Eight Man

Developed by Pallas Interactive and published by SNK, Eight Man is based on a 1960's manga and anime series that ran for five volumes or so. Eight Man is also considered to be the first cyborg superhero in manga history, predating even Kamen Rider. While this sounds well and good, by the time the Neo-Geo was launched Eight Man had already been out of publication for over 25 years. This makes Eight Man a bit of an odd-ball character to feature in a manga tie-in for your shiny new hardware. Given its release in 1991, a licensed game featuring more contemporary manga, like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Fist of the Northstar, would have made more sense. This could have been due to SNK not being able to secure the licensing for more contemporary works due to cost and or contract availability. Still, having Eight Man and Legend of Success Joe be the console's earliest manga tie-ins isn't exactly inspiring. 

There is little sales data on Eight Man, and early reviews from this period are sparse, but one can assume the game did not sell all that well in the arcade or at home. The only data we have is like just about every other random arcade game on any of the Wiki's - The publication RePlay stated Eight Man was the 4th most popular arcade game in the US in November 1991 based on a user poll. While I find that a little hard to believe, publications like this were finished for print weeks to a month before they made news stands, so this poll was likely in response to an August or September pool, closer to the game's launch in mid-1991. Even in the early days of the Neo-Geo, though, Eight Man was considered a little obscure; especially in the US where nobody had ever heard of this character before. 

Eight Man is presented with an extremely limited plotline, in that there is none. True to the manga's roots, though, Eight Man battles cyborgs, mutants, and zombies through four levels with multiple zones. Each of the zones are split up into one of three action sequences:

• Linear beat-em-up: You can only move left and right, but not up and down.

• Linear beat-em-up with limited platforming: Same as above, but there are holes in the floor that occasionally shoot flames.

• Auto-Scroll: Fast moving auto-scroll stage with no platforming and the exact same enemy patterns in every iteration.

While each of the action sequences happen in different locals, they all play exactly the same leading to some extremely bland level design. Thankfully, each level does have at least one unique enemy type so there is some variety among the overused cyborgs that are running amok. 

General gameplay is simple. You can melee attack with the A button, jump with the B button, and use your screen clearing bomb with the C button. You can also press A+B to perform a dual kick that strikes left and right simultaneously, and even has a hurt-box that sits above Eight Man's sprite a bit to cover his head. Eight Man has three default health bars, and each time you take damage you lose one bar. You can pick up L capsules to refill life to a maximum of five bars. Similarly, Eight Man's screen clearing bomb attacks also have the same number of stocks as your life bar, and each use requires one bomb stock. You can replenish your bomb stocks by picking up B capsules. Due to the high drop rate of B capsules, you can use your bombs without much risk. Additionally, if you lose a life your bomb stocks refill. Eight Man also has the ability to power up his melee attacks twice by picking up P capsules. These also increase your bomb attack's spread and power. Once you are at full power, you retain it even if you lose all lives and continue. Finally, you can pick up an 8 capsule that puts you in overdrive mode where you're mostly invincible and every attack you do is a bomb attack. This mode lasts for about ten seconds or so. 

Eight Man is challenging, but I don't know if I'd call it hard. The most annoying aspect of the game is you can take damage by just touching an enemy rather than being hit by one of their attacks. Enemies can fly into the action plane from the background or foreground, and often times they fly in directly on top of your sprite leaving you little room to react. The hit-boxes on everything are pretty large, so while you can strike enemies at a decent distance, they can also attack you well outside of where you think you should be vulnerable. To make matters worse, these early Neo games just didn't have good player feedback with absolutely no hit stun or impact effects making it hard to telegraph when you've made contact with an enemy sprite. It all just ends up feeling squishy and unpolished. 

The game looks okay, but certainly not up to snuff against other publishers' games in the genre. Even up against other early games like Magician Lord (which came out a full year prior), it looks like it's running on much less capable hardware. Sprite work on characters is blotchy and Eight Man himself looks more like a series of blue blobs cobbled together that somehow resemble a humanoid character. There isn't much here that ties the in-game pixel art to the actual manga, which is as much of a missed opportunity as everything else about this game. Even though the level layouts are repetitive, each level has its own theme - which is about the only variety you'll get. Music is bad, though, and sound effects are...they get the job done, I guess?

Eight Man isn't a good game. It's a bit of sloppy fun as a curio of the bygone days of the Neo-Geo and can be beat in less than 30 minutes - even less in co-op mode. That said, even console games of the day on 4 mega-bit cartridges, like Sega's Revenge of Shinobi, are vastly more interesting affairs. If you wanted to play a beat-em-up in 1991, you weren't spoiled for choice either. Capcom, Konami, and even Sega and Taito had much, much better offerings in this department - with some coming out years before Eight Man. You know, games like Final Fight, Golden Axe, Ninja Warriors, TMNT 1 AND 2, etc. I don't give Eight Man a pass for being a "relic of the time" when much better games in the genre exited long before this mess was a twinkling in SNK and Pallas' eye. 

So, is it worth your money? Well, considering the only way to play a physical copy of this game is on real Neo-Geo hardware I can see some collectors with enough curiosity being happy with their purchase. A Japanese or US copy will run between $350-$500 complete, and a Neo CD or MVS release will be significantly less. Eight Man is a messy, quirky, overall not very good game, but it still has enough surprising moments that one playthrough for SNK fans can be rewarding enough from a historical perspective.