#progressive esp for an episode that came out in the 90s

[moonscape]

man i completely forgot that they just retconned brock's mother being dead. though tbh with how neglectful both of his parents are she might as well be

[arcadequartermaster]

JUNE 2017 UPDATE www.arcadequartermaster.com

First of all, 4000 followers! Thanks so much for keeping up with my randomness and ramblings in this blog.

Following the results of my twitter poll last week, these 4 companies will be the topics for the incoming fighting game updates for June till September. With Konami leading the way, four new shrines are live in the site!

MARTIAL CHAMPION: As Konami held its indelible mark in the history of original and licensed beat-em-ups during the 90s, it can’t be said with their fighting games as Capcom revolutionized the genre with SF2 and the many FG clones. Martial Champion has 10 multinational fighters, each with 2 special moves as is the norm for FG brawlers at the time, plus a final boss that adopts the combat styles of the playable ones. It does boast huge sprites and graphics akin to Konami’s own Violent Storm, along with the expanding camera view as combatants get their distance ala Art of Fighting. While it’s an average game all in all, it had its share of “mascot” characters that could easily remind of this title: the American ninja Racheal and the name-swapped Chinese vampire Chaos/Titi.

DRAGOON MIGHT: As 2D weapon fighting engines like Samurai Shodown exploded in the mid-90s, Konami dished out Dragoon Might, mixing a majority of Far Eastern fighters with a few of the West’s own weapon masters. As for the (typical) plot, each fighter has a piece of a broken medallion which grants the bearer’s wish once assembled. As you progress against each match, you recover a piece until the medallion is whole again, until which a new character attempts to retrieve it for himself as the final boss. Konami now took the 6-button + super bar approach, and the game has very rich backgrounds and graphics. The main gimmick is the interactive “hang points” in each stage that serve as trapeze lines or temporary platforms to help each combatant in battle.

MONSTER MAULERS: It’s fitting to feature this as this blog won’t shut up about tokusatsu and sentai shows esp recently for the Konami update. Dubbed ‘Ultimate Task Force’, it’s a cheeky arcade rendition of everything you could find in a Sunday morning sentai show: the hammy rocking opening Dadandaa~arn intro, and the Engrishy match titles that serve as episode title cards. As with the three of our heroes, they seem to be more on the video game skin-baring side instead of the TV adults-in-spandex. Since the game has the international motif (a Japanese wind demon in China, Centaur in Iraq, and Moai in Brazil for starters) and bizarro costumes, it feels a bit of a nod to Battle Fever J, as the British Anne is skimpier than Miss America’s leotard.  Anyone can consider this as much as a Red Earth predecessor with a sentai touch as King of Monsters did to various kaiju and toku shows. The way it mixes both co-op fighting and beat-em-up also reminds me of the first Fatal Fury, makes me wonder why didn’t Toei actually adapt a few of their more popular sentai shows like this, since this game came out the year of the Mighty Morphin craze. Konami also inserted cameos of bosses from Gradius and Salamander as monster enemies before the final battle with the Happy Droppers, loosely based from the Yatterman nemeses.

S.P.Y. SPECIAL PROJECT Y: An amalgam of shooting and beat-em-up sidescrollers to an espionage theme, Konami’s engine for the game evidently has staple references from their other titles, like the third-person view (plus jetpacks!) from Devastators, pugilist spies like Crime Fighters, and the maze-like bases of Contra. It even boasts of a good number of acquirable firearms and smart bomb weapons. Instead of the looping endgame staple, Konami throws you back to the first stage to face the actual boss a second time where the last battle begins. It also has the infamous flyer with a pastiche of a mustachoied middle aged agent styled from Magnum P.I. / Miami Vice and an equally-mustached villain hijacking a yacht of bikini-clad women. This doesn’t even happen in the game where you play clean-shaven young agents and the yacht of swimsuit ladies appear at the very end (their sprite forms are rather... unflattering), clearly a way to cash in the TV spy fad of the late 80s.

And there’s the new shrines! This July will feature the fighting games of Kaneko, including Japanese warriors and one with a certain Hong Kong action star. ;)