Biker Mice From Mars

Also known as:  N/A

Developer: Konami

Biker Mice from Mars is a decent isometric racer brought to you by Snickers. True story. The racer select screen has the racers drive around on a platform that has the snickers logo on it...You can buy a Snickers bar for $2500 in the race shop…Heck, when Limburger wins a race, he's holding a Snicker bar and states, "Even winners need something to satisfy their hunger." That's product placement to the extreme. Konami may have officially developed this game, but I wonder if Snickers actually had their own development team working under the name of “Konami.” Product placement comments aside, the game does have some other issues as well. The controls of this game don't feel all that great, for example. But, the racing action and track variety make up for that setback, resulting in a racing title that's about average but not much more than that…and it’s one that leaves you wanting to run to the grocery store for a Snickers bar.

Review added: 07/31/2019

BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge

Also known as:  BlaZeon (Japan)

Developer: AI

I really want to like BlaZeon…I really, really want to like it. But, as you can see from the score I gave it, the Bio-Cyborg Challenge makes itself difficult to like. I'll start with the positive of the game, then work my way towards why it wound scoring so low. What I like about BlaZeon is its originality. You start out with a ship that has two different weapons available at your disposal. One weapon is a standard gun to shoot your enemies down with. The other weapon is a rocket that can passivate certain enemies and turn them blue. If you fly into these blue enemies, you transform into their ship, obtaining their firepower as well. Gaining these abilities is essential for survival if you intend to see this game to its final boss. Likewise, having an idea of what kind of firepower works best against certain bosses also helps, allowing you to pick and choose which enemy ships to possess. That said, a game where you absorb ships to use their firepower sounds awesome, so where does it falter? The speed. A slower-paced 3rd person shooter isn't always a bad thing…but a 3rd person shooter that's so slow that you can literally have an empty screen for long stretches of time while you sit and wait for something to fire at, that's pretty bad. If BlaZeon's stage action matched the action during boss fights, it would be a very solid game…but when you have the urge to take a nap on your way to each boss fight, that's just poor game design. Even with a neat concept of absorbing enemy firepower, the often absurdly slow gameplay simply brings this game down. I still feel like BlaZeon is a passable game…but it should have been so much more.

Review added: 01/23/2023

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Also known as:  N/A

Developer: Psygnosis

This Halloween season, I’ve been on a Bram Stoker’s Dracula kick. I’ve beaten the NES and Sega CD games with the same name, and both of them were entirely different experiences...and to my surprise, after playing the SNES version, I found that this one is also a completely different game. The Super NES version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a side-scrolling action game…a not-so-great side-scrolling action game. I’m assuming that it was intended to be thought of as a Castlevania clone, but with a sword instead of a whip...even some of the end-level bosses seem to be pulled from the Castlevania franchise, but they don’t look nearly as cool in my opinion. The end-level bosses are mildly fun, but the actual levels are very bland and unexciting - in early levels you can literally just press the forward button and mash the attack button and be fine. In later levels, you can use the same tactic, but instead of continuously pressing forward, just stopping before the enemies while still mashing the button. It’s not very enjoyable gameplay, if you can’t tell from that description. Anyway, this is better than the Sega CD Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but not as good as the NES one...so it’s kinda like the cream center of an Oreo that nobody really wanted. Unless you want to see what each of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula games are like out there, I can’t really recommend this to anyone.

Review added: 10/31/2021

Breath of Fire

Also known as:  Breath of Fire: Ryuu no Senshi (Japan)

Developer: Capcom

While it's not necessarily the best RPG of its time, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Breath of Fire. I generally like characters that are odd - whether they be odd in personality or odd in appearance, and Breath of Fire provides you with both. From Ryu, the main character that can transform into a dragon, to Gobi, a man with a fish for a head that can transform into a giant fish for you to ride for underwater travel, to Karn, a man that can fuse with party members to create an menacing force in combat, every character is just a tad weird, but in a good way. In particular, Bleu, the cranky woman with the lower body of a snake, is an unlikely hero and a favorite of mine. The story in Breath of Fire isn't groundbreaking - a bad guy destroys your village on his way to attempting to destroy the world, and that starts you on your quest to put an end to it. Much of the gameplay isn't even groundbreaking - the turn-based combat is basically the standard style of the time. However, one mildly enjoyable aspect of the gameplay is changing the party member leading the group. Depending on who's in the front of the pack, you'll have different abilities. Gobi, as I mentioned earlier, can turn into a fish to allow you to travel underwater to areas you can't reach otherwise, Nina can transform into a bird to allow you to do the same kind of travel above water, Ox can punch fruit from trees or break down walls, Bo can shoot his arrow to hunt the wildlife that sometimes appear on the world map and he can also make his way through forested areas, etc. That aspect is a nice touch to an otherwise fairly standard RPG. While Breath of Fire isn't the most groundbreaking game in the world, it's still a solid RPG and a nice game to play if you're a fan of the genre.

Review added: 08/03/2022

Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus

Also known as:  N/A

Developer: WaveQuest

I'm all for educational stuff in video games…if the game doesn't suffer from including it. In the case of Bronkie…well, the gameplay suffered even before the educational stuff was tossed in. The premise of the game is cute - meteors hit a dinosaur town, causing large dust clouds, causing much of the population to develop asthma. Bronkie, the dinosaur that you control in this game, is one of those folks that found themselves with asthma. Bronkie is also a bronchiasaurus, not to be confused with a brachiosaurus…which makes sense since he lacks the body type of a brachiosaurus. But yes, bronchiasaurus…as in bronchial tubes, the air passages that lead into the lungs. Anyway, as you travel around to find parts required to build a wind machine to blow the dust problems to some other poor, unsuspecting town, you'll be forced to answer asthma trivia questions while you avoid stuff like cigarette smoke, which isn't very good for a dinosaur suffering from asthma. Supposedly, a study was done that found that of all the kids that played this game, urgent care and emergency room visits of them went down forty percent…unfortunately, the possibility of them suffering from depression went up to one hundred percent after playing this as well.

Review added: 11/15/2023