a bit like an old one you might read in a magazine, with a bit of personal history thrown in for good measure.

Konami Brawlers That Didn't Make the Cut.

You know, I remember a day when I used to see the Konami logo and hear the little tune and immediately think to myself:

Oh yeah, good times are coming baby

Rocket Knights, Tiny Toons, Sunset Riders (in the arcades), Contra and a bunch of others.  It was a mark of quality.  Now though.... Let's move on shall we?

So continuing on with my Brawlers list, I will add in Konami games here.  They made a fair few and initially this was going to be a post about why the Turtles games didn't make it, but I decided to broaden the spectrum for reasons which will soon be very clear.

AquaShooters! 12 Kit build

 

Well, for something different, I thought I would go through my building process of these little Gachapon Aqua shooters figures which I have been somewhat enamoured with the past few years.  For a 500 yen roll, you'll find yourself blessed with either a kit action figure, to be assembled, or some kind of weapon set, also to be assembled.

Admittedly, like the GashaponQuest  items, it feels kind of crap if you just do a single roll and just get a a weapon set, which is exactly what happened to me on my first try when I discovered these super late only to find the weapons were the only two left in the machine. Sigh.  Oh well moving on.

I'll be building the Aquashooters! 12 series Izumi Motohashi, the one that took me longest to get (I think)... I went a bit overboard with these guys and I think I got the whole set a lot earlier than I thought.

Moving on, let's build a figure! (and weapons!)

Capcom Brawlers that Didn't Make the Cut.

 

So as a bit of a continuation from my Brawlers Top 10 post, I assume there might be some readers that wonder why certain games didn't quite make the cut.

Which I can totally understand.  Often these top 10 kind of things are highly personal and many people have many reasons for preferring one over another.  

Therefore, I am going to do some follow-up posts on popular games that I suspect many people would include in their top 10s and give a little explanation on my thoughts about them and why they didn't make the cut.

Naturally, in the Brawler and Fighter genres, CAPCOM is pretty well known.  Heck in my top 10, CAPCOM made 4 out of the 10, so that must say something!  So todays post is about CAPCOM brawlers that didn't tickle my fancy.

Beat 'em Ups; A top 10

I’ve played many, many games over the years and I often find myself attracted to 2 main types, the good old platformer and Beat Em Ups.  I’ve recently been referring to Beat Em Ups as "Brawlers" as I’ve never really liked their genre definition.  “Fighting game” doesn’t fit, as something like Virtua Fighter, DOA and Street fighter all fit into that mix and are very different.  A few years ago I was introduced to the term “Belt scrollers” which is just a stupid term; people defended it as the characters often travelled along the screen as if they were on a conveyor belt and they had the ability to move left/right and up down in the playing field.  Yeh? Well guess what, Zaxxon does that, 1942 too, it's just a vertical conveyor belt, Paperboy,  the list goes on and on.  Essentially it doesn’t describe the game play at all, just the movement of the screen and therefore something like Kung-Fu master nor Altered Beast fit in that classification.

So here I will refer to them as Brawlers, as I think it fits well indicating the often chaotic nature of their gameplay and the fact that you can often punch more than one enemy at a time.

Firstly though, I have to remind myself about the brawlers I have played over the years.  I am sure I am missing some, but after scrolling through a few lists, these are the ones I have played enough to be confident I have a pretty solid idea of what is going on in them:

Alien Storm	Ninja Combat NEOGEO
Alien VS Predator	PuliRuLa
Altered Beast	Red Heat
Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja	Sailor Moon (arcade game)
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs	Spiderman: The Video Game
Capt America and the avengers	Streets of rage 1,2,3,4
Capt Commando	Target Renegade
Comix Zone (on reflection, this doesn't fit)	Tenchi WO Karau II (Warriors of Fate)
D&D 1,2	The Combat Tribes
Die hard Arcade	The Crow
Double Dragon C64	The Crows, Battle action
Double Dragon II (NES)	The Ninja Warriors (+ Again)
Dynamite DUx (C64)	The Punisher
Final fight 1,2,3	The Simpsons
Golden Axe 1,2,3	TMNT arcade 1
GA Revenge Of Death Adder	TMNT Hyperstone Heist
Guardian Heroes	TMNT Shredders revenge
**I'm sure I've missed some**	TMNT Turtles in time
King of Dragons	Two Crude Dudes (CrudeBusters)
Knights of the Round	Under cover cops
Mighty Final Fight	Vendetta (Arcade Game)
Nekketsu Oyako	Xmen (konami arcade game)

A lot of the games above I've probably played on multiple formats, such as Double Dragon, Final Fight and even Golden Axe, so I have tried to avoid doing that because:

1. The list would be way too long.

2. For my purposes it is unneeded, because if a particular version is in my top 10, I will state so.

3. I probably can't remember them all.

So, due to popular demand (heh) here I am with a nice little list of my top 10 Brawlers on various platforms that I have played over the years.