In order to save them, you'll have to brawl your way through places that reflect their background. Once you have saved everyone, you must travel through a space shooter stage, either as the legendary Vic Viper from the Gradius series, or as Twin Bee, the lesser-known orbish robotic defender of Konami's corporate assets. Well, I say that you'll have to do some flying after you rescue all the other Konami characters, but something tells me that many a player will not be able to survive the trip. This game is pretty damn hard, especially right at the beginning, for two reasons, both of which are rather unfortunate design flaws. First is your perspective. "What," you might be silently asking, "are you talking about? It's only a side-scroller. Perspective schmerspective." Aside from razing your brain for uttering words that don't exist, I should point out that most platformers have your character smack-dab in the middle of the screen, but this one scrolls when your character is at least 3/4 of the way to the right, meaning less reaction time overall for fighting enemies that rush at you from off-screen. Secondly, the punching/kicking/whatever weapon range of many characters is so short, you'll basically have a 50/50 chance of getting hit with every swing. Considering the amount of enemies thrown at you, you will have difficulties surviving to the end of any stage unless you are a Nintendo wizard. I am not a wizard by trade, so I might as well put down my controller, walk away, and enjoy a box of Triscuits instead. The only saving grace is the fact that you can head back to the main Konami laboratories and revive dead characters with 100 pieces of the game's currency: bullets (a precursor to Grand Theft Auto times, perchance?).

Graphics in this game certainly the fit the slightly macabre theme of the game, as well as the games from which the characters originate, but they are actually a bit bland. Yes, even for 1988, it's bland. I'm saying it. The characters are adequately detailed enough to distinguish between them, but they lack the same level of detail you would see from their source material. The music shows more promise though, featuring tunes from most of the games Konami Wai Wai World draws from, with only a couple of exceptions. This is, to me, the highlight Sound effects actually seem as though they were plucked directly from Castlevania. Well, at least they picked a decent game to borrow effects from. I'd hate to see someone yank their dusty Atari 2600 Sound FX Deluxe cassette tape for this project. That could lead to horrible results.