As a long suffering horror movie collector, my default position is I don’t like censorship! While I was too young to be anything more than aware of it at the time, the whole ban the video nasties thing in the early eighties left its stink for decades to come, although I can’t deny it was a thrill every time one of them emerged onto VHS and then DVD in the swinging nineties! Cost me a fortune though, and more often than not they were still cut, like The Evil Dead – obviously now deemed an all-time classic – but let’s face it, a lot of them were absolute crap! All the same, if stuff like Don’t Go In The Woods ever gets let out of nanny-state jail, I’ll undoubtedly be all over it! And yes, some of those thirty-nine are still banned in the UK, although I’m not surprised – just have a look at The Dambusters the next time it’s on telly and see how history’s been rewritten there. And good luck ever seeing On The Buses and the like aired on British TV again! They’ll never take away my Blu-Rays and DVDs and VHS tapes though, and hopefully the same is true of MAME for a while too…

At fifty-one years old as I write, I don’t need some self-appointed busybody telling me what I’m allowed to watch, and likewise, what I’m allowed to play. And that’s where we pick up the story with Glass, although I am a bit conflicted here because had it not been included in its current form in the Gaelco Arcade 1 collection for Evercade at the end of 2021, I’d have never discovered what’s well on its way to becoming an all-time favourite, even if anything being messed about with like this has been will always bother me, “different time” or not! But I get it, people can be offended by whatever they want, and society needs its boundaries, and Blaze Entertainment can do what it likes too, which I assume is based on getting a 12-rating. And I’m not so bothered that I wouldn’t have bought it anyway, because it’s got World Rally and Snowboard Championship on there too, and as said, I do appreciate they went to the trouble of getting it in front of me in whatever form regardless! Anyway, I’ll come back to what that form is, and what was removed then put back in its place, but for now, we’re effectively talking about the same thing as those Big D peanut displays you got behind every bar in every pub until very recently, where every bag of nuts bought revealed a bit more of the scantily-clad lovely printed on the cardboard stand beneath, although in this case, you could also choose your preference for boys or girls at the start. Which was a delightfully forward-thinking touch…

Okay, no more ranting, and besides, it’s all totally superfluous to both the gameplay and the best sampled speech you’ll ever hear in a game ever anyway! I will, however, quickly mention that the majority of pictures here are from the original version on MAME though, but for no other reason than it’s easier than messing around with my phone, trying to take crappy pictures of a TV or handheld screen. As evidenced by the Snowboard Championship pic from the same cartridge playing on my Super Pocket above, although it’s probably more acceptable than the Big D one I was originally going to put there! And don’t worry about seeing anything else not suitable for everyone either. Anyway, Glass was developed by Spain’s OMK Software and published by equally Spanish arcade specialist Gaelco back in the unenlightened age that was 1993, a year after Splash, which can be seen as its spiritual predecessor, and involves a widely familiar mechanic applied to moving a paintbrush around the screen, negotiating obstacles and avoiding the nasty bubbles trying to prevent you revealing the naughty lady below as you go. Which Glass then turned into a nonsense sci-fi yarn about aliens invading Earth and the humans taking the fight back to their planets, which is then rewarded by the bizarrely abstract, “sexy” virtual peanut display! And rather than keep you dangling again until we get there properly later, we’re mostly talking your choice digitised Page Three-type girls with a bit of boob on show or Mills & Boon blokes with a penchant for Speedos!

Gaelco released thirty or so arcade games between 1990 and 2005 (when they turned their hand to electronic darts), of which twelve feature on the Evercade Gaelco Arcade 1 and Gaelco Arcade 2 compilations and, apart from Glass, they’re in their original arcade form. By the way, as well as being a bit pervy, Gaelco were also known for some serious copy protection, meaning it can be a bugger trying to get a decent MAME version of any of its arcade releases, and took me quite a few attempts to both find one and then get it working! Anyway, alongside Evercade’s own special release of Glass included on Gaelco Arcade 1 that I’m playing here (both on the Evercade VS connected to a TV and the Super Pocket handheld), there’s also crosshair shooter Alligator hunt, which was also new to me but is excellent and works surprisingly well with a d-pad. And there are a couple of action-platformers in Biomechanical Toy and Thunder Hoop, although I do prefer the sequel of that one on the second Gaelco Evercade cartridge. The opposite is probably true for the aforementioned isometric racer World Rally here and its sequel also on there, with its simple controls masking a fast-paced, fiendishly nuanced and very good-looking rally game, and finally there’s almost the same again but on snow in the vibrant and generally wonderful Snowboard Championship, which will get its own deep-dive here sooner or later too.

Back with Glass, at this point I did have in mind to get into the story a bit more but I’m not sure I have any more than I already told you, although I can now give you the full version from the attract mode… “Long time ago aliens attack us on Earth. Now we fight on their worlds.” Which is actually less than my version earlier, and definitely makes less sense, but anyway, that’s all the very busty lady stood here in a sprayed-on jumpsuit is letting us know for now! She’s stood in some kind of space station docking bay, with a ship just like the one you’re about to take control of being manoeuvred around behind her, which you then see launched into a very R-Type inspired scene before it arrives on a very fiery and unwelcoming-looking alien planet. And leave it long enough once that’s played out and you’ll be teased with an eyeful of one of those world-killing rewards too, in whatever form that takes in the version you’re playing! From there, we’re given an in-flight map showing our soon to be ongoing progress through the game’s eight worlds, each of which are made up of three regular tile-clearing stages then a boss one. Which brings us to that sampled speech I mentioned earlier because it’s undoubtedly the best part of a generally fantastic game! Each world is introduced by a different but consistently busty lady in some kind of equally sprayed-on space bikini (to begin with at least), telling you where you are, for example, “Hell’s World, Stage One.” But it’s the way she tells them!!! We’ve got this wonderfully bizarre, overly breathless “sexy” voice delivering the line in this unfathomable accent, which, given the game’s heritage, I’m going to say sounds like a Spanish woman who’s been told what to say in English but really slowly and with a hint of a Japanese about the delivery. And I don’t think she can speak English, and definitely doesn’t know what a Japanese person speaking English sounds like! It’s absolutely priceless, and whatever your thoughts on how much the game is for you, one way or another, just have a look at the first level!

Right, that’s a good place to move on to gameplay. Each stage consists of a single screen that starts out covered in tiles, and to complete it you need to get rid of them to reveal the planetary scenery beneath that also contains the exit to the next one. And to make it way less straightforward, you not only need steer your ship over the top of every single one, but also made sure the little tile clearing ball thing that constantly orbits your ship makes contact with them, otherwise the tile will stay put and you’ll have to make another pass. Feathering the move button and taking it slow and methodical, removing each tile in turn is then the ideal scenario, except for the enemies popping out of star-gates that periodically appear around the edge of the screen. As much as a hinderance to your progress towards a bit of sauce as they are though, they’re another real highlight because there are loads of them and they’re all so full of character and unique animations that go way above and beyond expectation! You’ve got skeletons wearing board-shorts and groovy Frankenstein’s Monsters in smart blue boiler suits waving their arms up and down as they plod towards you. There are little bald guys with half a snake for legs swimming through the air, and the classic witch on a broomstick with unstoppable rotating magic blades, or alternatively, some kind of fitness model sorceress too, if that’s more your thing! What else? Monkey-like Stone Age guys with bows and arrows, flying about on hoverboards that they fall off of then hang onto them for dear life when you hit them the first time, and will recover if you don’t finish them off quick! There’s also bullet-sponge transforming spectres, pulsating flying squids that look straight out of Space Harrier, and caped superhero-types chucking out thunder clouds. You’ll also get occasional appearances by some heavy hitters shooting balls of flame or ectoplasm at you, or firing rockets strapped to their backs, or maybe just some giant space creepy crawly that will cruelly regenerate all the tiles you’ve just cleared if you don’t shoot it the second it appears!

Pretty much all of them are so meticulously crafted, and also have their own “ow” sound when you shoot them, as well as lovely death animations, including some of the juiciest, most organic explosions you’ll ever see in a game, and special mention to the fantastic ball of flames when the man-dogs who inhabit the final level, Dog’s World, have breathed their last! Bosses are more of the weird same but bigger, with fire-breathing red demons, huge monstrous faces, big double robots following the other’s movement and each with their own health bar… Then there’s horrible, oozing, Giger-inspired brains and lumbering Viking longboats that take up too much of the screen for comfort, although less so than the massive, ornate occult chalice boss, filled with blood that slops around disturbingly realistically as it moves, splashing over the side as it turns! Dispatching them is slightly less imaginative, and they all generally involve pumping fire as fast as you can when you can while dodging their regular (but irregular) movement patterns, as well as whatever they’re chucking at you. Some of these will feel a bit unfair until you learn them, although their regenerating health if you lose a life will never feel any better however much you know! Like their minions but on a much larger scale though, the unique screams and anguished looks on their faces (or equivalent!) when you get the final hit in does make up for all that!

You do get more of the same polish here too, with a triumphant animation from your guy opening the top of his ship and waving when you complete a level, then at the start of the next you see your ship up close and personal on the screen before being whisked away to its regular small size within the level itself (where it now looks less like an American football helmet). Conversely, when you’re hit you’ll see your little man being blown out of his ship then spinning helplessly into space, which reminds me, I’ve experienced so many cheap deaths from shrapnel flying off defeated aliens – a lot of them are way more dangerous dead than alive! You do have a limited-use shield if you’re in trouble and remember to hit the third action button in time though, which strangely I forget about most of the time, possibly in part down to the limited-use bombs on the second button being totally weedy so I tend to stick to mashing regular fire! As well as being able to pick up more of both of those as you go, other stuff you’ll come across to help you out includes a double-speed tile-clear power-up, meaning you can just hold a direction down and go, a more powerful flame shot and a missile that’s fires of lots of razor shots in every direction. Frustratingly though, all of them seem to turn up just as you’re about to complete the level!

The first couple of worlds ease you in just fine but the difficulty soon ramps up, and simply avoiding enemies becomes avoiding multiple enemies, and then their projectile weapons, and then their projectile weapons shooting multiple projectiles at once, although after a while you do fall into a rhythm in both regular levels and boss levels too, where you just keep on the move, not being too greedy with the tiles, and instead prioritise on taking down enemies as they appear, and before they cause you too many problems – like with that tile-spawning centipede thing from earlier – then returning to your tiles while the screen is relatively clear. The illustrated backgrounds you gradually uncover on each level that depict each world beneath are a bit of a mixed bag, varying from properly stunning – like the best ever pixel art from an Amiga point-and-click adventure – to well-produced but a bit bland and generic sci-fi fare. Of all the worlds you encounter, Lord’s World is probably the most ambitious, revealing itself to be this gorgeous grand hall of monsters impossibly suspended in outer space, but I think my favourite is the late-game Virus World, as it’s huskily spoken introduction calls it, or Virus’s World as it’s awkwardly written, with strikingly garish green tiles revealing even more garish shades of orangey-red inside something’s throat!

A lot of the above also applies to the sound design, with those really cool individual cries and groans juxtaposed by perfectly dense and punchy but mostly generic spot-effects, while this subtly epic but ultimately forgettable synth-orchestral score plays along in the background. Whatever sound does elsewhere though, I just can’t avoid my thoughts constantly returning to the totally bizarre between-world encounters with the apparently 12-rated starlet introducing each one! The Amazon’s World opening is especially hilarious, with the appropriately lithe lovely in a less appropriate big fur cape pronouncing it “Amaze-ons World” instead, but I think the one just before it, Robot’s World, takes the prize for most bonkers husky speech of the lot, with the bikini-blonde in the thigh-high armour giving a you a seductive (or downright creepy, depending on your point of view) wink as she delivers the message, which is so over-the-top sexy it sounds like she’s dying! But as much as these ridiculous cutscenes are the absolute highlight of the game for me, and as much as I’ll be forever grateful they somehow escaped the worst of the nasty censor’s knife, I can’t help but look at the moving lights reflecting off my ship’s windscreen as I do nothing more than slowly move in one direction or the other, and wonder at the contrast between that insane level of polish, and all the other dynamic animation and tiny little details going on everywhere you look, and this recurring audio freak-show filler, with its binary stop-motion facial effects then attempting to push you over the edge and turn you on all the way to eleven…

Which is as good a place as any to come back to those forbidden end of world fruits! Don’t worry, as said before, I won’t get too graphic though, and will focus more on the various changes to subsequent versions. Just to recap, whichever version you’re playing, at the end of each level you’ll get a graphic that starts out mostly covered in big black squares, which are then gradually removed as you progress through each of the eight world’s four stages until it’s shown in all its glory after the boss fight. It’s all pretty tame, Sunday Sport standard topless glamour model stuff, with a girl for each world then two for the price of one letting off the champagne in the last one. And it’s all as much a stylistic time capsule now as whatever it was intended to be at the time! Seemingly of a similar timeframe to this original arcade version, there’s also a toned-down Korean release with anime-style girls (but also with boobs) doing things like provocatively holding a phone in the bath. Boys fans will be pleased to hear that the digitised Speedo-guy is intact in that version though! Then onto the modern Evercade revision, which I guess is based on the Korean one, where you’ve still got the original screen where you choose boys or girls but in this case, for the latter you’re gradually revealing the minimal static silhouette of what’s just about identifiable as a woman in a handful of high-heeled poses, meaning all those poor pre-teen kids who are now allowed to play this version of the game aren’t even getting any small, James Bond-style hints of “detail” for their efforts! It’s even less fruity if you choose the boy option though, with just a drawing of a cat that looks like it was done by a five-year old emerging from the pixels! Not sure about the Korean version, but just to close on this stuff, the breathless speech anime lady introducing each level here also keeps her consistently skin-tight but very partially-clothed form too, rather than losing the top half along the way like in the original, but the inherent insanity works regardless!

Let’s also now close on the game itself, and the final boss – a pair of almost screen-filling, gilt-edged mirrors with moving monster faces along the top who chuck out little space ships that shoot missiles as they home in on you! They work the same as those robots from earlier, and once one of them is down the other will follow a bit easier now you’ve got some room to manoeuvre in, eventually shattering and rewarding you with not only a celebratory cut-scene with all the guys back in the docking-bay from the start (where your original lady friend also rewards you with some bits of a new spray-paint spacesuit and some congratulatory “greetings to our hero because the enemy is completely defeate”) but you also get a recap of all the nudey ladies (or equivalent) you unlocked on your travels through Hell’s World, Lord’s World, Robot’s World, Amaze-on World and so on, complete with their respective sexy voices recapping each adventure! And that’s not all because once you’ve entered your initials, full name or entire life story if you wish in the most generous high score table you could ever imagine, you also get a look at your own masculine-self, helmet off, lording it over a load of the monsters you’ve taken down through the course of the game. It really is the best possible ending all around!

However much I object to the censorship, or appreciate the above and beyond attention to detail, or can’t get enough of the gloriously stupid level introductions, I didn’t know about any of that stuff the first time I fired up that Gaelco compilation and found myself instantly hooked! It’s all just window-dressing (meant to attract you into a shop you’d probably never enter!) for a well-executed and fundamentally simple gameplay mechanic. Which I guess is why the Evercade people went to the effort of getting it the release they needed to, and were less precious than I might have been about losing some grainy nudey girls that ultimately added absolutely nothing to an absolutely wonderful experience. And for that we should all be grateful!

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