Ghox
Gameplay. "Ghox" is an action game reminiscent of "Devilish" in which the players assume control of Axis (P1) and Bilious (P2), two men from the Eastern Country summoned by King Gitane of the Akuria empire, from a top-down perspective where the main objective on each stage is to break as many bricks and obstacles as possible from the playfield with a single ball by using the walls and/or the paddle to ricochet the ball back to eliminate them, while a boss at the end of every seventh stage must be fought before progressing any further in an effort  to overthrow the evil magician Jagula from conquering the world along with his legion of unleashed evil spirits from the netherworld, in addition of rescuing the goddess Lucia from her captivity. Failing in making the ball rebound from the paddle will result in losing a life and once all lives are lost, the game is over unless the players insert more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing. A unique gameplay feature is the ability to launch two balls instead of one at the start of each stage. Another unique gameplay feature is the ability to activate a bomb  item that spawns multiple balls from a single ball, however only one bomb item is given to the players with every single life. Scattered on the playfield of every stage are treasure chests containing other useful items such as fairies, additional bomb stocks, money and heart-shaped 1UP icons. Colored crystal orbs (red, blue, green, yellow and purple) are also dropped from opening the treasure chests and by collecting five of the same color grants power-ups for the player characters. These power-ups are kept even after losing a life. After the first area is completed, players are given  two areas to select as the next one before reaching the fifth area. Depending on the actions taken during gameplay by the players, two possible outcomes can occur during the final boss sequence; If Jagula is defeated during this battle but Lucia is not rescued, it will automatically trigger the bad ending, forcing the players to restart the game from the beginning in order to achieve the good ending by fulfilling certain conditions. Development and release. According to former Toaplan designer Junya Inoue, "Ghox" was initially envisioned to be a vertically scrolling game but due to hardware issues, the project  was retooled into a single-screen game instead. The game was released in arcades worldwide on November 1991. The soundtrack was composed by Miyoko Takaoka, although she is not credited as such in the game. On 30 May 2018, an album containing music from the title, as well as "Rally Bike" and "Teki Paki" was published exclusively in Japan by City Connection under their Clarice Disk label. Reception and legacy. British and Spanish gaming magazines "The One for Amiga Games" and "Micromanía" gave an overall positive outlook to the game. John Cook of "Sinclair User" rated the game with a  85% score. In the April 1992 issue of Japanese publication "Micom BASIC Magazine", the game was ranked on the number thirty spot in popularity. "Retro Gamer" regarded it as a graphically superior clone of "Breakout". In more recent years, the rights to "Ghox" and many other IPs from Toaplan are now owned by Tatsujin, a company named after "Truxton"s Japanese title that was founded in 2017 by former Toaplan employee Masahiro Yuge, who are now affiliated with arcade manufacturer exA-Arcadia.