The Adventures of Bayou Billy

The Adventures of Bayou Billy is a beat-em-up, with a driving and shooting game thrown in for variety.

Bayou Billy won’t be winning any awards for its plot. Some bad guy has kidnapped your girlfriend, and you have to rescue her.

He’s even kind enough to let you know that you will be encountering obstacles on your way to his estate. What a nice guy.

The game behaves pretty much like your bog standard beat-em-up, with a button for punch and one for kick, and pressing both together doing a flying kick. You can pick up weapons that you knock out of your enemies’ hands and to use against them. The difference, though, is that Bayou Billy is hard. It’s not so bad against one enemy, but you’ll find yourself fighting against three at a time, who are not stunned when you hit them, take many hits to kill, and are fairly quick-moving as well.

Fortunately, they are also fairly stupid, and will happily walk around in circles without hitting you, if you move just a bit. They also occasionally drop food, which heals you.

Humans aren’t your only foes, though. You’ll also encounter crocodiles in the water, which are quick moving and can attack you when you’re near the water’s edge.

When I got to the right side of this screen, it didn’t scroll any further, and since I couldn’t seem to harm the crocodile, I quickly died.

The game does include, as I mentioned, a driving subgame and a shooting subgame, which can be accessed from the practice menu, and apparently appear as levels later in the game.

Neither of these subgames was anything spectacular, although the shooting game did have the benefit of being playable with or without a zapper. Nice, since the emulated zapper uses the mouse, and playing with my laptop’s touchpad was very difficult indeed.

The Adventures of Bayou Billy was called Mad City in Japan, and was considerably easier.

My feeling from playing a few minutes is that the enemies died in about a third as many hits in Mad City. Furthermore, the screen that wouldn’t go anywhere in Bayou Billy and had only crocodiles had divers in Mad City, and continued once I defeated them.

No crocodiles in Mad City. Perhaps I didn’t step on a trigger or something while playing Bayou Billy, which caused the divers not to appear. Maybe.

Anyway, I think that Mad City is probably better than Bayou Billy, although I only played either one for a few minutes. My final opinion is that Mad City is worth playing, but I’d avoid Bayou Billy, since its difficulty is just not fun.

First Impressions: Flying Warriors

Yeah, it’s out of order. I hit ‘random game I haven’t played’ and I got this:

Flying Warriors. It sounds like some kind of shooter maybe. Airplane game. That’s cool, I liked 1943. So, what do I get? Castlevania if it sucked and had a boring training sequence. But before training, some important wisdom:

Okay, on to the training. Since the designers went to all the trouble of putting in training, this game must have some complex controls, or something. Let’s see:

Yes, that’s right. Toward automatically blocks at the right level, and B automatically punches at the right level. You get to practice these complex manoeuvres several times before you grasp them fully.

Yes! I am a master! I can now go out and make the world a better place! But, first, a practice match against sensei. Well, sure. I’m a master now. Piece of cake.

So we fight and… he beats me down. Badly.

So it’s back to training. Never mind that training couldn’t possibly help me, and that a monkey could manage these controls. So, we train again, he declares me a master again, we fight again, I lose again. Repeat. Repeat…

Finally, I win. So we get a scene change.

So, the game begins with an exciting… empty screen! I have to move off it to an entirely different scene to get to the actual game. What was the point? Why waste my time putting this scene in if there’s nothing here? The next scene is some kind of mountain area, which kind of matches with the description, but that does not explain what the point of this last scene was.

So, after that painfully long training and practice fight, we expect challenge, yes? But the enemies all die in one hit! The hardest part is managing the movement controls, since it seems to be impossible to make Rick (our hero) jump the way you want him to. After a couple of screens full of these zombie-like wimps, we enter a cave, filled with more of the same, as well as the far more dangerous bottomless pits.

In fact, these pits are so much more dangerous, that they even kill the enemies, who just jump off like lemmings. But, remember how I said that jumping correctly was the hardest part?

Yes, I too jump off like a lemming. The game tells me that Rick doesn’t let this stop him. Fortunately, it does stop me.

Verdict: You can’t skip the long intro, you have to go through boring training and practice fights, only to get to a game that acts like a bad rip off of Castlevania. Better to leave this one alone.