Here begins the story from a time and a world not our own ... A sorceress used her evil powers to fulfill her conquest to rule the world. "Go my dead slaves to trample and rule the world which will belong to us!" You are the only one who can crush her wretched plans! Each stage is controlled by a boss who portrays a sign of the zodiac. Going through a maze, you have to find and destroy the boss before your time runs out. Save the world!
Reviews View More
Actually fairly novel and cathartic - and kinda uncomfortable too? something about games where you control inanimate objects in traditionally human-led settings makes me feel uneasy. Reminds me of Devilish on Genesis with its whole 'prince and princess turn into breakout paddles' gag.
But it burns all its goodwill by mixing like 3-4 terrible maze levels into its otherwise sober pot of linear bouts. Then it burns it AGAIN by giving you a 15-fight boss rush that takes up nearly HALF of the game's runtime and gives you NO opportunity to get more powerups between them. It ain't easy to die in Somer Assault, but if you somehow do (like I did), you're in for excruciating battles that amount to spamming safe spots or milling your lives in a damage rush.
Soundtrack kinda slaps at least, I love the PCE soundchip but lament how few games on the platform use it well. The wave modulation has very YM-like qualities in the right hands, and I love the glassy, astral rhythms pulled off here.
But it burns all its goodwill by mixing like 3-4 terrible maze levels into its otherwise sober pot of linear bouts. Then it burns it AGAIN by giving you a 15-fight boss rush that takes up nearly HALF of the game's runtime and gives you NO opportunity to get more powerups between them. It ain't easy to die in Somer Assault, but if you somehow do (like I did), you're in for excruciating battles that amount to spamming safe spots or milling your lives in a damage rush.
Soundtrack kinda slaps at least, I love the PCE soundchip but lament how few games on the platform use it well. The wave modulation has very YM-like qualities in the right hands, and I love the glassy, astral rhythms pulled off here.
What your ZODIAC SIGN says about YOU 😱
aries: you should probably play a better game
taurus: you should probably play a better game
gemini: you should probably play a better game
cancer: you should probably play a better game
leo: you should probably play a better game
virgo: you should probably play a better game
libra: you should probably play a better game
scorpio: you should probably play a better game
sagittarius: you should probably play a better game
capricorn: you should probably play a better game
aquarius: you should probably play a better game
pisces: you should probably play a better game
aries: you should probably play a better game
taurus: you should probably play a better game
gemini: you should probably play a better game
cancer: you should probably play a better game
leo: you should probably play a better game
virgo: you should probably play a better game
libra: you should probably play a better game
scorpio: you should probably play a better game
sagittarius: you should probably play a better game
capricorn: you should probably play a better game
aquarius: you should probably play a better game
pisces: you should probably play a better game
Approximately five months ago I played Gate of Thunder (real fuckin' good game) and successfully gaslit at least 17 people into thinking I was gonna start exploring the Turbografix/PC Engine library, and proceeded to put more effort into the Atari Jaguar instead. Y'all should've seen your faces, I got you so bad! Calculated and just as planned.
It took BL game club and my pathetic want of needing to be a part of something to play another PCE game. One about playing as a toy made by an American naval engineer from my home state apparently, that was originally priced at one whole didgeridoo, I think that's like five-hundred didgeridoos these days adjusted for inflation. This particular Slinky toy was born from a Louie egg straight outta Bomberman dropped by...Christian God? At least that's the story for Mesopotamia, the Japanese release of Somer Assault. Did you get the pun? Hee hee ho. In Somer Assault the intro is just a boring villainous monologue from the sorceress as the Slinky inexplicably appears and goes "I WILL STOP YOU FOUL VILLAIN!!!" in an overly heroic voice as I like to imagine.
Afterwards you proceed to clumsily bumble your way through the Amiga-ass stages and hold down the turbo button to blast bosses in the noggin constantly after you find safe spots, or simply tank through everything with your humongous lifebar that you gained from the generous drop rates of the power ups from the eternally respawning enemies. I actually almost timed out in the first stage of Mesopotamia when I first booted it up, but Somer Assault makes things easier, which to me is almost unheard of. I'm so used to it being the other way around! I completely blame Konami for making their games harder overseas on that one, I'm still suffering from the fallout of Bayou Billy on that shit.
I think it's neat! Different for sure! Am I coming back to it? Eh...I think it's just kinda hee ho-hum. Go play Gate of Thunder instead. I'm gonna go watch Ace Ventura When Nature Calls for the 500th time.
It took BL game club and my pathetic want of needing to be a part of something to play another PCE game. One about playing as a toy made by an American naval engineer from my home state apparently, that was originally priced at one whole didgeridoo, I think that's like five-hundred didgeridoos these days adjusted for inflation. This particular Slinky toy was born from a Louie egg straight outta Bomberman dropped by...Christian God? At least that's the story for Mesopotamia, the Japanese release of Somer Assault. Did you get the pun? Hee hee ho. In Somer Assault the intro is just a boring villainous monologue from the sorceress as the Slinky inexplicably appears and goes "I WILL STOP YOU FOUL VILLAIN!!!" in an overly heroic voice as I like to imagine.
Afterwards you proceed to clumsily bumble your way through the Amiga-ass stages and hold down the turbo button to blast bosses in the noggin constantly after you find safe spots, or simply tank through everything with your humongous lifebar that you gained from the generous drop rates of the power ups from the eternally respawning enemies. I actually almost timed out in the first stage of Mesopotamia when I first booted it up, but Somer Assault makes things easier, which to me is almost unheard of. I'm so used to it being the other way around! I completely blame Konami for making their games harder overseas on that one, I'm still suffering from the fallout of Bayou Billy on that shit.
I think it's neat! Different for sure! Am I coming back to it? Eh...I think it's just kinda hee ho-hum. Go play Gate of Thunder instead. I'm gonna go watch Ace Ventura When Nature Calls for the 500th time.
Somer Assault really is a story of what could have been. The game's core concepts, the idea of a silly slinky-cum-VVVVVV based puzzle platformer with basically this art style and basically this gameplay forms neatly in my head. It's so easy to imagine something just like this coming out in the summer of arcade on Xbox 360 and be the thing all the cool kids are playing for a week or so. The recipe for Somer to be at least a serviceable little game is all there, and for moments, it works.
When you're in a tight, interesting space with different enemies and only having the ability to shoot perpendicularly to the main body of your slinky, that's cool. Working out what position your body will be in when over there and running that stuff on the fly can be engaging.
Shame that those scenarios basically don't exist. I made it up. The level design in this game is universally awful. It's very 90s Euro (derogatory), which is to say interminably labyrinthine and large whilst having a background that scrolls too much versus the plane making it hard to keep your bearings. Theres huge sections of just straight up open plains with 3 of the same enemy harmlessly going overhead. Sections where you have to just have to jump or something without a threat. And the end result is so easy, at least in it's US version, to be remarkably boring. Dying is hard and getting a game over seems basically impossible if you're legitimately trying to beat the game. You get way too much health and the time controls are way too lenient.
The bosses fare little better but I can at least see how that would be more of a challenge to get right. Their attack patterns are just really simple and every fight seems to have straight up safespots.
They had something here, but the execution is just poor. Imagine if Kuru Kuru Kururin only consisted of hallways as wide as your stick, or VVVVVV let you take like 3 hits per screen. That's Somer Assault.
When you're in a tight, interesting space with different enemies and only having the ability to shoot perpendicularly to the main body of your slinky, that's cool. Working out what position your body will be in when over there and running that stuff on the fly can be engaging.
Shame that those scenarios basically don't exist. I made it up. The level design in this game is universally awful. It's very 90s Euro (derogatory), which is to say interminably labyrinthine and large whilst having a background that scrolls too much versus the plane making it hard to keep your bearings. Theres huge sections of just straight up open plains with 3 of the same enemy harmlessly going overhead. Sections where you have to just have to jump or something without a threat. And the end result is so easy, at least in it's US version, to be remarkably boring. Dying is hard and getting a game over seems basically impossible if you're legitimately trying to beat the game. You get way too much health and the time controls are way too lenient.
The bosses fare little better but I can at least see how that would be more of a challenge to get right. Their attack patterns are just really simple and every fight seems to have straight up safespots.
They had something here, but the execution is just poor. Imagine if Kuru Kuru Kururin only consisted of hallways as wide as your stick, or VVVVVV let you take like 3 hits per screen. That's Somer Assault.
‘Go, my dear slaves; trample and ruin the world, then it will belong to us!’
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 24 – Jan. 30, 2023).
At the beginning of the 1990s, Atlus was still going through a period of experimentalism, before focusing on their most successful franchises. Among these titles, there is Somer Assault, a strange platformer concept: the player controls a Slinky, which can fire projectiles, depending on its position – stretched or retracted. This surprising gameplay is supported by a esoteric monster design that prefigures Kazuma Kaneko's work on Shin Megami Tensei (1992) and the subsequent games of the series. Somer Assault thus emerges as a somewhat arcane title, whose genesis or ambitions are difficult to trace, but has a unique status in the PC-Engine catalogue.
The player goes on a crusade against the Sorceress, who has released twelve monsters to conquer the world, each representing one of the zodiac signs. Each level consists of a maze and ends with a boss fight. While Somer Assault's gameplay is interesting, it is still caught between two conflicting philosophies. On the one hand, the title tries to unfold as a puzzle game, with an emphasis on deliberate movement to navigate obstacles; on the other, it seeks to create hurdles by adding enemies for the Splinky to destroy with its projectiles. Torn between these two approaches, the level design never manages to create anything cohesive. The levels are simply labyrinthine and barely feature any interesting ideas involving the Splinky's motion spectrum – perhaps because it would be too difficult given the timer, which in fact should not exist –, and the enemies never constitute a substantial threat, as the player always prevails thanks to the generous power-ups placed in their path. Bosses are also disappointing, as Angel_Arle pointed out, either by being slayable in a mindless rush or because the Splinky's gameplay is not designed to deal with them at all – this is particularly the case with Aquarius, who is moving far too quickly.
The result is a game that has no idea where it is headed. Every good idea is discarded before it is properly implemented, causing monotony to set in quickly. The Pisces level is interesting in that it forces the player to choose the right route to jump from platform to platform, but the difficulty is non-existent: the puzzle has no real reason to exist. More often, the player moves along long linear stretches while shooting, until finding an opening in a wall. It is an empty experience. As if to illustrate the inability to consider the game in more ambitious grounds, the confrontation against the Sorceress is preceded by a boss gauntlet. The issue with this sequence is that it is too cheap an expedient to extend the game's playtime and offers no interesting variation for any boss. Instead of having rooms with different block layouts, which can alter what strategy to use, the gauntlet takes place in empty spaces, hampering the ability to have interesting shooting angles. Perhaps it is the result of my own ineptitude, but the fight against the Sorceress was mostly a matter of doing as much damage as possible by mashing as fast as I could, before my lives – accumulated over the previous twelve levels – reached zero.
Somer Assault is perhaps more interesting in what it foreshadows, at least visually. The various monsters have a very delightful demonic quality to them, and the title seems to be sincere about its use of Babylonian mythology: the choice to write their names in the credits in Boustrophedon is amusing, if a little rogue. The game is an enjoyable curiosity, but fails to rise above that modest status.
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 24 – Jan. 30, 2023).
At the beginning of the 1990s, Atlus was still going through a period of experimentalism, before focusing on their most successful franchises. Among these titles, there is Somer Assault, a strange platformer concept: the player controls a Slinky, which can fire projectiles, depending on its position – stretched or retracted. This surprising gameplay is supported by a esoteric monster design that prefigures Kazuma Kaneko's work on Shin Megami Tensei (1992) and the subsequent games of the series. Somer Assault thus emerges as a somewhat arcane title, whose genesis or ambitions are difficult to trace, but has a unique status in the PC-Engine catalogue.
The player goes on a crusade against the Sorceress, who has released twelve monsters to conquer the world, each representing one of the zodiac signs. Each level consists of a maze and ends with a boss fight. While Somer Assault's gameplay is interesting, it is still caught between two conflicting philosophies. On the one hand, the title tries to unfold as a puzzle game, with an emphasis on deliberate movement to navigate obstacles; on the other, it seeks to create hurdles by adding enemies for the Splinky to destroy with its projectiles. Torn between these two approaches, the level design never manages to create anything cohesive. The levels are simply labyrinthine and barely feature any interesting ideas involving the Splinky's motion spectrum – perhaps because it would be too difficult given the timer, which in fact should not exist –, and the enemies never constitute a substantial threat, as the player always prevails thanks to the generous power-ups placed in their path. Bosses are also disappointing, as Angel_Arle pointed out, either by being slayable in a mindless rush or because the Splinky's gameplay is not designed to deal with them at all – this is particularly the case with Aquarius, who is moving far too quickly.
The result is a game that has no idea where it is headed. Every good idea is discarded before it is properly implemented, causing monotony to set in quickly. The Pisces level is interesting in that it forces the player to choose the right route to jump from platform to platform, but the difficulty is non-existent: the puzzle has no real reason to exist. More often, the player moves along long linear stretches while shooting, until finding an opening in a wall. It is an empty experience. As if to illustrate the inability to consider the game in more ambitious grounds, the confrontation against the Sorceress is preceded by a boss gauntlet. The issue with this sequence is that it is too cheap an expedient to extend the game's playtime and offers no interesting variation for any boss. Instead of having rooms with different block layouts, which can alter what strategy to use, the gauntlet takes place in empty spaces, hampering the ability to have interesting shooting angles. Perhaps it is the result of my own ineptitude, but the fight against the Sorceress was mostly a matter of doing as much damage as possible by mashing as fast as I could, before my lives – accumulated over the previous twelve levels – reached zero.
Somer Assault is perhaps more interesting in what it foreshadows, at least visually. The various monsters have a very delightful demonic quality to them, and the title seems to be sincere about its use of Babylonian mythology: the choice to write their names in the credits in Boustrophedon is amusing, if a little rogue. The game is an enjoyable curiosity, but fails to rise above that modest status.
So here's an oddity on the PC Engine. A game surprisingly developed by Atlus of all companies. This is one of those games that just makes you go wtf with the premise. You play as this weird slinky thing coming with some odd controls and just an odd premise. Thankfully it's fun too.
Your weird slinky thing can move like a slinky and depending where it's standing, it can shoot in multiple directions. You can also jump to attach to other walls but your jump isn't too high. You can also get some powerups from enemies like more health, more bullets, going faster or even reversing your controls but it's not too annoying but come on game why have this?
The stages can be a little confusing on your first run but none of the levels can lead to frustration at least not for me. You also get a lot of time so don't worry about ever getting a time over. There's some good creativity here though not every level is well made as some feel too easy and short. I would argue it's because of the powerups but the game loves to shower you with them.
The bosses are sadly the lowpoint of the game because they are quite easy most of the time and it just leads me to just tanking hits and just winning that way. I just don't think the controls work the best for this kind of thing to just not do that. The last few bosses though it's best to just sit in a specific spot and spam your shots. Though if you didn't hate them the first time, the last stage will. It's a boss rush and it hurts the game so much. The game was already pretty decent length and could have just had the final boss be the final stage as it is three forms but nooo we have to fight all 12 bosses again. You will hate mashing the fire button by the end of it.
The Japanese version also seems to be harder. I noticed the US version gave you more time and maybe it's less generous with power-ups? I can't really say because this is sadly not documented anywhere at least from a quick search. The plot is also different. The Japanese one has god go to a Egg Tree with an egg falling and then the slinky thing comes out...what? The US one is just a generic plot sorceress is wanting to take over the world plot and suddenly talking slinky thing wants to stop her.
The game looks good enough for what it is but nothing is going to amaze you. The bosses are good sizes though but all share the same color palette which is intentional but doesn't make it less bland looking. At least the framerate is good and there isn't really any graphical problems. I also like the weird color effect for the slinky when the controls are reversed. The music however is not very good. I really don't like the pitches of the audio personally. Though this is highly subjective, I just don't like some PC Engine OSTs that have sound like this.
This game is fun and good but it's such a shame the last part of the game hurts the replayability so much. There is still more good here then bad and again I enjoy the interesting concept but it's nothing outstanding as a game. I still did enjoy the game but it is a hard game to recommend. It's worth at least a try to see if you'll enjoy it.
Your weird slinky thing can move like a slinky and depending where it's standing, it can shoot in multiple directions. You can also jump to attach to other walls but your jump isn't too high. You can also get some powerups from enemies like more health, more bullets, going faster or even reversing your controls but it's not too annoying but come on game why have this?
The stages can be a little confusing on your first run but none of the levels can lead to frustration at least not for me. You also get a lot of time so don't worry about ever getting a time over. There's some good creativity here though not every level is well made as some feel too easy and short. I would argue it's because of the powerups but the game loves to shower you with them.
The bosses are sadly the lowpoint of the game because they are quite easy most of the time and it just leads me to just tanking hits and just winning that way. I just don't think the controls work the best for this kind of thing to just not do that. The last few bosses though it's best to just sit in a specific spot and spam your shots. Though if you didn't hate them the first time, the last stage will. It's a boss rush and it hurts the game so much. The game was already pretty decent length and could have just had the final boss be the final stage as it is three forms but nooo we have to fight all 12 bosses again. You will hate mashing the fire button by the end of it.
The Japanese version also seems to be harder. I noticed the US version gave you more time and maybe it's less generous with power-ups? I can't really say because this is sadly not documented anywhere at least from a quick search. The plot is also different. The Japanese one has god go to a Egg Tree with an egg falling and then the slinky thing comes out...what? The US one is just a generic plot sorceress is wanting to take over the world plot and suddenly talking slinky thing wants to stop her.
The game looks good enough for what it is but nothing is going to amaze you. The bosses are good sizes though but all share the same color palette which is intentional but doesn't make it less bland looking. At least the framerate is good and there isn't really any graphical problems. I also like the weird color effect for the slinky when the controls are reversed. The music however is not very good. I really don't like the pitches of the audio personally. Though this is highly subjective, I just don't like some PC Engine OSTs that have sound like this.
This game is fun and good but it's such a shame the last part of the game hurts the replayability so much. There is still more good here then bad and again I enjoy the interesting concept but it's nothing outstanding as a game. I still did enjoy the game but it is a hard game to recommend. It's worth at least a try to see if you'll enjoy it.