Buster Brothers

Remember Pang, the highly cute, highly playable arcade coin-op from 1990? Well, this here's a dead-on conversion with a spiffy new name. (You may have already seen the Super NES version, released by Capcom.)

Whatsat? You never played Pang? Well, it's simple really. You're an adventuresome sort armed with a harpoon gun, and you're traveling around the world (by yourself in one-player mode or with a friend in two-player simultaneous mode), stopping in 17 different locations to pop a bunch of bouncing balloons. There are three stages in each location, making 51 stages in all. You can start from any of the first ten locations, which is good, since there are no passwords and only two continues.

In each stage, there are a number of balloons bouncing around the screen (which is generously laden with ladders and platforms). Your goal is to shoot the balloons with your harpoon weapon before time runs out. When a balloon is hit, it breaks into two smaller balloons, which in turn split into even smaller balloons that are destroyed when shot. The smaller balloons bounce much lower on the screen, which makes your life even tougher. If you're touched by a balloon, you lose a life.

Powerful weapons are available during each stage to make the balloon-popping easier, such as the double harpoon (which allows you to shoot two harpoons instead of just one) and the gun (which fires faster than any other weapon, but can't break through certain platforms that the harpoons can). To make things even more interesting, there are nasty creatures buzzing around the screen that can disable your weapon for a few moments if you're hit by them. (You can destroy the creatures with a few weapon shots.)

The graphics are very nicely drawn, and I'd bet the left side of my brain that they look exactly like the coin-op. I would have liked to see animated background scenes instead of the still pictures that are used, though. The sound effects are good (the balloons give off a particularly satisfying pop), but the music is very, very average.

Which brings me to the only fault I can find with Buster Bros.: Why the heck is it on CD-ROM? Take away the so-so music and the nonanimated reward screens after each level, and you've got a game that could easily fit on a TurboChip. Capcom was able to cram the game onto a cartridge while retaining all of the playability; why couldn't Turbo Technologies do the same? Releasing the game as a CD-ROM just prevents Turbo owners without CD-ROMs, and TurboExpress owners, from sharing in the fun. (At least it also prevents those idiotic weasels with cartridge copiers from pirating the game.)

Buster Bros. is a very enjoyable shooting game with a little platform-game and puzzle-game action mixed in. It's just too bad that the majority of TurboGrafx-16 owners won't get to find out.