(SNK, 1987, action, 2 player simultaneous)

The MAME team must have been tapping my phone lately, because MAME .34 beta 8 brought a whole slew of my "most wanted" games with it.
POW goes in the same bag as Bloody Wolf, Rush'n Attack and a few other xenophobic, Cold-War / late 80's games. You are the heroic American on a one-man mission to smash the enemy Commie forces.
At least that is apparently the premise of POW, but I get a little mixed up in parts, because you're in the jungle and from the looks of the helicopters and so forth, it looks like the this game is suppose to take place in Vietnam. The only thing is, all the enemies you fight look pretty American. Well maybe not necessarily American, but they're all either white or black, no Asians. This confuses me...
But POW is not really a thinking man's game anyways, so I guess the plot is pretty irrelevant. POW is your standard issue Final Fight type game: 3-quarter view, scroll from left to right and beat everybody up kind of thing.
I am kind of confused. See, POW is another one of those games that I haven't played in about 10 years. When I was 11, I thought this was about the coolest game in the world, but I never had enough money to beat it. I could get to the end of the first level before I ran out of money, so I always wanted more. I dunno... Maybe it's because I don't have to worry about how many credits I use up, but POW just seemed really repetitive and dull this time around. Level after level (well actually only 4 or 5 levels) of the same enemies and the same tiled backgrounds. It just didn't hold my interest too much.
Plus, I have this crazy idea that it should be possible to win any game on one credit if you're good enough. POW is one of those games where that is just not possible. You get mobbed by like 8 guys with big knives at once- kind of like East Cleveland! Seriously, there's just no way you can get around feeding credit after credit into POW. I started with 99 credits and finished with 24... That's $18.75!! I think POW gives Revolution X a run for it's money as all-time champ of quarter-suckers.
After a while I didn't really want to keep playing, but I did just because I had wanted to play POW for so long and now I had the chance, but to be honest with you I really don't think it's that good of a game. Of course if you feel the urge to blast some commies with your M-16 and you don't have Operation Wolf, POW might provide you with a few minutes of fun.

Here's the disappointing ending! Thanks to "Boss Kawasaki"