The story starts off slow, unskippable, and ... well... not really a gripping thing nor an overly accurate one either. So it's really just this weird 1980/90s / 00s almost thing, where as the story plays out, some of it just wouldn't be as the lead character says it is, if it were still the 80's anyway. That said, whatever, it is what it is... the narrative is long, and at times even has to meet up to musical cues it seems. Heck, even the main menu, if you'd call it that, as it only has START and QUIT... but even that takes FOREVER to finally pop up, with START coming up to one note, and the QUIT appearing at a distant other.... with you, the player, just sitting there, waiting to get any level of control, and either actually start or quit the game. The "cut scenes" are the same lingering drawn out way, and then you get to the game. The very beginning has you playing some Streets of Rage clone level, which art(wise) is nice. Gameplay though, my god is this a regression from even launch era Genesis games, like Streets 1 or Golden Axe.... You get a punch, and a jump button... together they do a spin kick, alone the jump, and punch... and of course you can jump, and then punch, in which case you'll do a jump kick moving forward. Sounds okay, but this is as bare bones as it gets. When the before mentioned games had things like specials, double direction tap for run, ram from run, rear facing attacks, front facing attacks, and more. This just feels, handicapped... right from the get go, at least to someone who's actually played the games it's cloning anyway. Then after what feels like a half hour of cut scene, there is the second stage, the 2D forward momentum space shooter. Die, and it's starting from the beginning for you, even if you've been going for 20 min and are just about at the end... beginning time baby! .... I quit at this point, not fun, not worth it. 3 stars is more than I really want to give, but todays soft world would cry too much if I went lower.
I'm no noob to this stuff, been playing games, building systems, etc since before this old title was made... and played it when it was brand new back on a 97 Packard Bell Multimedia machine. Sadly though, DOSBox screws up just about all games on my system, and when not given explicit options over dosbox, which this installation does not, I can't fix it. So the game won't run windowed unless I set the overall system to 16bit color, then I can play it in a window looking correct... but a tiny window, as this is a 4k panel, and it will ONLY run in 640x480... so it's literally about the size of a postage stamp. So fullscreen it is, except with that implemented, there is a green tone to everything, and it looks horrible. I tired all command lines, all launch switches and options, tweaked the driver, and tried to find an ini or cfg file to work over, but there really isn't anything. Old sites have fixes for old problems, patches, reworked exe's, launchers, etc... However all of those sites are dead, and support died long before that even occurred... so it's just all crap for me. And this is on a Sandy E 3930K @4.4, RTX 2070 @+200/+700, 16GB DDR3 @ 1600.... so uh.... I mean, it has the horsepower, but likely that's the whole issue... maybe I'll get around to trying it on an old P233MMX or PII laptop as time goes on... maybe it'll work better there, in a native Win9X environment no less.
I had this on Sega Genesis as a kid... Born in the early 80s, I played this game quite a bit once I got my hands on a genesis. This being the case, after playing a couple levels of this version, I couldn't help but think "man, this is way more pixelated (lower resolution) with far less colors on screen than the genesis", and it really is. Compared to even old screen shots of the genesis, this version has far less colors displayed, and seems to be below a rendering output of even 240x320... If you played the SNES variant growing up, this won't even resemble the same game at all. Sure it technically is, but with about 256 less colors, and 10x lower res, it just looks terrible. Nothing like the way anyone would have played it in the past. The graphical options via dosbox are existant, but not good. Nothing is really going to offer a positive change. Merely a handful of scaling options, one of which works, the rest of which break the game... And then a couple other superfiscial options that more or less impact nothing. Shame. It's still possible to have some memories come back, some nostalgia goodness I suppose... But you're gonna have to use your imagination a bit to fill in the gaps. That said, at least this dosbox game works... All of the MK games I bought on here have zero controller support of modification options.. Just a handful of games that can start, and then loop on their title screens indefinitely, as nothing ever registers as a button press, and no options are present to change that.
