Pokemon II

Pikachu flies across the screen like a bullet and you have to hit it at the exact moment when a notch appears in the wall. If you miss, you fall down and collect broken bones. That's Pokémon II on Mega Drive — a hack-job arcade blabber without license, without mercy, and without a clue what those creatures flying across the screen are actually called.

It's a classic climb-and-dodge format where you move upward across various platforms and obstacles. Your creature, or whatever it is, has to reach the top to advance to the next level. Obstacles pile up, enemies wait at every turn, and every wrong jump sends you back to the start or costs you a life. It's taken straight from Donkey Kong, just with a colorful six-legged thing leading instead of an ape.

Controls are simple — left and right movement, jump, and that's it. The game doesn't go easy on you when you jump wrong; you fall and die. There's no mercy system here, so you have to be stricter with yourself. Levels aren't long, but they're repeatable to the point of madness. For a while it's fun, then it starts to annoy that you're reliving every struggle again.

Players remember it more as a weird joke than a classic. An unlicensed rip-off, a profaned famous brand name, animation that looks like someone drew it in two hours. But that's exactly what makes it interesting — it's a faithful knockoff that shamelessly draws from the simplest formula: you jump, you survive, you move on.

Nowadays someone will play it if they want to see what an unofficial copy of a classic looks like on hardware from the nineties. In an emulator you'll manage it in no time, get a feel for what was normal in the '90s, and then forget about it. It's not a bad game, just unnecessary — and that's precisely why it has its peculiar value.