WTF am I playing: El Viento

One of the greatest things about hanging out at 8-bit and Up (35 St. Marks place in NYC) is that sometimes you stumble onto random games that you probably never heard of in your childhood. You fire this game up and within the first 30 seconds you are figuring out what the hell am I playing. Today’s game is El Viento (Spanish for “the Wind” - who says Chocolate Lemon can’t be educational too?)

The story for El Viento is as follows

New York City, 1928. A mad religious leader known as Henry seeks to awaken the ancient and malevolent god Hastur. A sorceress named Restiana offers herself to Henry as a sacrifice for a cause which will bring the inevitable down fall of mankind.

There are some people that have descended from Hastur’s ancient bloodline, one of which is the young Peruvian sorceress, Annet Myer. With some assistance from Earnest Evans, Annet attempts to stop the cult from resurrecting Hastur using the very spells of this bloodline.

I did some research on this game and it turns out there was another game before it that had nothing to do with the wind at all but some random dude whipping the hell out of stuff (Gee how original) and some chick with green hair beating the stuffing out of guys in Mega Man costumes.

Latina? Yesssss

But lets get back to the task at hand, I get to play as Peruvian sorceress (I googled it and got some decent to weird pictures) that’s in NYC trying to sop an evil religious cult from releasing an ancient evil god. I can’t help but think that this angle has been worked before. Either way a non traditional main character in a video game is pretty cool. I couldn’t wait to boot up the game considering the woman on the box looked straight out of Spanish Harlem in NYC. So what happened when I booted the game up? Well I was treated to this.

That's not very Peruvian.

She looks more stereotypical magical ninja anime girl. The costume on the box does match up but as a recovering latinaholic this is an outrage. But focusing in the game is a side-scroller platforming adventure game. It isn’t bad considering it’s overall presentation for 1991. The sprites are huge and sort of detailed. The music is terrible forgetable, there are one or two tunes that you will hum but it isn’t the best Sega had to offer. The controls are surprising good while the gameplay focuses in on using her ninja run and her incredible leaping ability to navigate the platforms. Her ninja magic and I’m assuming what are boomerangs (she looks like she’s throwing birds at people) to get rid of the baddies.

After a full day of this game and beating only two stages. I think this is one of those gems that should stay hidden. Don’t get me wrong this is a good game and it was out before but Shinobi 3 was one of the best ninja games of all time, also he looked like where he was from. I mean I know one of Japan’s chief exports is ninja but don’t lie to me and tell me that main character is Peruvian, Wolfteam please unbreak my heart. The plus side you get to beat the crap out of 1920s thugs with a ninja. I’ve been on a retro kick ever since playing L.A. Noire. I kind of want to play the rest of the games in this series now.