in the face of war:
blonde on a motorcycle
seeks male idiots
Additional Comments:
I've been so caught up in a few specific games for what seems like months with no foreseen end in sight - games like Fallout: New Vegas, Mad Max, and the surprisingly fun yet not so surprisingly addictive, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, along with several other noteworthy titles that I'll cheekily fail to mention at this time. However, with the year coming to a close, I felt like tackling something different, something lacking complexity, and hopefully, something quick. Arcade games usually fit the bill as their purpose has always been to traverse a world filled with incredible challenge from point A to point B on a perfectly linear path. Beyond that, the game heralds little to no depth. After all, who wants to feed a machine twenty bucks in quarters just to read an hour and a half worth of eye-rolling context? Certainly not I. Though I must be grateful that those quarters are only theoretical thanks to emulation. Still, no need for time wasting plot lines mucking up an exquisite action shooter. A blonde, a bike, and a mission to.... A mission to what? Maybe just a smidge of story? No? Ok....
Soldier Girl Amazon is a typical top down shooter in the sense that you're shooting the crap out of some fantastic other-worldly lifeforms while they retaliate with their own barrage of machine gun candor. Yet, the game doesn't exactly feel like a typical shooter. It's more akin to the slightly misguided genre rebels, Jackal or The Lost Castle in Darkmist. Maybe it's because instead of the usual aerial machinery, you play as a bodacious babe out to kick some ass, all the while struttin' her stuff - at least until you hijack a futuristic motorcycle, that is until you lose it exactly three tenths of a second later. Perhaps, but at least she has a gun, so the feel of an aerial shooter isn't far removed. Or perhaps it's that awkward scrolling that I've seen before.
Much like Jackal, Soldier Girl Amazon places scrolling within the player's hands making use of a unidirectional manual scroll. When it comes to top down shooters, or any shooter for that matter, I've never been a fan of manual scroll. Unlike any other genre where auto-scrolling typically introduces a faux brand of difficulty, I find this to be the case for manual scrolling in shooters. Maybe it's the unnatural flow to the levels since you usually have to remain in constant motion. Unforeseen pitfalls always seem to prevail during manual scroll, especially when large obstructions may come into play. One such incident nearly occurred here where I thought I backed myself into an inescapable corner. True, the same could happen with autoscroll, but at least you'll be crushed to death by the invisible barrier within a few short seconds as opposed to spending an eternity in a tiny hollow.
Scrolling, however, may be of personal taste and isn't the true detriment of the game. Controls and difficulty easily win those honors. The controls are solid for what they are; unfortunately, they're far too clumsy for this particular title. Maybe if the difficulty wasn't turned up to eleven, I could overlook the lack of rapid fire or the use of a single stick handling all of the aiming routines. Except the severe difficulty only makes the frustration with the controls all the more noticeable.
How developers choose to ignore a rapid fire button in these kind of games is beyond me. Sure, I love hammering my thumb on the fire button incessantly for an hour or two without break. Ok, if I was on an actual cabinet, I'd be slamming my palm or tapping my finger on the fire button - not as aggravating a chore as thumb Olympics. Still. But what's more infuriating is the aiming physics. You shoot in the direction you face. In theory, it makes sense, and in a number of shooters, it works perfectly. However, when every enemy has the ability to home in on you and enemy fire appears to travel at a rate equal or greater than your walking speed, it needlessly complicates play technique. If anything, it forces you to go on the defensive more often than necessary because you consistently find yourself boxed in, preventing you from aiming at your enemy lest you walk headlong into their wrath. It's bullshit and nowhere was this more of an issue than the first boss, or rather after defeating the first boss and having to then kill off four of the most annoying enemies I think I've ever come across in any video game. First off, let's think about what I just said. The largest problem area is with the very first boss in the game. That's not a good sign for things to come. Level 1 - fuck it, we're done. Secondly, why do these little adjunct shitheads even exist? I killed the boss and rescued the first of many mysterious men (actually, I didn't, but more on that later). And why are they harder to kill than the boss itself? Can I only harm them by firing into their open mouth? I don't get how these little yellow fuckers function. Let's just move on to the next level already! Oh, it's just more of the same uninspired background and freak-show inhabitants as it is ten levels down the line.
Thing is, those now affectionately labelled "little yellow fuckers" are the sole reason why I hate the way the controls work in this game. After a short time of fumbling around trying to figure out how to kill them, they suddenly began to frenzy, rattling off quick-fire spurts of deadly energy so fast that I had no time to reciprocate my due hatred. All I could do was run circles around them; the slightest hesitation instantly killing me. How the hell am I supposed to aim any sort of return volley when I can't even pause for a nanosecond? If I had the ability to aim with a second stick, the game would actually be playable, but as is...forget it. Oh, I have a few bombs - maybe, if I didn't waste them yet - but they're next to useless.
Somehow, I bullied my way to the boss of the second level where I finally declared the game worthless trash given the insane difficulty. Thing is, there are games out there with insane difficulty that are genuinely fun to play. Any of the Touhous, or hell, most bullet hells in general come to mind. Yes, they're frustrating, but they're playable and have a certain Zen quality to them as you try to carefully work your way through a myriad of beautiful fractal patterns of death. Soldier Girl Amazon, on the other hand, is just amateurish design building proposed challenge with slapdash varieties of mutants with no real ounce of thought to placement. In fact, to create increasingly difficult levels, the game just creates more varied mobs with overall increased numbers. Why not? A group of gigantic bees wasn't enough to aggravate me; let's add some floral mouths, scurrying androids, and most surprising of the bunch, some human soldiers to the mix. The bullets will fly! And to top it all off, make sure the player suffers one-hit kills and we'll send him packing when he dies.
Honestly, it doesn't matter. If you can survive one level, you've essentially survived the game. In many respects, Soldier Girl Amazon reminds me of Exed Exes - in overall style at least. Difficulty, not so much as Exed Exes essentially had an infinite lives mechanic built in. But most everything else, it reeked of the same level of ineptitude. There's really only one level and you just repeat it over and over and over again. There'll be some additional enemies to heighten the action and a couple of new bosses, but there's really no point in venturing forth. There appears to be a rescue scenario at work, except it seems to be perpetual. Soldier Girl Amazon's work is never done, and as such, the game appears to be endless. Granted, an 80s arcade game, endless is appropriate. There's no reason to whinge over that, however, an endless game that's comprised of the same goddamn level over and over...what's the point? High Score? Yea, that is the point of most arcade games, so consider me eggfaced. Except, Soldier Girl Amazon doesn't seem like the game that would rely on such a petty design, and that's what bothers me about it. There could be additional backgrounds or enemies. Why manufacture a couple extra bosses only to recycle everything else? It makes no sense. It's nothing more than a grand illusion to trick idiot kids out of their middling funds injecting the idea that the game is filled with a vast selection of levels.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I can't attest to Soldier Girl Amazon being truly endless, but I'm 99.9% sure it is. After failing miserably at the boss on the second level, I succumbed to extreme measures to further investigate this game. Some people may find cheats immoral in the face of gaming, and most would likely express the use of cheating strips one of the right to call themselves a proper gamer. I could care less. Perhaps I should feel some guilt, but every once in a while a game comes along that's squarely giving you the finger right to your face. Soldier Girl Amazon is one such game and I don't feel a shred of guilt performing any sort of cheats. Frankly, the game doesn't deserve the time of day to play it legit. Thanks to cheats, I suffered through 20-something levels of repetitive tedium and rescued another 20-something jackoffs from the forces of who-the-fuck-cares. While I experienced ever increasing mobs throughout the levels, nothing else ever changed. I figure a simple equation was put in place to create the increasingly difficult mobs. Otherwise, why put in the effort to make several dozen levels only to change so little, if anything? Eventually, after 20-something levels, the game crashed on me mid-level. My first suspicion was something overflowed and began to eat into some additional data - the score perhaps? The way the crash occurred, it sounded reasonable except the Dec->Hex didn't exactly play ball with my hypothesis. Whatever. I consider it a fitting end to a shitty game.
Nano-Rant:
Is there even a point to having a nano-rant? Pretty much this entire post has been nothing but one giant rant. So what shitty thing can possibly top all the other bullshit? You can completely fail what I can only assume is your mission objective. Granted, it doesn't affect the game in any physical sense, but the sheer fact that it can happen and how it happens is just the icing on the cake.
When the game initially starts, nine futuristic soldiers run off into the distance to fight the good fight. Your mission, so I assume, is to rescue all these asshats as they somehow got themselves imprisoned immediately - quite possibly as soon as they negotiated the upper thresholds of the TV screen. Once you defeat a boss, a single captive is released. However, you have roughly two seconds to move Soldier Girl Amazon on top of the rescued prisoner before he decides to run off into the wilderness. Either he's an ungrateful fuck or duty calls. If this happens, you fail to rescue him. At first, I figured once the captive is shown on screen, everything's right in the world. Intuitive game mechanics for the win - yea. This isn't that big of a deal on the latter bosses, but on the first boss, thanks to those little yellow fuckers, you can't exactly focus on collecting the prisoner.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this matters since there's no ending and no real objective. They're just score fodder - 5000 points a pop. So honestly, there's no point in getting my panties in a wad over a device that is only there to further the overarching premise of a high score mechanic. I'll give it that, but it's little things like that that act as a reminder that Soldier Girl Amazon tried its best to be an actual game with actual substance but rather stick it's big ugly toe in the ocean instead of taking a plunge while giving the impression of the latter.
It's a pointless game. I can't even enjoy it for the simplicity of high score functionality. If that's what I'm looking for, I'll turn to Pac-Man or Fast Food or other such games that pander to the high score arcade phenomena. Soldier Girl Amazon, on the other hand, is nothing but a misleading Two Face.
It's been a while since I've had a game piss me off to such a degree. I suppose it was time for one such nightmare to come along. So much for hoping something from my arcade library would be a quick, enjoyable diversion from my working stock.
Rating: 0.5 wasted powerups out of 5*
*Yet another comparison to Exed Exes - powerups that you pretty much lose immediately because the game exists in a one-hit universe against the player's favor. Yet treasure boxes take a half dozen bullets to break apart. What the fuck is that about!?
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