Night Slashers - Innovations in Lore - MCIHAD
4Data East does it again with a bananas-town beat em up featuring a mish-mash of Universal monster tropes thrown into a melee against robots and Chinese Phoenix-masters. Naturally, this serves as a fitting backdrop for a discussion of Rip Torn’s gradual descent into madness. On a note related to the game, I really like the perpetually nonchalant varsity jacket-wearing brigands who pose like tough guys in the forest deep right up until the heroes arrive, at which point they turn into werewolves and go apeshit. It’s after the apocalypse, but that’s no reason not to show your school spirit! And since their jacket is destroyed in their suicidal charge, you know this is the one and only chance to show off they’ve been waiting for! Bereft of any of the life events once anticipated by earnest youths in the pre-war world, they make a sort of baptism out of their Letter-rending suicide attack. Gotta admire their resilience, them finding a fitting career path after the end of the world! I admire that.
All in all, this is a pretty fine game, but it sure does elicit the most obscure references per minute of any LP of ours that I can recall. I sure can’t imagine what cross-section of humanity will be in the market for Let’s Plays, allusions to George Carlin, The Point, AND freaking Freddy Got Fingered. What has become of us?! (Answer: we’re hacks.)
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Night Slashers (ナイトスラッシャーズ?) is a 1993 beat'em up arcade game developed and published by Data East.
Night Slashers is similar to Capcom's Final Fight series, which is an archetypal side scrolling beat'em-up game. One, two or three players/characters move from left to right through each level (most of which are split into three or more scenes), fighting with the enemy characters who appear, until they reach a confrontation with a stronger boss character at the end of the level. Once that boss is beaten, the players automatically move on to the next stage. Enemies appear from both sides of the screen and from out of doorways or entrances set into the background, and the player(s) must defeat all of them to progress. If the players try to simply travel through the levels without fighting, the screen will stop scrolling until all current enemies have been defeated, before allowing the players to continue progress. Enemies may move outside the confines of the screen, but players may not. There is a time limit to each stage.
Unlike Final Fight, Night Slashers features three characters with larger move sets (including "smart bomb" or "screen zapper" type moves) and a horror theme. During the course of the game, players fight through hordes of attacking zombies and mutants, as well as other enemies such as werewolves and elementals. Bosses also include stereotypical monsters such as a mummy, a golem, a mad scientist, and lookalikes of Count Dracula, Death the Grim Reaper and Frankenstein's monster. Players fight these enemies and bosses to stop the evil plans of King Zarutz from turning our planet into a world wide kingdom for the dead. What separates this game from other beat'em ups is that the enemies names are never listed on their health bars when fighting them.
In the Japanese version, the blood and gore is uncensored (red blood instead of green, but in the overseas version, there is an option to change blood color and violence level). At the end of a melee attack, Christopher holds out a cross instead of a blue crystal ball. The "Go" arrow flips over to read "To Hell!" in blood. There are extra pictures and dialogue in the cutscenes.