Kamen Rider
By Jeffrey Couto

What is it About?

This is a 1-2 player side scrolling beat-em up (like the Bare Knuckle Series on the Mega Drive) where you take control of Kamen Rider.

How Good is it?

Yikes! This is nowhere near as good as I thought it would be.

The best way to convey the feel of this game is to ask you to think back to all those horrible games that several U.S. based game publishers released in the early 90's, which featured cool licenced characters in sub-par games. That's what Kamen Rider on the Super Famicom is. Another way to convey the badness of this game is to say that this release is very similar in its quality to the many anime influenced games that Bandai has released over the years (actually this one was released by them too, go figure).

What bothers me the most is that I can see the potential that this game might have had, but because of the limited number of moves/attacks that your character has and the limited selection of background music that potential is never realized.

The graphics in Kamen Rider, including the small scenes that play between stages, are pretty good for the year the game was produced (1993). My only complaints in the graphics department are that:

1) There is absolutely no background parallax, which really makes the backdrops very flat and uninteresting

2) The character animations are very limited, including the ones used to animate our heroes.

The sound effects are ok, but the music (inspired by the shows) is not that great. The exception to this is the boss fight music, which if I'm not mistaking is the Kamen Rider theme (sorry folks I haven't had too much experience with the Kamen Rider shows yet)

My Opinion:

So to play or not to play this game? Needless to say that if you are a Kamen Rider fan you will be interested in trying it out at least, but if you are a casual gamer I would not waste time trying to hunt this one down.

Jeffrey Couto