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: 8 Eyes

This game is like Castlevania, except much, much harder.

When the game begins, you select which country to play in first. I understand that it’s something like Megaman: play in the wrong order, and the game is much harder.

The game really looks quite a lot like Castlevania, and plays similarly, too, with one major difference: in 8 Eyes, you have a falcon with you, and some enemies can only be destroyed by the falcon. Unfortunately, you only have control over the falcon when there are two players–the second player controls the falcon. With one player, the falcon just flies left and right, and your control is limited to telling it to swoop down to attack or return to your shoulder.

The result of this lack of control is that the game is way too hard with one player, and I can’t imagine why anyone would play it just to control the falcon. Give this one a miss.