 Since I looked at Stone Protectors the other day, which was a Super Nintendo game based on a line of toys based on troll dolls, let's keep going with the ridiculous and the weird. Here's the Wild West Cowboys of Moemesa. Now, one of my favorite things about growing up when I did is that it gives me an excuse to explain to people that weren't around then that stuff like the Wild West Cowboys of Moemesa really did exist and that the cow in Cowboys was an acronym that stood for Code of the West, and that this was an animated TV series that ran for 26 episodes and featured character names like Sheriff Terrible and the Cowl Lurado Kid, and that Dallas Cowboys Quarterback, Dak Prescott was named after Dakota Duke, one of the main characters on the show, and that Dak also has a tattoo of the character on his throwing arm? No, really, it's all true, and get a load of this premise. In the late 19th century, a comet hits the western United States, or no, I'm sorry, a cow-met, and it cow-metized everything in the area, turning regular old cows into Ninja Turtle-like anthropomorphic cows, emphasis on Ninja Turtle-like because this TV show was actually created by comic book writer, artist, and toy designer, Ryan Brown, known for his work on the Ninja Turtles comics. And of course, I should mention, considering the time period, the Cowboys of Mumesa decide to fight for justice in Ninja Turtle fashion, only in the Wild West, and they learn how to talk, fire guns, and dress the part, and all that. While the title and the story seem completely ridiculous, this show had its share of fans, to the point that Konami was tapped to make an arcade game in 1992. And as you can see, this game is very much in the same vein as another Konami arcade title, Sunset Riders, which was released the year previous. It's got the same gameplay structure with four different characters to choose from, where you fire projectiles with either a pistol or a shotgun depending on who you choose, and you usually have two different parallel planes that enemies spawn from that you can jump to. This game rolled out with three different arcade cabinets, one with two players, another with three, and another with four, so yeah, this game is up to four-player co-op. There's some differences worth pointing out between Sunset Riders and Cowboys of Mumesa, for one thing, this game is a bit more forgiving. One token gives you two lives, each with a health bar, to get through six levels, so none of this one hit death crap here. You can take three hits with each life, which makes it pretty easy to progress through this one. There's also some extra moves you can do, like a bullet charge, and you can headbutt stuff with your horns. In addition, you can choose which order you want to complete the levels after you finish the first one, and the settings are a bit on the cartoony side, which duh, that's the source material. But here we've got ghosts and stuff, which eventually leads to a boss showdown against the bovine version of Slimer. In another level, you get to swim up a waterfall while dodging trash and skulls. There's this part where you've got an eagle flying you around some railroad tracks, making this more like a horizontal shoot-em-up. You're jumping around on minecarts before careening off a cliff. It's good cartoony fun. In fact, the presentation and gameplay make this seem less like Sunset Riders and more like another Konami title that came a few years later, Bucky O'Hare. What really stands out about this game are the boss fights. Here we've got this giant snake, and man, I just love this kind of layered sprite animation. Then there's this spider cow? What the hell? Then we get even weirder with this cow wearing a cheetah print scarf that's floating around in a giant balloon made of his own face. Only it looks like a cow version of Shrek. Right after that you fight a cow scorpion, accompanied by a giant freaking cow lapster crab thing or whatever it is. It's a damn good time. If there's any flaws to point out, it's that the sound design gets kind of annoying after a while. You're constantly hearing bad guys mooing in despair as they get shot and destroyed, so you're left with a cacophony of unintelligible crap coming out your ears. Now, it makes sense to me why the game was designed this way, because it's just how a cabinet stood out and got recognized, even from across a noisy arcade. So if you heard this sound, you knew Cowboys of Mumesa was somewhere around. But these days, playing this one via emulation, it just gets kind of annoying. But otherwise, yeah, this game is tremendous fun, a great encapsulation of early 90s Konami arcade games that feels like a follow-up to games past like Sunset Riders, while also feeling like a precursor of games to come, like Bucky O'Hare. What I really dig about Cowboys of Mumesa in general is that most of the levels are short and set a really fast pace. In my opinion, pacing is really important in games like this, setting a level of intensity, while not overstaying its welcome. Wild West Cowboys of Mumesa was never released for home consoles anywhere, so this is another game you gotta play any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.