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What’s most notable about Crying, though, is just how fast and smooth it is every level offers a constant onslaught of enemies and bullets that swoop and pulsate across the screen in hypnotic and slightly eerie fashion.
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A gaudy relic from a bygone age, ToeJam & Earl still has lots to offer, particularly when played with a friend. It’s an example of the game’s weird, inventive sense of humor, which extends to an ingenious two-player mode where the screen only splits in half when players head off in different directions. Obstacles include ice-cream vans and violent chickens, while the aliens’ only available response is to knock them out with tomatoes. Essentially a top-down dungeon crawler, it sees a pair of ungainly aliens (the ToeJam and Earl of the title) hunting a surreal landscape for the missing parts of their spaceship. Quite possibly the most ’90s game ever made, with its backward hats, chunky sneakers, and other period fashion accessories, ToeJam & Earlremains a delightful curio. The range of power-ups and things to collect keeps things interesting (the crocodile hero appears to have a worrying addiction to fruit machines), and some of the monsters are endearingly strange. While the single-screen, trap-the-monsters action may have seemed old hat at a time when Sonic was tearing through levels like lightning, Wani Wani World has aged quite well. At any rate, the resulting game is a bright, breezy bit of fun. Was Kaneko inspired by the success of Sonic the Hedgehogand intent on creating an “animal with attitude” character of its own? Quite possibly.
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Later ported to the Sega Game Gear by Kaneko itself, Berlin Wall was mysteriously altered for the Genesis, where it was given a new title and an entirely different central character – a crocodile (“wani” being the Japanese word for crocodile).
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In 1991, Japanese studio Kaneko created an arcade game called The Berlin Wall – a revival of the old Space Panicgame with better graphics, end-of-world bosses, and lots of power-ups. If you’re into collecting things, the box looks great, too. El Viento may desperately want to be a Castlevaniabeater, but it’s more akin to a ’90s straight-to-video movie, which oddly enough, is actually a recommendation.
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