Trio the Punch - Never Forget Me...

Released: 1989
Published by: Data East
Genre: Beat-em-up
Platform: Arcade, ported to PS2

It's kuso-ge time! Even among crap games, Trio the Punch is pretty darn special. Purposefully nonsensical, Trio the Punch was the third in a series of games by the same director featuring ridiculous characters and nonexistant plots. The stars of the other two games in the series, Karnov and Chelnov, even make an appearance in this game as bosses. Critics and serious game fans seemed to universally despise this game upon its release, but we know better, don't we?

The "trio" in the name presumably comes from the fact that the player is given a choice of three main characters to play as. I don't recall names ever being given for these characters, so for lack of better ones I've creatively decided to call them "Ninja Guy", "Sword Guy", and "Punch Guy". While Ninja Guy has the useful ability of being able to turn into a tree and not move for a little while after being hit, and Sword Guy has the best range for his attacks and also the power of looking like Conan the Barbarian, I decided to play as Punch Guy because he looks like a pretty cool dude and also he has sweet Wolverine claws as an upgraded weapon. This would later turn out to be a horrible choice, little did I know!

Wait no Weebles wobble but they DON'T fall down ugh this is all wrong :(

Trio the Punch features a whopping 35 levels and zero plot. Between levels you're occasionally given a message to introduce the next stage or appraise your performance in the last one, my favourites being "the moon is your friend" and "you are the best in the world." They started to get sassy as I progressed in the game, telling me "that was okay" when I beat a particularly tough stage. There's no particular rhyme or reason to the order of the stages or the bosses in Trio the Punch; one moment you'll be in a graveyard, the next in a desert, the next in a sewer. One of my favourites was the circus stage, featuring a boss that looked suspiciously like Col. Sanders. Well, technically the boss was the evil chicken that burst out of Col. Sanders Alien-style, but you get the idea. Another highlight is very near the beginning of the game, in which you fight a pink sheep. Whether you win or lose, the words "CURSE YOU" appear at the top of the screen and you'll spend the next level as a sheep yourself. Not much of a curse considering the sheep is much easier to play as than any of the real characters.

Michelangelo's Dying Slave is really delighted that you have so many continues. Just look at that happy smile!

At the end of every level you beat, an old kung fu master gives you a roulette wheel to spin that awards (or punishes) you with whatever you land on. Sometimes it's an upgraded weapon or a new special move, and sometimes it's a downgrade or even just a chance to switch characters. Levels are so short that the whole thing is pretty meaningless, though I did find that I landed on good things more often than not. Unfortunately for Punch Guy, his best weapon is a really really powerful punch that sends you sliding across the screen to hit multiple enemies. If this sounds great, you probably haven't taken into account that many stages of Trio the Punch feature multiple levels of platforms and this punch is likely to send you flying off of them and right into an enemy below! It's just another fantastic element of this ridiculous kuso-ge.

Trio the Punch really is a great game for fans of the weird. It requires zero attention span, but a lot of patience--it should be mentioned that the collision detection in this game is utterly wonky; you'll often hit when it looks like you should miss and vice-versa, and hitting the top of an enemy or projectile won't hurt you, but send you bouncing away until you're on solid ground again. For all the ridiculous fun this game has to offer, it gets 4.5/5 cursed sheep on the GTPU weird-o-meter.

Pu-Li-Ru-La

Released: 1991
Published by: Taito
Genre: Beat-'em-up
Platforms: Arcade, ported to FM Towns Marty, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PS2

[Note: Sorry for the late update. It was a holiday weekend up here in the frozen tundras.] Well, looks like it's the second week in a row of Taito-developed games! But they do deserve to be in the spotlight, as this week's game Pu-Li-Ru-La is a short but sweet classic weird game. What starts out as a seemingly saccharine fairy tale story turns into a surreal mess (though still admittedly saccharine) in which the two heroes Zac and Mel fight robots, clowns, and angry bamboo shoots to save their homeland of Radishland.

The basic premise behind the game is that each town in Radishland has a key that controls the flow of time, and these keys have been stolen by an evil mastermind, subsequently stopping time. For some reason all sorts of bizarre baddies are roaming around in the frozen towns, and when you kill them they turn into ADORABLE little fuzzy animals that you can, uh, run into to collect points. The combat is pretty simple, Zac and Mel have only one attack (club dudes over the head with a Magic Stick) and can use up to three magic spells per life, which are randomly selected and usually pretty awesome—at one point Mel used a spell that one-hit KO'ed the stage boss and moved us right along to the next level.

If I could have only posted one screenshot to sum up the magic of Pu-Li-Ru-La, this would be it.

While it might sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill sidescrolling beat-'em-up so far, the fun of the game starts in around level three when the world takes a sharp twist for the strange and surreal. Levels are littered with photos of real people blocking the screen or interacting with the characters (for example, a room in which a sideways face on the wall licks your heroes with a giant cartoon tongue). Demonic mosaics replace the storybook towns of the beginning of the game. The game explains in broken English that Radishland is being twisted by a megalomaniac's dreams, and while it's allegedly referring to the final boss, we can probably safely assume it applies to the game designers themselves. It's amazingly fun wondering what sort of monstrosity the next level will hold.

Wait, wait, wait... I don't think this is quite what I signed up for when I started playing this game.

Pu-Li-Ru-La's certainly a bit of an anomaly in the gaming world. It seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been targeted at a pretty young audience, judging from the pastel colours, cutesy characters, and difficulty level—it only takes a handful of credits to beat. And yet, there's something so off about it. It was obviously a pretty successful venture for Taito, as it was ported to four different consoles (!) between 1991 and 1997. It's extremely short, taking probably less than fifteen minutes to beat, but there's just so much to take in that you'll probably find yourself coming back to it. It's a shining example of the really weird arcade games that were coming out in the '90s, perhaps because it's something pretty much anyone with a taste for the offbeat can pick up and enjoy.

Pu-Li-Ru-La gets 4.5/5 nightmare fantasy worlds on the GTPU weird-o-meter. Give it a try, I promise you won't be disappointed. Now if only Taito would get around to making a sequel...