Bomber Raid (1989)

This cheerful little shooter has shades of Capcom’s 1942, with bright, colourful graphics and a fairly grating repetitive tune underneath much of it. There’s nothing complicated here, just vertically-scrolling blasting with a large playfield and plenty of bullets and enemy craft to dodge. There are mid-stage set pieces to up the interest quotient and the whole thing really does look quite lovely. Infrequent slowdown is present, though it’s the kind of game where you’re sometimes grateful for its existence. Your ship can be supported by tiny miniature ships, presumably piloted by children, that you can arrange into different formations based on numbered pick-ups you can blast to change their state like in Twinbee, but this is infrequent enough that it’s difficult to work into a meaningful strategy. Regardless, this is good. The stages go on a touch too long for my taste but everything that makes a decent shmup work is here. ***

Bonanza Bros. (1991)

Look, I’d better get this out of the way. There’s a song in this game that really sounds like one from Tom & Jerry: The Movie, a cartridge I had as a kid. So I went to look through each game’s credits to see if there was any crossover and the answer… was no. But it really does sound similar and there were a lot of pseudonyms, so I still think I’m right. Yes, I spent the entire first four sentences of this entry on something sounding a bit like something else. Not sure why, because Bonanza Bros. certainly isn’t lacking in things to talk about. If you’re not familiar with it, the game – at least in its original arcade form – was a co-operative heist adventure that saw the titular Bonanza Bros., Mobo and Robo, breaking into various locations, shooting up all the guards and making off with that sweet loot. Amoral, but jolly good fun thanks to a reactive game world that let you slam doors open into your enemy’s faces, sneak into the background for stealth manoeuvres and ride ziplines to safety. The most remarkable thing about this Master System port is that it’s pretty much all here. It’s a shame that you’re looking at a single-player experience, but something had to give to get everything else as spit-shined as they managed. This is great! The graphics are superb, the gameplay is slick and the experience has been sensibly redesigned for single-player adventures in a way that recalls the Master System port of Shinobi; totally different rules to the arcade game, significantly easier, but far less frustrating and more playable than a straight port. You can switch between Mobo and Robo in the options menu, so both of the Bros. are present and correct. The only way this beautiful and brilliant game could be any better would be the ability to bring ‘em both. *****

Bonkers: Wax Up! (1998)

What a horrendous character. Honestly, you think Bonkers couldn’t be any less interesting and then it turns out he’s a cop. ACAB means All Cartoons Are Better (than Bonkers). Some nice animation as you’d expect from Disney TV, but a charisma vacuum of a protagonist. This didn’t stop Capcom from making a jolly decent SNES game around him, but can this Brazil-only Game Gear port bring that same level of quality to the glorious Master System? Well, if you’ve read the Game Gear Directory entry in which I describe this game as “a shit Chuckie Egg”, you’ll be aware that the answer is an unfortunate no. That said, for god only knows what reason, I didn’t mind this as much on Master System. I suppose handheld games need to have some measure of immediacy, while playing on console lets me take my time a little more. Which I needed to, because Bonkers: Wax Up is something of an aimless runaround, letting that irritating and unfunny bobcat loose in a succession of big, open stages that are almost empty, seeking clues – which, in the first stage, are pickles. I don’t know why. You’re able to pause at any time and see a compass that’ll vaguely point you towards the next one, which takes a lot of the meandering out, but you’ll never find you stumble across anything interesting. I do like the mummy enemies that unravel when you jump on them, revealing a sheepish-looking man in his undercrackers. But I’m not giving it an extra star just for that. This looks bad, runs terribly (constant slowdown) and it isn’t fun. A shame, because there’s the barest skeleton of something decent here. *

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993)

I love this game and I love the movie it’s based on. I will certainly entertain the possibility that I am overrating both. A very traditional platformer, you’re given control of Jonathan Harker and must explore a variety of terrifying locales such as a castle, a different castle, then the first castle again (except a different part of it). I’m deliberately making it sound shite for a joke, but it isn’t. As well as there being lots of lovely false walls hiding treasure to collect, this game also has a really fundamental grasp of compelling stage design, with all sorts of tricks, traps and smart enemy placement. It’s bloody difficult, even more so because to see the ending you need to beat the game on Hard, but it’s a lot of fun trying to get there. It’s a shame that the final stage is reliant on a time limit so tight that it’s actively unfair and basically requires borderline flawless performance – it’s the big finale and challenge is to be expected, but come on. It’s that cruelty which brings this down a notch, despite how enjoyable the rest of it manages to be. ****

(Next: Bu-Cal)

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