Ultraman: Towards the Future

First of all, apologies for missing a post yesterday, I was rather sick and in no condition to be writing anything, but having made a speedy recovery I'm now back and ready to continue!

So, ever since beating that SNES Empire Strikes Back game, I've been wanting to go back and beat all the games that I never beat as a child, and Ultraman: Towards the Future was one of those games.

At this point I'd tell you what Ultraman is exactly, but to be honest I'm not entirely sure.  From what I can tell Ultraman is a popular kids series in Japan which has a similar vibe to the Power Rangers which used to be popular back in my day (which itself takes scenes cut for cut from Super Sentai, another similar kids TV show in Japan)

So the whole deal with the show is that big monsters come and attack and its up to Ultraman to give them a beatdown.  The game has the exact same premise, where each stage is a different monster, which I assume is from the show, and you have to give them a thrashing.

Whats strange is that despite the fact that Ultraman never made an appearance outside of Japan, his game was available in the UK and in America.  I got my copy when one of the staff members at my old primary school sold it to my mother for about £5 and it was then passed on to me as a present.

So Ultraman is a fighting game, but a really fucking bad one.  Basically, you fight the monster, but when you empty his bar, you don't win, it just says "FINISH".  To win the fight you have to let the meter in the middle charge all the way to L4 and hit him with that when the finish sign appears.  This makes some enemy's way harder than they should be since you end up dying before your thing can charge despite having beat them 2 minutes ago.

When you run out of lives, you go all the way back to stage one, but despite that I managed to beat the game on my third try.  Unless your a fan of something like Ultraman, don't bother trying to play this one, it's a piece of shit, I just had an axe to grind from my childhood.