Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road

"Gamer's Log, April 12: I run and shoot in all directions, but they kill me anyway....."

In the SNK title Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road for the NES, you play as Paul and Vince, two militant warriors who look like Max Force and Hitman with flotation devices engulfing their legs. The Ice Climbers have better get-ups than these goons. You trudge across unidentifiable landscapes, only rationally explainable as being labeled alien, only to be killed, killed, and killed again by creatures so ugly that they are spawned in a bell tower in Notre Dame three floors above the one where Quasimodo lives.

Paul and Vince are out to kill a villain named Zap Zang or something like that. He has two names and they both start with Z, that much I know definitely. But none of this is important because the game will crack the sanity of the most established intellect with little or no trouble. You run slower than a snail with a double hernia, and the proficiency with which you fire your gun is minimal. On top of this you have forever long bonus games wherein you shoot at a vague target that could be a disk or a pie or a UFO, graphics that beg for attention, and digitized voices that make blood spurt four feet from your ears. Yes indeed, this game is horrible.

I already mentioned the molasses-speed gameplay, so I'll move right on to the realm of sound. The music actually sounds like you're supposed to be intensely involved in the heat of battle, and your full stock of grenades and ammo rations should only serve to further pump your adrenaline. You won't do a whole lot of enemy killing, however, because you'll be retching over the hoarse voices in the game. They appear if you are killed (always happens) or if you reach one of the game's many space bars. It sounds closest to an NES-era sound effect of a roaring jungle animal, and is the only noticeable sound other than your grenades being thrown (a quickly dying ''wooooo''). I will state that I enjoy the music, however.

This game is truly one of the all-time greats for the NES in terms of the officially verified Difficulty/Bad Gameplay Rule of Direct Proportions, which states that games like this have a difficulty that is directly proportional to the horrendousness of the control and gameplay. This is one of the games where it plays sucky and yet is so hard that the only way to beat it is with the novelty Game Genie, and even then there are nearly unavoidable bugs along the way, such as getting stuck behind elevated terrain and finding yourself in inescapable situations upon returning from a bonus game, which here is sort of the video game equivalent of detention - nothing to do, nothing to say, and you can't escape until dismissed. Fortunately, you can dismiss yourself easily in the real world with the Power button. Reset won't see a lot of use when you plug in this tepid title.

As a child, I was unable to discern between bad and good games (which may explain why I played Bubsy a lot - no matter, it's in the past now), and spent a lot of my time attempting to pass the first section - there is no clear distinction between levels - without being ruthlessly slaughtered. More or less it was usually better classified as euthanasia than a ruthless slaughtering. I can't do it now, and almost six years have passed since I touched the game. What does that say?

You might find this in a flea market or a bargain bin somewhere in your walk through life. If you see it, consider it taboo and file a restraining order on it, keeping it at least 500 yards from your person at all times. I wouldn't recommend this to a friend unless they weren't really my friend, and all my friends are really my friends, so I can't recommend this to anyone save for that one obsessive freak who's got to play every Nintendo game ever made. It's funny how you remember the good games and the bad with equal clarity.

Score: 2

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/12/02, Updated 04/12/02