 Ssssssssssssssss,edrunk! Another day, another completely insane Japanese arcade beat'em up, although I think this one may take the cake. It's called Piri provola, made in 1991 by Taito, and right away you can see this game just looks so much different to any other beat'em up, especially for the time. I don't know about you, but I was used to seeing stuff with a similar style to something like Ninja Turtles or X-Men, and it didn't even need to be attached to any kind of license either, There's stuff completely created from the ground up, like Metamorphic Force, or Violent Storm, or Monster Maulers, or whatever. They all had a certain look to them. This game is just kinda different. Not just the anime art style, but just, uh, I don't even know, just everything. I should mention quickly that this game did get a few arcade cabinets in the US, but they were extremely hard to find, whereas in Japan, this game was ported to PlayStation, Saturn, and the FM towns, and it was included on a PS2 compilation, but none of those ports reached the US or Europe. Puli Rila takes place in a wonderland called Radishland, where every town has a key that controls the flow of time, but then a bad man started stealing them one by one, and with no key, there's no time, so everything in each town just freezes. But then, an old man was so impressed with a sense of danger that he called two kids to help, using magic sticks to get the keys back. Sure enough, when you start the game, everything is all ho-hum, until some mechanical enemy things start jumping out of windows to attack you, and you get to work using your magic stick to turn them into dogs and pigs, and then the town just kinda stops. Now, the premise here is actually a pretty cool idea for a story, but it does not explain the crazy sights and sounds you'll come across on your adventure. Where the heck do I even start with this one? We got jellyfish with big mustaches. We got skating tea kettle birds with mohawks. There's pirate clowns with disembodied heads blowing bubbles at you. And then there's this boss, and oh my god, what is this? Some giant face with a shlong nose that fires eye lasers at you? Oh, but we're just getting started, because this is how level 3 starts. I got nothing. I mean, we've gotten from merely strange and crazy to a precursor to Hong Kong 97. Our hero tells us that this town is controlled by the dream of a megalomania, and that all places are such circumstances. Oh yeah, what circumstances are those? Shoving your face into a mountain of meth like you're Tony Montana? And dear god, are those dead bodies in the background? What in the hell is that? The game continues on like this, and yeah, the gameplay is kinda limited to say the least. There's your typical arcade beat-em-up stuff at the time, and each token gives you a health meter with two lives to get through six levels, and it's one button to jump and one to attack, and one does a clear screen attack, and those on their own are their own brand of crazy, to the point that I really don't even want to spoil them. You'll have to play the game yourself. The thing is, though, this game is really short. Like you can finish this one in 20 minutes or so. And there's really not that much of that typical arcade cheapness here. The hit detection may not be the greatest, but this game is clearly meant to be just a total mind-trip rather than any kind of challenge or test of skill or whatever, unless you consider keeping your sanity to be a test of skill. Come on, man, I'm just trying to relax and play a game, not question the meaning of existence while being attacked by a duck-billed snail with psychedelic finger paint and a bowl cut. What is my life? What is your life? What is anybody's life? So yeah, there's not much else to say about this one. I mean, you get the idea. This is one of those games where just a glance speaks for itself. All I can really say is that this is one of the rare games where the insanity just builds and builds until it feels like my brainstem is sweating and my eyes start looking into the inside of my own skull and I can't totally think straight. So yeah, if you're into that, then go ahead and play this one, man. Alright, I want to drink you for stopping and I hope you have a great best of your sleigh.