Sega8bit.com - Review: Argos no Jūjiken


	Review Information

	Reviewer Name:	Stan

	Game Difficulty:	Medium
	Difficulty Options:	False


	Game Information

	Full Title:	Argos no Jūjiken
	Year Released:	1988
	Game Type:	Fighting
	Max Players:	1

Introduction

Here it is, one of the sole reasons I originally decided to look for some Mark III games, perhaps expanding my already large, beastly, godly collection of godliness. When I was younger and primarily played the NES, Rygar was one of my favorite games. I played it for hours and it was one of the first games I defeated, bad ending aside. It's filled with lots of things to do and almost plays like some sort of early-RPG in a way, though not really. It's just a good game. So when I heard it was also released by Sega for the Mark III (that's what this is), I just had to get my hands on it. These hands are now pierced and burned by the blasphemy of this twisted game.

Gameplay

Argos no Senshi is generally NOT like its NES counterpart. Mind you, I believe this one is more true to the arcade game (never actually played that), and if it is they can both suck together, far away from me. Tecmo did an excellent job of creating an entirely different game for the NES. Didn't happen with this beast.

Essentially, you control Rygar and have to run around attacking enemmies, collecting power-ups, and so forth, defeating bosses at the end of every level. In the NES version you had to find certain items to get to different areas. Not here, it's just another "run and hit crap" game, plus one where you DON'T HAVE ANY LIFE. So what? So you'll die, at least once every freaking five seconds. The NES version was tough, but at least it gave you some hits to play around with. Argos doesn't, you get hit once and that's it, you even lose all your power-ups. Not that it matters, I found you can pretty much jump over everything to make it to the end on every level. That, or you can jump on top of the enemies to fly even further along, closer to the end of this horror.

I also noticed a bit of collision detection suckiness in this game. Actually, make that A LOT of collision detection suckiness. It had me dead more than once. You'll be striking away at everyone, when suddenly, after attacking an enemy that is the SAME kind of enemy as one you just killed, they just don't get hit at all. Or, they for some reason take more hits then their friends and you end up running into them since you assume they'd otherwise be dead. Really got annoying. I got the hang of it after awhile, but it still caught me here and there, plus I'd rather not have to deal with chaos theory while playing my Sega, thank you. One more thing. I noticed that a number of enemies can only be struck while crouching. Why? They're clearly at head level, why do I have to crouch? More importantly, why is it so hard to do so while attacking? Not sure what the deal is with that.

The power-ups are pretty basic. One makes your weapon stretch further (giving you more room to miss and not get hit), one that enables you to jump and kill, another that allows you to swing your weapon around in an arc, and two others that I can't remember. Seeing as how I forgot completely and only played this game about five days ago, you can see how cool they are. Eventually I avoided all of them altogether because you can just run and jump over most creatures. If you die, you lose them anyway, so what's the point? They're not integral to winning. Plus, make it to the end of each little substage and you get to continue from there on out no matter how many times you die. Therefore, just keep on a runnin', and when you eventually get to each level break, you can just continue from there. With infinite continues, it makes attacking kind of mute except for the bosses.

Ah yes, the bosses. At first I thought they were kind of interesting, that is until I saw they repeat, meaning that you'll fight them here and then there (though a bit harder). Come on, guys, seriously. There was nothing more frightening in the NES version than the first boss, that two-head, lion-turtle beast that wasted you. No music, the thing just sits there making this beastly sounds, scaring the hell out of you. All of the bosses were like this, scary as hell. In Argos, the bosses are pretty tough, until you realize they each have their own "suck" factor. The first one, for example, can be defeated by simply waiting in the far left corner, striking insanely over to the right. He keeps on running into it and you have him down in a few strikes. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame. I actually got so bored with this game that I simply shut it off, so I have no clue if it has a cool ending, nor do I care because after playing this I decided to sell my Mark III and games.

Graphics

The graphics are decent, but definitely not up to par with the NES version, which is a shame since there are more capabilities here. The rolling creatures came out of the ground kind of cool, but that gets old. Notice that that's the only memorable piece of this game for me. There are some interesting backgrounds, but nothing too spectacular worth mentioning. One odd thing was the separationg of the stages. You normally are spending your time "above ground," but there's a "below ground" part of every stage you run above or can run in. I have no clue why it's there, I guess it gives some more space, but it looks kind of like Pitfall because of this. The levels repeat pretty much all the time, so unless they get different later on you're in for a redundant ride into palette swap territory. Could have done better.

Sound & Music

Argos didn't do too bad on the sound category, considering. Still, the repetitive themes get annoying coupled with the rank gameplay. The only redeeming feature is the boss tune, which is frankly the best part of this game. It's pretty dang cool, nice job on that. Too bad they didn't work a little harder on the rest of the game. Had the music been more bearable, I may have stuck with it.

Controls

The controls are a little awkward. I found on numerous occasions that crouching down was somewhat difficult for some odd reason, and it had nothing to do with a faulty controller. Otherwise, they're pretty responsive. If it weren't for the gameplay, I'd say they were excellent. But gameplay somewhat relies on controls in order to function, and if it's not working, these aren't working either.

Replay Value


	Scores

As you can assume from what I said above, this game has little replay value. The NES version was just killer, I play that game now and then just to see certain levels and hear certain songs. This game actually incited me to STOP collecting Mark III game and sell the lot of them. That should be all I need to say, but I'll say some more. This game is awful, it gets really tiresome really fast and I'd be surprised if you actually went through the whole thing. If you actually do, I doubt you'll come back to it, it can't be worth it. There'd have to be a really killer ending to make it worthwhile. I doubt there is considering everything else, but you never know.

Conclusion

Okay, so this game didn't REALLY make me stop collecting the Mark III, there were other reasons, but this is definitely one of them. It's a sad title and a poor conversion in my opinion. I don't care if it's true to the original. If this is the original, it sucks just as bad and I can't see anyone having put any money into playing it. If they did, I assume they're long dead now from self-inflicted injuries.