 S...M...S. Drunk! Here's another fun one that was never released outside of Japan. It's a traditionally styled beat'em-up based on the Common Rider TV series. For those unfamiliar, Common Rider is a franchise that got its start in the early 70s, and it features a college student named Takeshi Hongo, as he fights the evil shocker organization, who of course are hell-bent on ruling the world. If this fellow looks vaguely familiar, you might recognize him from The Great Battle Games, also on Super Famicom, where he teams up with Ultraman and Gundam, along with a bunch of other superheroes, and those are some of the absolute best games that never left Japan. This is just regular ol' common writer, though, and while this game may not be as good as the Great Battle series, it's still a pretty good beat-em-up with a lot of campy charm. This was made in 1993 by developer Sun L, who are a subset of folks who cut their teeth working at Capcom. They made Great Battle 4 and Great Battle 5, and seriously, if you haven't played those two games, you owe it to yourself to do so. They're a lot of fun. So, common writer here does have a certain polish to it, and it has a bit of a similar feel with the controls as well. You start out just as a regular looking guy, albeit a stylish and well-dressed guy. He's got the matching belt and shoes, and a shirt with the top three buttons undone, must be going for that Bob Ross look. But if you press the X button at any time, you change from your human form to insect costume form, I guess. And what's cool here is that there's no limit to when or how often you can do this. A lot of beat-em-ups impose some kind of penalty for whatever reason when it comes to stuff like this, usually just so the player doesn't abuse something that's overpowered. But thankfully, this game does not care. However, you do have to sit through this little production piece every time you do it, and that kind of gets old after a while. Changing forms unlocks an interesting mechanic. You can press the L and R buttons to fire off a combo of moves. But what's really cool is that you can customize these combos yourself. Before you start the game, select the SSI system option here and you can pick between 16 different moves you can set up as a sequence. Not some combos are better than others, you don't want to be stuck with something that sucks, but thankfully the game helpfully shows you what each move looks like as you're setting it up, so that's pretty cool. You can even cancel into combos, so to speak, just like you would in a fighting game. Yeah, it's super limited, but it's still an interesting idea. I don't think any other beat-em-up from this time frame utilized anything quite like this. You get three lives and three continues to get through six levels with the occasional mini-game thrown in, where you mash buttons to prevent a front-end loader from pushing you off the screen, or it has you dodging boulders, or whatever. And there is a password system here, but it's all in kanji. There is no English patch available for this game. It's not needed to play this one, obviously, but if you really want to be hardcore, you can still use the password system by just matching the characters one by one. In fact, someone at Game Facts uploaded a screenshot of each password for each level, so if you really have a lot of time to kill, you can go about passwords that way. This is also one of those games where you have to be playing on either normal or hard difficulty to access the last level and to beat the game proper, so keep that in mind. The gameplay here is, uh, well, it's a freaking beat-em-up. It's exactly what you would expect. You'll run into some hitbox wonkiness here and there, but it's nothing game-breaking at all. The settings are pretty fun, too. You're fighting on top of trucks, you're dumping people into bottomless pits that are in the middle of the road for some reason. You're, uh, what is this, Contra 3? Hey, that works for me. This game isn't gonna touch the top tier of beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage or Turtles in Time or anything, but it's perfectly solid, and of course it definitely helps that this game supports a second player. Even better is that it's arcade-style multiplayer, so Player 2 can press start at any time to join the game as it's happening. So yeah, Common Rider is a pretty fun playthrough. I admit I'm not all that familiar with the TV show or the manga or anything like that, but based on what I've read and what I've seen, this game does a good job making use of the source material. What I really like is that in order to finish off a boss, you have to be as Common Rider because he delivers the knockout blow, which treats you to a neat little cutscene here. I do have to warn you, though, this game has a pretty crazy difficulty spike. The last level is ridiculous. I mean, that shouldn't be that surprising, and most 16-bit beat-em-ups have some kind of insane difficulty that pops up out of nowhere. It's just as much of a trope as the token elevator level. But still, this game is high on charm and personality. Even if you're not familiar with Common Rider, it's still fun to see all the enemy and boss designs. And hey, sometimes you just want to kick a monster off the side of a building. If a game has that going for it, then you're in for a good time. Again, this game was never localized or remade or anything, 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.