Sunday 22 September 2024

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.

Sunday 8 September 2024

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!)

Friday 6 September 2024

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.

Tuesday 27 August 2024

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 StormNinja Combat NEOGEO
Alien VS PredatorPuliRuLa
Altered BeastRed Heat
Bad Dudes VS Dragon NinjaSailor Moon (arcade game)
Cadillacs and DinosaursSpiderman: The Video Game
Capt America and the avengersStreets of rage 1,2,3,4
Capt CommandoTarget Renegade
Comix Zone (on reflection, this doesn't fit)Tenchi WO Karau II (Warriors of Fate)
D&D 1,2The Combat Tribes
Die hard ArcadeThe Crow
Double Dragon C64The Crows, Battle action
Double Dragon II (NES)The Ninja Warriors (+ Again)
Dynamite DUx (C64)The Punisher
Final fight 1,2,3The Simpsons
Golden Axe 1,2,3TMNT arcade 1
GA Revenge Of Death AdderTMNT Hyperstone Heist
Guardian HeroesTMNT Shredders revenge
**I'm sure I've missed some**TMNT Turtles in time
King of DragonsTwo Crude Dudes (CrudeBusters)
Knights of the RoundUnder cover cops
Mighty Final FightVendetta (Arcade Game)
Nekketsu OyakoXmen (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.  

Wednesday 24 July 2024

Galvatron - Generations Selects, Toy colour version

 


Hooo, boy.  This little fellow I waited a while for.  Some reason when I saw the original colour version of this guy from the EarthriseKingdom (all those lines blended together there...) line, I just had a feeling that there was a white version on the way eventually.  Thus I held off buying and bided my time; lo and behold! I was blessed by the news that the toy coloured version (this one) was planned.

Kingdom is the purple one.  I decided to not link to the TT page, as it'll eventually disappear.

Woot!  Now I just had to pray to the Plastic Gods that Taktom saw fit to release him here. And they did, as a TT Mall exclusive (which there was a lot of going on at the time).  While the exclusives were a pain, it did mean that I just had to be on the internet ball to get one.

Obviously I did. And here we are now.

More preamble to follow:

Sunday 16 June 2024

Legacy Core Class Megatron

 


Just as a heads up, this toy is called "Energon Universe Megatron,"  however, when the old Armada/Energon/Galaxy force trilogy was happening, I ended up seeing more episodes of Superlink and Galaxy Force than their English counterparts.  I also had just discovered the joys of Hobby Link Japan and the internet, which was coupled with a decent Aussie dollar, and so imported a lot of my figures.

Where am I going with this story?  Excellent question.

Well, in Superlink/Energon, the main leader of the Decepticons was missing for a while and Scorponok was the leader, then Megatron eventually returned.  However, since they carried on from Micron Densetsu, Super link Megs was called Galvatron from the start.  I also imported the JP version of Galvatron as it was a smaller size and the Hasbro one was oversized.

As a result of all this, I will probably be calling this figure Galvatron a lot of the time, despite the fact that is not it's official name.  Hasbro also have plans to release a Galvatron coloured version (With extra purple bits) later as well, just to add to the possible confusion.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Monday 29 April 2024

Sludge of the Studio Series variety

 


Moar DINOBOTS!  Goddam life is good.  Sludge is one that I always wanted as a kid and never got.  I didn't get any of the Dinobots actually, until I got a gold box Snarl.  The Studio series took the wind out of Takaratomy's Generations Selects coloured versions made from the POTP figures, but with nicer paint, and personally I appreciate that as these Studio Series ones are looking good and a leader sized = Darn bigguns.