 Let's keep it up with these arcade game reviews, here's another game made by Konami that once again never received any official home port and has since been kinda sort of forgotten. It's Monster Mallers, and the gameplay structure here is what makes this one worth checking out. It's a one-on-one fighting game, only it's a boss gauntlet. You have three playable characters to choose from to fight six different bosses, defeat those six, and unlock four more boss fights interspersed with some typical beat'em-up action like spiking these giant missiles into the ground. You gotta love that. You can choose which monster you want to fight first by selecting them on this map here, but after that the order is randomized. The story here is pretty amusing, a team of evil villains unleash all these hideous monsters in an attempt to take over the earth I guess, and it's up to Kotetsu and an eagle to stop them before you have to fight the villains themselves in powered up mechsuits. As you can see the game really looks great, everything is done with a certain art style and color palette that's reminiscent of what you might see as a Saturday morning cartoon in the 90s. The monsters though are what really steal the show. You've got this badass looking dragon, a centaur, this bizarre plant thing I guess, this weird underwater monster with gills for eyes, and whatever this is supposed to be. You may recognize some of these bosses from other Konami games like Gradius and Salamander, so that's pretty cool. The settings and backgrounds are also really well done, apparently I'm fighting this thing inside of another giant thing? The fighting mechanics here are exactly what you'd expect, nothing fancy here, just typical street fighter style stuff, roll the joystick or d-pad toward or away your opponent and hit a button for a light, medium or hard attack to do some kind of special move. Kotetsu is your typical Ryu type character who's the most balanced of the three, and is the quickest, but in my opinion the most fun character is Eagle just because he suplexes everything. I mean this is like the 90s Konami version of Brock Lesnar, it's freaking great. I will say this game does offer a little bit of nuance here and there, for instance when using a projectile with Kotetsu or Ann, you can change the angle it travels depending on if you select light, medium or hard as your attack, with hard providing the steepest angle upward. The big selling point this game offers isn't just the boss gauntlet structure, it's that it's two player co-op. Yes, that's right, you can take on all these different monsters, two on one, now that is really cool and something different, and there's no silly battle toads nonsense here where you can do damage to each other on accident, you both just kick the crap out of each boss, it is really fun, and there's double team moves here as well. Yeah, they're really tough to pull off, but it's still doable. Even better is that this game nails it with the sound design here, it's one of those games where it feels really satisfying to land some of these moves and I think that's because it sounds satisfying. For me personally getting the sound design right in games like this is a big part of making it fun to play. The music here is also well done and really just the overall presentation here is way over the top in the best possible way, it's the kind of game you can tell was made with a lot of enthusiasm because there's a lot of personality here. Now I've read that there are different endings you can obtain but I'm honestly not sure what parameters the game goes by to determine which ending you get, it may have something to do with how many tokens you have to use or just the total amount of time it takes to beat the game, I'm really not sure. If you know the answer to this, let me know in the comments. So yeah, Monster Maulers is a great time, it is a short play through, I mean you can crank through this one on something like 25 minutes, maybe even faster than that with a second player, but this is a case of quality over quantity, the sprite work here is fantastic, the bosses are designed with a lot of imagination and the three playable characters all have their own distinct style giving this one a little bit of replay value since there's some incentive to go back and do another play through with a different character. It's worth noting that Capcom tried their hand at this sort of game titled Red Earth so if you like this one you'll want to check out that as well. But yeah, since there's no home port, Monster Maulers is another one where, say it with me, you gotta play it any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.