Deciding that I want eye cancer and to become obese at the same time, I played Jack Bros. by Atlus for the Virtual Boy. Jack Bros. is a very simple dungeon crawler for the Virtual Boy using original icons from Atlus, such as Jack Frost and Pyro Jack.

The story is very simplistic but it gets the job done. On Halloween all the faeries come out play with the small children to have fun and cause mischief. You play as a one of the Jack brothers, either Jack Frost, Pyro Jack (Jack Lantern in this game) or Jack Skelton (aka Jack the Ripper). Having so much fun playing with the children, you forgot you’re suppose to go home by the end of the day or else you will die because faeries don’t belong in the realm of humans. So off you go on your adventure to get back home with the aid of a small pixie that nags you at every single floor giving you the most obvious hints.

The game play itself is just as simple as the story. You go through many floors of a dungeon collecting keys and eventually get back to the faerie world. Each character plays pretty much same, the only difference is the sprites. So I decide to play through the game as Jack Frost, who in my opinion is the most lovable one of the three. The gameplay consists of running around collecting keys and shooting ice/fire/knives at enemies, and if you’re feeling feisty you can use a bomb too, which kills everything on the screen. The dungeons are small and narrow, so there’s not much room for you or the enemies. The floors are designed to be maze-like but can easily be solved by any grade school child; so it becomes hard to lose yourself on the map. There is also a radar that tells you where the keys are and where the exit is. There is no life bar, but rather a timer. The timer goes down every time you are damaged and once the time runs out its game over.

Overall the game play is just basic and repetitive. There’s nothing really much else to it besides the dungeon crawling aspect of the game. The monotony does break up when you reach the end of a dungeon to fight a boss, which changes things around as you now have an arena to fight in and it suddenly feels like I’m playing Smash TV. Each boss is unique in their own way and all of them are very fun fights. Even though the boss fights can be very exhilarating, everything in between gets a bit boring after mere minutes of playtime.

Nothing really much to say about the graphics in the game, besides staring at them for too long can cause eye problems. Shades of red aren’t really a beautiful sight to see, but it gets the job done, sort of. I would say besides the eyestrain, everything else about the graphics is just fine; everything is identifiable and you really can’t get confused between one sprite or the next. The music seems to remind me of every DOS game there is, even the NES and Gameboy had some catchy bits in their music library but the music in this really reminds me of the days of DOS music which can be either good or bad depending how you like it. Even though the music was a step backward in synthesis, it was for the most part adequate, I’ll say just above mediocre but that’s it.

The game is simple and fun for those who enjoy the dungeon crawling. If you like to kill thirty minutes, give the game a try; if you want to kill over thirty minutes, give the game a try – just go see optometrist afterwards.

Now something for you well rounded Atlus fans, a First Person Fighter/Slasher/Melee, Maken X for the Sega Dreamcast. Maken X is about a weapon, as the protagonist; that’s right, you’re playing as a sword that takes control of people. As a sword you can’t really talk but everyone person around you will talk to you and for you, and at some points at the game give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice like “do you want to save the world or not?” To simply describe the story, you are made to defeat an evil entity because of some virus or something. It becomes really hard to pay attention to any of the story when the cut scenes are completely horrendous to watch. The voice acting is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t help that in the cut scenes, the dolls don’t move their lips to go with their bad voices – at least half the time, they tend to lip-sync when they feel like it.

The real appeal to play this game would not be the story but rather the gameplay. The gameplay is indeed unique, as you do not use a gun at all. Instead you get to hack and slash your way through enemies in first person perspective. For someone like me who plays every FPS ever just to go around meleeing everything I see, this was indeed a game for me. The melee is simple, move around, jump and attack – nothing much to it. Of course there is variety in weapon choices, or rather people choices. Can’t switch weapons, since you are the weapon, but you can take control of different people who have different styles of fighting and abilities. Every person you can ‘brainjack’ in the game has their own unique way of fighting, traits and abilities. But, before you can go taking people’s brains, you have to defeat them, which can be very fun.
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