Nightshade (NES)

If you’ve heard of late release NES curio Nightshade, it’s probably by that name and not its full title, Nightshade Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh. Australian studio Beam Software clearly had big plans for this aggressively quirky point-and-click adventure/fighting game hybrid. They even managed to get industry giant Konami to take on publishing duty via their Ultra Games label. Sadly, the sequels promised by that snazzy subtitle were not to be. I don’t blame Beam or Konami for this, necessarily, as few 8-bit games were selling all that well circa 1992, especially downright weird ones. In any case, Nightshade’s one and only game appearance endures as a singular experience within the massive NES library.

When Sutekh, Metro City’s reigning crime lord, manages to kill off veteran superhero Vortex, nothing stands between him and total domination. Nothing, that is, except for Nightshade, trenchcoated crime fighting alter-ego of mild-mannered encyclopedia researcher Mark Gray. Too bad old Nightshade isn’t off to the greatest of starts. As the game opens, Sutekh’s tied him to a chair next to a lit bomb. If he doesn’t think fast, his adventure could be over before it’s began.

With its moody film noir-inspired opening music and cut scene, you might expect Nightshade to be quite the grim, gritty affair. Well, joke’s on you, because literally everything that follows is simply bananas; a full-blown pulp/comic hero parody in the vein of The Tick or The Venture Bros. A pretty good one, too, with plenty of sarcastic item descriptions, pop culture references, and recurring gags like various citizens of Metro City constantly mangling poor Nightshade’s name, dubbing him Lampshade among other things.

This slapstick sense of humor extends to the game mechanics proper. Each time Nightshade runs out of health, Sutekh show up to stick him in another overly elaborate death trap akin to the one from the opening scene. If Nightshade can manage to escape using a combination of quick thinking and accurate timing, he’s free to continue his mission. Otherwise, it’s game over and all progress is lost. The game also ends if he should reach the fifth and final trap, from which there is no escape. In other words, figuring out how to foil the traps gives you access to four extra lives.

Most of your play time as Nightshade is spent wandering the city streets in a point-and-click adventure mode, summoning a cursor as needed to examine, pick up, and use various objects, speak to NPCs, and so on. Interfaces like this were rare on the NES, although not entirely unheard-of. See Maniac Mansion or Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom. What sets Nightshade apart is its combat, which uses a side-view beat-’em-up style. Although the contrast between the slow-paced, methodical exploration and the frantic brawls is theoretically exciting, I found the battles to be the game’s weakest aspect. Nightshade is slow on foot and has a high, floaty jump. Enemies tend to both be faster and enjoy greater hit priority on their attacks. True, most have exploitable weaknesses that can be mastered eventually, but the learning process is a painful one due to the sharply limited lives and healing resources. Needing to restart the game from scratch multiple times, redoing the early point-and-click segments over and over almost soured me on the game as a whole.

Almost. In the end, I’m glad I persevered through Nightshade’s mediocre fights and resulting early frustration. I was rewarded with a wild, witty escapade that absolutely merited more success than it found. On the plus side, some of its DNA did carry over to lead designer Paul Kidd’s 1993 follow-up project, Shadowrun for the Super Nintendo.

God Panic: Shijō Saikyō Gunden (PC Engine)

The 1992 PC Engine Super CD-ROM shooter God Panic: Shijō Saikyō Gunden (“God Panic: Supreme Strongest Army”) is a genuine oddity. One barely documented on the English language Internet, to the extent that I had to rely on a somewhat dodgy machine translation of the Japanese manual to have any idea what it was even supposed to be about. We know it was sold by Teichiku, a nearly century-old record company that had a brief, largely unremarkable fling with video game publishing in the ’90s. The developers behind it seem to have been Sting, an outfit founded in 1989 by some ex-Compile employees. Compile? As in my favorite shootgame studio of all-time? Yup! I’m sad to say, however, that fans of such legendary Compile titles as Blazing Lazers and Musha really shouldn’t get their hopes up for this one.

One look at any given screen of God Panic will place it firmly in the wacky cute-’em-up subgenre, à la the better known TwinBee and Parodius franchises. Each of its stages has a silly, seemingly arbitrary theme like music, baseball, or Japanese mythology. Your “ship” is a little anthropomorphic ninja rodent fellow named Mouse Boy who gets contacted by none other than God himself and asked to fly off and save the day when an attempt to create a new universe goes awry and results in a hoard of kooky monsters appearing to wreak havoc.

Story-wise, that’s all you should need to underpin a quality shooting experience. Pity the gameplay isn’t there to support it. God Panic is such a bare-bones, perfunctory feeling product that there honestly isn’t much in the way of design or mechanics to comment on. Mouse Boy has a single linear weapon upgrade path that first sees his standard straight shot get augmented by a pair of small option satellites. These satellites then upgrade to three increasingly powerful shot types (lasers, lighting, homing) as more power-up icons are collected. A limited stock of up to five bombs allows for clearing away enemy shots in a pinch while also dishing out heavy damage across most of the screen. Other than that, there are collectable speed-up icons as well as ones that will either restore one pip on Mouse Boy’s health bar or expand said bar from its starting capacity of three up to a maximum of six.

Basic as that all is, it’s the level design here that truly let me down. God Panic’s five stages are short, often wrapping up just when I thought they were getting mildly exciting. Worse yet, the designers had the nerve to pull the rather cheap trick of making you play through them all twice via a second loop before you can fight the final boss and see the ending. The only concession to how tedious this obviously is is that second loop versions of levels are recolored and most (though not all) of the enemies are given new sprites. There’s a spooky Halloween angle to the redone art, such as giving the disrobing geisha enemies from stage three purple skin and bat wings. In my opinion, it’s not enough to compensate for the levels themselves being fundamentally unchanged.

On the plus side, God Panic’s soundtrack is interesting. Not spectacular, mind you, only strange and eclectic enough to stand out. You get obvious jokey homages to Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” sprinkled in amongst moody piano dirges and a ragtime end credits. It’s a proper trip and makes listening to God Panic arguably more fun than playing it. It’s also the sole justification I can spot for why the game needed to ship on a CD-ROM as opposed to a simple HuCard.

Between the refillable health bar and stock of three continues that allow you to keep on playing right on the spot you died with no break in the action, God Panic is notably easy by genre standards. I would cite that as a potential point in its favor, since I consider beginner-friendly shooters a very good thing in general. Alas, it just so happens that the PC Engine is already home to multiple great works in this vein, most notably Star Parodier, which presents much the same style of comedic vertical scrolling action with exponentially more depth and polish. Not to mention Air Zonk, Coryoon, Magical Chase, Seirei Senshi Spriggan…I could go on, but you get the idea. If you’re a PC Engine fanatic like me and bound to get around to the deepest of deep cuts like this eventually, you probably won’t hate it. It’s too trifling for that. That said, don’t expect to love it, either, as the minimal effort invested marks it as one of the least essential games of its kind on the platform.