Spanner-chan The Assault Engineer — Trial Impressions
May 9th, 2008
I still have no idea why this game even has porn.
Some of you may be familiar with Milktank and their strange proclivity for making awesome games with terrifying porn. Alright, so "games" might be stretching it, since "Saa, Ushi Da!" is the only one they’ve released so far. It’s still a pretty awesome kind of quasi-Megaman X clone if you can get past the random ‘hostage rescues’ which usually involve women with breasts larger than the rest of their bodies covered in… viscous fluids and often tentacles.
Ushi Da! Eina Stage 5
Spanner-chan is, so far, a pretty similar game, but with a lot of minor changes. The electro-grapple is gone and replaced by the titular Spanner’s… spanner and supers now cost you your equipped weapon. Control has been tweaked in a number of ways as well. They’ve also added some really nice dynamic zooming, although it does occasionally zoom in when it shouldn’t and enemies fire at you from offscreen, but I’m sure that’ll be fixed by the time the real release is out. There are also random vehicles laying around that you can pilot ala Metal Slug. Of course, the graphics all look a lot sharper as well. The control could still use a little work… there’s no middle ground between "slowly plod toward your target" and "rush out of control into a withering hail of gunfire," but that just makes the real fun of laying down endless coverfire yourself more important.
The gimmick here is that Spanner literally steals enemy weapons for her own use. Every enemy has some kind of rifle/shotgun/minigun/RPG launcher/etc, and by throwing your spanner at them, you pull it out of their hands (or in the case of turrets, just tear them in half) and take it for your own use. The spanner itself is also an important defensive weapon since it cuts through enemy bullets with ease, which is especially important for dealing with those jerks shooting homing rockets. You can only carry a limited number of weapons at a time (upgradeable at the shop), but it’s still fun to disarm enemies and then watch them run around in panic. Like Ushi Da!, you can also just buy weapons at the shop, though your cash is usually best saved for upgrades to your melee attacks, extensions to your life bar, etc. My favorite upgrade by far is the massively expensive 30K upgrade to your spanner that lets you pull an enemy back towards you once you ‘hook’ them with it, then flip over and spike them on the ground.
Spanner-chan Trial Stage 1 Playaround
The only thing really marring both games is, like I intimated before, the scary scary porn that is rather unfortunately just shoehorned in for no real good reason. Luckily, it’s just there to be there and is easily skipped, but if someone walks in on it, they will look at you strangely for a long time to come. It’s pretty much all tucked away as a ‘reward’ for saving ‘hostages’ hidden throughout levels, as well as at stage ends, so it’s easy to see coming in case you want to avert your eyes. Seriously though… when I think of what a Megaman X clone needs… scary HH breast porn is not it.
Only a couple stages and I think one character is playable in the trial, but I haven’t really spent any decent quality time with it so far as yet, so I could be mistaken. It does look like there’ll be quite a few more stages than Ushi Da!’s paltry 5 though. It’s a rather fun little game that I heartily endorse… so stop reading and grab the demo. Just make sure that your door is closed before you let Spanner run wild.
http://milktank.sakura.ne.jp/games/spanner/spanner_trial00.lzh
Posted in Games | 8 Comments »
I want to sit in on one of these planning meetings when the creative guys are sitting around brainstorming.