Skip to main content

Four in February #1 - Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein [DC]


The first game I completed of my Four in February was Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein. This is a fighting game by Capcom that was released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast in North America and 1999 in Japan. The game was first released in 1998 in arcades across the world. It's a sequel to Capcom's earlier Star Gladiator - Episode 1: Final Crusade, Capcom's first in-house 3D fighter. I had wanted to play Plasma Sword for a long time, since I had Star Gladiator but not a Dreamcast as a kid. It was the allure of the odd that drove me to it; Star Gladiator was such an unknown game in my friend group, and I had never even seen the sequel.


 
The cover art to Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein is pretty great. There's the hero, Hayato, a colorful bubble, some designs of circuitry or windows in a spacecraft, and a huge title. The colors really make it look like a Dreamcast game, that vapory millennium orange and pink. The Japanese cover shows the whole image that Hayato has been clipped from, a shot of the cast amidst the stars. It resembles a Star Wars poster, and, from what I understand, this series was slated to originally be a fighting game about Jedi and other force users (I mean it still has tons of similarities too), so this seems fitting. Europeans got a weird blue cover with the cast all around. I don't think it lives up to the other two.


Graphically, Plasma Sword is a pretty nice-looking game. Bright colors and flashy effects abound across the well-animated characters. Unlike the first game, backgrounds continue out into infinity. The characters from the first game appear here along with clones for each. The designs are all pretty cool and weird, though some of these clone characters are way too similar. It's not like having clones in a fighting game is unheard of, though.


Sound follows suit in terms of high-quality compositions and sound effects. The music is a bit more rock/metal than the more grandiose epics of Star Gladiator. It's a bit more what you might expect from a one-on-one fighter. The sound effects include a lot of voice samples that help bring the characters to life with all of the slashing space swords and laser effects.


Plasma Sword is a game about slashing space swords; each character has some type of weapon, from your standard beam saber to axes, scythes, yo-yos, and huge disks. The game combines Street Fighter inputs with a 3D fighter combo system. It's a bit like Street Fighter EX, and I am sure that isn't too surprising. Characters have a super meter to fill up can execute big specials with it. They can also create a small area that the opponent cannot escape from to try to execute heavy damage on to them.


The main arcade mode is your standard fight against a number of opponents with a rival match in the middle and a boss at the end. If you do a good job during the normal eight matches of the arcade mode, you might get to fight a strong, final opponent and possibly get a better ending. Otherwise, the game has your standard training, versus, and team battle modes to enjoy as well.

I had fun playing Plasma Sword, and I will definitely play more again in the future, hopefully against other people. It's a fast and weird game, and it represents the Dreamcast well with. I wish there were maybe a few more modes, less clones, and music that sounded as good as Star Gladiator, but Plasma Sword is pretty good otherwise.


Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein receives a Good (8).

Follow EfreetEater on Facebook

Labels:
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Convention Dimension: 3 Rivers Comicon

DISCLAIMER: I received a press pass to attend this event. The opinions here are still mine. Also, please consider reading this brief article about my various illnesses and such over the last several months. This article is very late, but things have been difficult. Originally, I had also planned to publish these pfotos to Instagram, again, in a more timely manner. Here we are though! At the beginning of June, I attended 3 Rivers Comicon at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh. I was surprised to see this event at the convention center, as I couldn't recall seeing it advertised in years past (I later heard that it was held at the Century III and Waterfront Malls in previous years). American comic book stuff is really not a huge thing on my radar, so it's not a surprise that I missed out on the earlier events. My friend Tyler wanted to check out this convention, so I decided to check it out as well. Anyway, 3 Rivers Comicon is held by local chain New Di...
Post a Comment
Read more

PlayStation Basement #40 - Evil Zone

This review was originally published on the  Console Purist  Facebook group on June 1st, 2019. Today is Saturday, so it’s time for PlayStation Basement. As always, I have another review of an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral. Let’s go! This week it’s the anniversary of Evil Zone , a fighting game by Yuke’s Future Media Creations. This anime-influenced brawler was released 20 years ago in North America on May 31st, 1999 by publisher Titus Interactive. The Japanese release, published by Yuke’s themselves, preceded the American release by a few months (January 14th, 1999). Evil Zone was also released in Europe and Australia in the same year, but I could not find specific dates. The cover art of Evil Zone varies significantly by region. The American release shows the villain, Ihadurca, casting a spell in a green mist (small aside: the American release also lacks the normal ridges on the left edge of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Slightly Fabricated Story of How Nintendo Conquered America

I finished a book called Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America  at the end of February. I expected good things from it. I expected a breezy but analytical approach to Nintendo and Mario's history. I got something that sails with a heavy anchor and a damaged rudder. First things first: the cover art is pretty cool. It's minimal, but I like the blue color and the little Mario jumping above the title. It's like he can leap over any obstacle! Unfortunately, the text is not free of such things. At under 300 pages,  Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America  goes for a brief history of Nintendo through the years. Each chapter is themed around a console, peripheral, or major event. It was nice to see the whole history, from hanafuda to Wii, the latest console at the time of publishing, however, I wish that Jeff Ryan, the author, had covered a bit more topics and more thoroughly. Even adding a few pages to each chapter could have added a lot more inf...
Post a Comment
Read more