VG Abyss- Clash At Demonhead/Dengeki Big Bang!

Left: Big bouncing brown monkey with straw hat get a front row seat to Bang's blaster. Right: Treasures! Amazing how Yen can just magically float on water.

Probably one of the most underated titles of all time, I felt a need to write about Clash at Demonhead (and it's Japanese counterpart, Dengeki Big Bang). This game hasn't even got the cult status that of River City Ransom has gotten throughout the years, and that's a crying shame since the game in my childhood even passed the funfactor of the then-popular Mario 3. Well, hopefully, oldschool enthusists will try this out
as soon as I've done writing about it.

When I was a young psycho child, there was one game EVERYONE on the planet was playing, called Super Mario Brothers 3. Well, I played it, but then I played a game that just blew this one out of the water. It was called Clash At Demonhead. You know what I said when I played this? WHAT Brothers 3 again?! Jet packs, supersuits, exploration, powers of ''The Force'' like kung-fu and shrinking yourself, enjoyable plot twists, super challenge, constant gameplay, early 80's style anime graphics, freaky bad guys, even more bizarre good guys (if you don't believe me, check out Michael/Pitan), guns, girls, nutty music, swimming in LAVA, and a story straight from something Streamline Pictures would have been too scared to touch with a 50 meter pole. ... Yep, this is were it's at BABY!

Left: Bang VS. Rowdy for the Hermit...isn't that the thing above the freaky creature thing from Kid Kool you tossed around?? Right: Underground river with fire-shooting fish....Ooooooooh! ^.^

The story of Clash At Demonhead/Degeki Big Bang goes like this (no your girlfriend isn't the first one to get kidnapped, how about that!?). You are Agent Bang, and are sent away from your hot 8-bit-anime girlfriend, Mary (or Meri), on the beach to go rescue some guy from the boardgame Clue (really a genius by the name of Professor Plum; I haven't gotten around to trying to find his name in the Famicom version) who is being hypnotized by the gang of the Seven Governors to create a doomsday bomb to destroy the planet Earth from the top of Demonhead Mountain. NOW, why these guys want to blow everything including themselves up, I can't tell you, but considering WHAT the Seven Governors look like, it almost makes perfect sense to me why these products of drunken Manga drawing sessions would want to blow themselves up too. Well, the plot goes through about a jillion different twists, full of Faries, Hermits, walking toy construction workers, and Rock n' Roll villains, so I'll let YOU try it out.

Bang blasts Michael/Pitan into a "NO!" oblvion.

The controls are pretty easy to get used to after five minutes of fooling with an NES pad (a little harder for you dirty, dirty pirates that use emulators and don't use a controller). In fact, the only thing hard to get used to is the ''water hopping'' where Bang skips across the water by pressing 'A' as soon as you get to the (told you, man- this game is WILD!) As far as graphics go, it's mid-early generation Famicom/NES so don't friggin' complain! Second, even for Mid-early gen NES, the graphics were pretty darn swell! There were some boring palette-swapped backgrounds, but other than that, Vic Tokai didn't do anything bad! The characters were very 80's style anime with a certain nuttiness you COULDN'T hate!

Left: The Clash/Big Bang trademark travel technique: WATER HOPPING! Right: The Hermit, and the Force/Guts Techniques you've learned. The first one is Minimize.

Left: The Supershop, where you buy all the firearms and supersuits you'd ever need. Right: Underwater Adventure on the way as Bang dons an Aqua Lung.

The enemies; Oh man, Boomer, Michael and the big bouncing monkey wearing the hat just DID IT for me! Music wise, it's typical NES. In this case, it's so bad, it's good. First you have your 70's anime-anthem style themes. Then, you have your bizarre folksy themes. Then, the 70's anime creepy-theme style themes. You have to love this. That's all there is to it.

Left: Something's in Bang's head and I'm willing to bet it's not a Slurpee brain freeze.
Right: A statue at the bottom of a waterfall...could this be a secret of some sort?

Replay wise, there's a password system, so if you're playing the cart instead of those EVIL EVIL EMULATOR ROMS, Get paper, because the passwords on this game are LONG. Not River City Ransom long, but pretty pencil killing nevertheless. And when you beat the game? Oh yes, you'll want to play this game over again like playing a good Mario game once in a while!

Left: The first Governor you run into, or are supposed to fight first. This game's pretty non-linear. Anyways, I wonder where he shops for his furniture because I could use a chair like that. Right: After using the Force/Guts technique of Minimize, you can now crawl down this tiny passageway.

This is why I love the NES. These kind of mind-numbingly insane plots and characters. Even the small bad guys are funny as hell. It's a crying shame this game didn't even achieve the level of cult classic that River City Ransom did. If you've never played it, get the emu rom below, buy it at a Funco Land, do whatever you can, JUST PLAY THIS! You won't regret it!

Extras:
The Lost Scenes- I don't know if these are the only scenes that were deleted from the American version, but even if it's not, here they are.
Funniest Scene If The Game- Meeting up with Joe...who got thrown off a cliff... (this is taken from the American version, so all the hillarity is in English)
The Rom- See below...
More To come....

Rom Showcase: Since the Clash At Demonhead rom is pretty easy to find (I bet you could probably find it on the first Google search result you come across), I'm only supplying the harder-to-find Japanese Rom to conserve space for the future. The differences between this and the American counterpart (as far as I've noticed) are: Japanese text (really, is it nessicary I mention that?), an extra scene in the intro detailing the Commander's letter to Bang as well as other scenes within the game that never made it into the US version as well as a couple of other extra Talk Times, the shop keeper looks a little different, and the currency is yen ("Ľ") rather than the American version's dollars ("$"). My Japanese is not the best in the world, plus I haven't played far into the Japanese version, so I really can't tell you if there's much change to the dialog (I'm guessing there probably is). As far as names go, I know Bang is still Bang and Mary is still Mary (or "Meri"), and Michael's name is "Pitan". I have yet to catch any other name changes as of now. If there are any other changes I've left out or simply forgot, please don't be afraid to email me (you'll be credited in the update, if the warm fuzzy feeling of helping me out means anything to you).

Please read the rom notes and click the Pirates Of Blue Hell flag to begin download.

Rom notes: The recomended emulator for this (or at least the one I use for it) is NNNester J e019b. It may work on Nesticle, I don't know, Nesticle is rather outdated. You can get it and just about every other emulator at Zophar's Domain, so don't bother me about finding it, I have better things to do instead of helping your broke ass pirate games for a dead system ^_^. This rom is strictly for educational purposes and must be deleted within 24 hours. I take no responsibility if you choose to ignore that warning. (Just download the rom, dammit, nothing's gonna happen to you.)