Arcade Adventures - PuLiRuLa and In the Hunt

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

More Arcade Adventures from myself and my intrepid friend Alma! This time we took on two lesser-known arcade games: first, Taito’s quirky side-scroller PuLiRuLa; followed by In the Hunt, a nautical explosion simulator by our friends at Irem.

PuLiRuLa

Release Year: 1991
Developers: Taito
Genre: Beat ’em up
Players: 2 (co-op)
Platform: Arcade - Taito F2 System
Ports: Saturn, PlayStation

PuLiRuLa is a weird game, starting with the premise: an evil puppet has stolen the key to time itself from Zac and Mel’s quaint little village, and it’s up to them to chase after him and get it back, armed with “magic sticks” that can banish enemies with a single strike! The different locations they travel through each have their own surreal enemies and bosses: a desert town ruled by a fire-breathing snail, an icy glacier where you fight a face wearing thigh boots, a town that’s been invaded by digitised photos of real people bouncing around the screen, and the final boss - a cloaked magician with a globe for a head. Enemies turn into harmless animals when you hit them, and you can scoop them up for extra points.

It’s got that Parodius-like quality of “anything could show up”, and that’s its main appeal - it’s just weirdness for weirdness’s sake. The game mechanics are incredibly simple for a side-scroller, with only one attack, no difference in playable characters, and a desperation move that simply clears the screen. Naturally, this arrives with a random weird effect: summoning a really buff guy, pulling all of the enemies into a microwave to cook them to death, or simply nuking the town from orbit (it’s the only way to make sure)! With this simplicity of control, it seems to be aimed at young children, almost a “baby’s first beat ’em up”.

As one hit kills everything, the only challenge is just crowd control for the waves of regular enemies, and learning the patterns of the bosses so as not to get hit and preserve your credits. It’s also incredibly short; there’s only six stages and they can be beaten in about 15 minutes, with the game looping round and round as a score challenge. Still, the art style is cute enough to be worth the diversion - reminding me a lot of Panic on the Sega Mega CD - and there’s at least some replayability in the random effects that could happen in each fight.

You can see our playthrough on YouTube below:

Screenshots

In the Hunt

Release Year: 1993
Developers: Irem
Genre: Horizontal shooter
Players: 2 (co-op)
Platform: Arcade - Irem M-92
Ports: Saturn, PlayStation, PC

A submarine-themed horizontal shooter, In the Hunt has you fight off wave after wave of enemies armed with two primary weapons: front-launching torpedoes, and upwards-firing missiles. Cleverly, in order to hit airborne enemies you’ll have to surface in order for your missiles to have the desired effect, or else they’ll just cause a small plume of water to explode upwards which might not catch skyward planes. You can also dive underneath enemies and use the missiles to take them out; bosses are often tackled this way, with one player bombarding them from the front while the other sneaks underneath.

The game looks like a predecessor to Metal Slug (and it should, given that most of the team went on to form Nazca and create that series): the clear blue water of the opening levels soon gives way to industrial grey-beige-bronze tones as you get closer to the enemy base. Enemies are the usual arrangement of subs, aircraft, weapons platforms and big machine bosses… although one level has you diving to the depths and encountering a giant stone golem which chases you up to the surface! Destroyed enemies drop power-ups like different weapon types: rapid fire, wide shot, sea mines, but sadly there’s no screen-clearing bomb available here.

While it looks great and plays solidly, performance is an issue: there’s so many explosions happening on screen at the same time that it becomes hard to follow your own sub, and by the later stages so many enemies appear at once that the game suffers from drops in framerate - something very rare for custom-built arcade hardware. The optimal strategy by that point is just to spam both attacks continuously, as there’s no penalty for wasting ammo and you’re bound to hit something anyway. Unfortunately, “finger fatigue” soon becomes an issue!

One last observation: you’ll be travelling from left to right at all times, can only fire forwards and upwards, and can’t turn around. None of the enemies think to attack you from the rear… until the final boss, which flips back and forth and puts you on the run! I would have liked to have seen more surprises like this (and the aforementioned vertical chase with the golem), because the core gameplay is fun - it just gets a bit too repetitive.

Catch our full playthrough on YouTube:

Taito on GamingFluid

Arcade Adventures - PuLiRuLa and In the Hunt

PuLiRuLa

Screenshots

In the Hunt

Screenshots