It's an aesthetic

Despite its technical shortcomings, the Famicom (and, by extension, the NES) was a great platform for the vertical shooter sub-genre. It might even be my favorite because, although there was never a port of Raiden for the 8-bit console, developers had to be a bit creative. Famicom shooters are more measured since bullet hell is technically not possible within the strict sprite limitations. Not that I dislike bullet hell?, I just prefer a saner approach.

While my personal favorite to point to is Gun*Nac, Konami’s Japan-exclusive Crisis Force is a close second. In fact, Crisis Force even has a few advantages over my beloved Gun*Nac. I don’t think the decision-makers at Konami are even aware that Crisis Force exists, which is criminal. No top-shelf Famicom game deserve??s to be forgotten like this, but I suppose the top shelf is the best place to collect dust.

199X

Released quite late into the Famicom’s lifespan, Crisis Force may be the most technically impressive shooter in the system’s library. Maybe. Summer Carnival �2 - Recca was pretty awesome, as well. The point is it was very difficult to create a shooter like this without any slowdown while still throwing in some flashy effects and lots of on-screen sprites, and Crisis Force makes it look easy. It doesn’t have the option to reduce flicker �something that games like Gun*Nac did �but it works well enough out of the box.

The story is rather predictable. Aliens attack Earth (Tokyo, to be specific), and you’re the last competent pilot in the world who is equipped with a really good sh?ip. The aliens are bad, so ??you have to shoot them all.

The aliens also have, like, Pharaoh heads on their battlecruisers, which reminds me of ancient aliens conspiracy. You know those ones where star people came down to teach us how to build really big rock piles because we couldn't do it ourselves? And the rock piles are for communication or starship refueling or something??. I don't know; my parents sometimes have the History Channel on.

Your ship transforms into three different configurations, which affects which direction your bu??llets go. There are also the somewhat traditional red-and-blue upgrade?? paths, with blue being “normal�and red being “special.�Normal essentially just lets you put ordinance out in directed paths, while special is a bit fancier. The transformation is honestly not the most well-utilized feature. Not all that much creeps up from behind you, so spraying death in the most direct manner is a functional strategy for much of the game.

It belongs in a museum

The best and worst part of Crisis Force is that it is the absolute image of an NES or Famicom shooter. I think if an AI had to take a whole bunch of data on the system and cobble together the image of what a standard shooter looks like on the console, it would look like this. If a developer wanted to emulate the visual style of NES shooters for their game-within-a-game, it would look like Crisis Force. That takes aw?ay f??rom the technical impressiveness of the title, however.

The gameplay, as mentioned, is rather traditional. If there’s one thing that it does differently, it allows you to power up ?into a bigger form. In 2-player mode, the two ships combine into one. This not only makes you invincible, it also sends death in all directions for the amo??unt of time it lasts.

There’s also the typical area-clearing bomb. Couple of things to note about them: first, they change depending? on what form your fighter is in, and second is that they’re refilled every time you lost a life. There isn’t much reason to ?hold onto them, especially in a boss battle.

Gone and probably forgotten

There isn’t much more to really say about Crisis Force. Your little fighter travels from the bottom of the level to the top and then there’s a boss. Other than that, it’s your typical solid late-release Konami effort. While the design team didn’t go onto bigger and better things, the programmers had a hand in some great efforts including Shadow of the Colossus and the Ganbare Goemon series.

As I mentioned earlier, if Konami knows that Crisis Force exists, they haven’t really given any indication. It doesn’t seem to ever have been ported to another platform or landed in a collection. The price of a cartridge on the collector’s market is relatively high for a Famicom game. It was never localized to North America, though there is no Japanese text in the game. It used Konami’s custom VRC4 chip, which might be the reaso??n it never made it over here.

It’s shame, as it’s one of the console’s best shooters, and now it languishes in obscuri??ty.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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Not really that many zombies

Zombie Hunter looks like a fake game. You know the opening of No More Heroes III where Travis Touchdown outlines this weird Deathman game, and the gamer part of your brain tells you that such a game couldn’t exist in the time period it’s supposedly from? That’s Zombie Hunter. It tells me it’s from 1987, but doesn’t really tell me it was developed by Lenar. Instead, it just mentions Hi-Score Media Work Corp, which was sued out of existence by Enix over a screenshot of Dragon Quest 2. I know this, because the first thing the game does upon being started is scream at you, “Hai Sukoa!�It was a nice jumpscare to?? start the game.

That's a lot of UI

Just look at it. Half of the screen in Zombie Hunter is taken up by its HUD. It’s excessive! Then you actually start moving, and then you stop because there’s an encounter. These encounters are like the rand??om encounters of a typical JRPG, but they’re always the same. You side-scroll screen by screen, then some enemies pop ??out and you swat them to death with your iron death stick.

Yes, it’s the unholy marriage of side-scroller and RPG. It’s all about experience points, gold, and invent?ory management. You have to jump over some holes, but not too many, and falling in a hole doesn’t mean instant death.

It’s weird. Not the combination of genres, but the almost half-assed meshing of systems. The enemies on each screen are always the same. The loot they drop is always the same, except sometimes they don’t drop anything at all. You can’t advance forward when combat is active, but if an enemy falls off the edge of the screen, they’re just gone. You don’t get experience, and you don’t get any loot. Zombie Hunter doesn’t want to track off-screen ene??mies, so just deal with it.

Kickywalk

Look at the graphics. They’re weirdly pleasant. There’s very little animation aside from your armor-person’s kickywalk. The music is manic, but it isn’t really all that bad. Despite all the shortcomings I’ve already listed, Zombie Hunter is a strangely solid game. I’m even going to g??o as far as saying I enjoyed it.

Your job?? is to get past six levels, but levels 2-5 have you select your route, so there are technically ten levels in the game in total. Enemies and their loot drops are different depending on which route you take, so there’s reasonable incentive to take different routes thro?ugh the game.

Equipment is rated with numbers that denote both its strength and potential degradation. Your normal enemy-smacker doesn’t degrade, and neither does armor, but magical items and better smackers do. However, if you get a level 8 smacker; that love lasts forever. Of course, there’s a chance that Zombie Hunter will just give you butt. You either get an item or don’t from an enemy group, so unless you want to grin??d every encounter until they drop something, you might miss the best pick-ups.

Enemy-smacker

And you will grind. Zombie Hunter is a grinder’s paradise or Hell depending on how much you actually enjoy grinding. I love it, so I was at home here. If you backtrack into an enemy’s territory, it will respawn, meaning you can find your comfortable grinding spot and then rack up the levels. You need a key to exit each level, and like any of the drops, they’re random. So, if the enemies are playing shy about dropping their wallets, you may end up grinding unintentionally, jus??t trying to end the stage.

On the other hand, you also get gold and there are hidden shops. I say “hidden,�but mostly because there aren’t any signs. There are often lots of doors in the environment, but only t??he rare one is an actual shop. Some are even literally hidden behind otherwise solid walls. But what make these especially hard to find is the fact that in order to enter them, you have to hold Up and press B. No one really tells you that the shops are there or that this is how you enter them, so you’re welcome.

I will break you

Zombie Hunter’s biggest downfall is that it has no protection against grinding, if that bothers you. It will happily let you over-level yourself and kill the boss in a couple of swats. That can be fun, but the problem I find is that there is no baseline difficulty. It feels like grinding out some experience is expected. It’s certainly welcome. So how do you play Zombie Hunter without grinding? Do you just press your way through the encounters without doubling back? Do you grind in moderation? Try and stop me.

Really, I guess you set your own difficulty, but Zombie Hunter can screw you over pretty quickly. You have to prepare, but what is the right amount of preparation? This is my dilemma. Don’t give me the ability to break the game becau?se I always will. I have no respect for yo??ur design.

Won't set your groin alight

I don’t think Zombie Hunter is going to set anyone’s groin alight, but I found it to be a rather pleasant surprise. I had never really heard of it before, and while it is a strange mix of polished and ramshackle, it’s a decent ??way to spend the afternoon. I just can’t get over what a lack of restraint it has in its design. There aren’t even that many zombies.

Activision was apparently going to bring Zombie Hunter to western shores, but for whatever reason, canceled it. A version was released on the MSX home computer, but it ha?sn’t been ported to anything modern. Th?at’s sort of a shame.

Especially since it can be a bit heavy with its Japanese. There is no word puzzles, so you can get a feel for the menus, but unless you have a baseline in the language, it’s difficult to discern. Luckily, there is a fan translation of it, so if you’re a mono??linguist who has an afternoon to burn, I can think of worse ways to do it.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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But they're in space

The Ninja Jajamaru-Kun series took a hard left turn after Jajamaru no Daibouken. Considering it started as something of a rip-off of Ninja-Kun after ?Jaleco published the Famicom port of that game. It never?? really had a strong identity, but Jaleco was going to throw it against the wall as many times as it could until it finally stuck.

It never stuck. Reinvention didn’t work. The biggest offshoot was Ninja Jajamaru-Kun's attempts at JRPGs, but 1991’s Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen?? for Famicom is perhaps the one that feels most desperate. That’s not to say it’s bad, but if some sort of game vampire sucked out every last ounce of what little personality the series had, this is what you’d get.

There is blood on all the shoes you've worn

First of all, I guess we’re in space. Despite the series focusing on Edo-era Japan, we’re suddenly in space. Next, they took away Jajamaru’s shuriken. Largely, it’s the Jajamaru characters in a game that doesn’t at all resemble any of the others. It’s not just that the art style has changed, it’s that everything has. Gamapakkun appears but in robot form. It’s bett?er than no Gamapakkun at all. That would have been very upsetting.

Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen is actually a hop-and-bop platformer, like all the other hop-and-bop platformers released in the wake of Super Mario Bros. 3. What this game does different is essentially nothing. It has this heavy reliance on using this charge-up dash move to get over gaps, which is one of the dullest focal points I can imagine. However, most levels have at least one instance w??here you have to charge up ?your dash to make it across or over obstacles.

Don’t get me wrong, there are side-scrollers out there with some indispensable jumps. For example, I can’t imagine the Mega Man X series without the dash jump. But Mega Man X wasn’t just dash jump the game. It also had its wall jump. Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen has this dash jump, and essentiall??y everything after that is an afterthough??t.

Robo-Gamapakkun

Let me backpedal for a moment here, since Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen doesn’t deserve to just get beat on. Despite my gripes, it’s honestly a perfectly competent game. The graphics are entirely on point for a 1991 NES release, and the level design is varied enough that it’s clear that? the development team tried with this release. The graphics are colorful and detailed, which is a huge departure from earlier games. It also features some difficult technical trickery, such as four-way directional scrolling in some stages.

One nice feature is that you can play as either Ninja Jajamaru-Kun or Sakura-Hime. There isn’t a difference between them aside from appearance, but playable female protagonists were extremel?y rare at the time. You can also select her witho?ut her just being a palette swap assigned to the player-2 controller.

It can be challenging, but it’s rarely frustrating, unless you consider the fact that there are limited continues before you have to start over. If I rented this game as a child, I probably would have been enamored by it. The bright graphics and inoffensive gameplay just remind me of licensed scrollers like Felix the Cat.

Princess in space

Just because the design is inoffensive, however, doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. The power-up system is particularly sloppy. Most of these consist of weapons or items that grant additional powers, but they’re all extremely limited. Not only that but they’re placed around all willy-nilly. On one such occasion, I found Gamapakkun in an item box, only to find that I couldn’t proceed past the small section I was in that contained exactly one enemy. This wasn’t ran?dom, every time I replayed the level, he was in that box, even though it wasn’t contextually appropriate.

I rarely ever found an item on an occasion where it felt needed. Well, that is aside from the armor which affords your glass-boned hero an extra point of health. However, jetpacks rarely carry you far enough across obstacles, and weapons are just ineffective enough to be useless. It doesn’t feel like a huge stretch to reimagine the power-up system into something more fitting to the game. Maybe something along the lines of what Felix the Cat had going for it.

There are also lett??ers that you collect, but I couldn’t figure out what they do. The let?ters are A, S, and J. I read somewhere that they affect the level boss’s attack pattern, but I really didn’t care. They gave me the ability to spell ASS on my screen. At that point, you can throw any practical usage out the window, as I’ll always prefer ASS.

Then there’s the music, which is passable at its very best and baffling at its worst. It never got as annoying as, say, Koneko Monogatari, bu??t some of the tracks barely sound like music. Like, maybe they technically qualify as music, but they’re not constructed?? in a way to sound pleasant or memorable.

Eat your greens

The level design gets pretty weird. It??’s not exactly ambitious, but you could tell someone challenged themselves to present something new each time the screen flipped. However, regardless of what got thrown at me, I found it as bland as a styrofoam steak. Like I said, if I played this as a kid back in 1991, it might have left an impression. However, as a jaded and perpetually tired adult who has seen their share of hop-and-bop, I couldn’t even stay attentive enough to get through the past couple of levels.

That’s pretty sad since I have a pre-existing soft spot for the games in the series. I always found that, while they were inadvertently janky, they were charming enough to be memorable. Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen is the opposite of that?: mor??e competent but entirely forgettable.

We nearly got a localized release in North America. Like the other localized games in the series (Maru’s Mission on Game Boy was a Jajamaru-Kun game, for example), it was going to be renamed to something unrelated. Jaleco was going to call this one Squashed, and it was going to lean heavily toward vegetable puns. However, it was canned before launch. This was probably because the market for NES games was sinking fast after 1991. Even games with brand power, like 1993’s Duck Tales 2, were only released with ??limited supply. It would have been a risk?y endeavor.

However, the prototype was leaked to the internet if you want to play an English version of Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen. The Famicom version isn’t exactly encrypted with Japanese text, to begin with. You might miss out on some of the finer details, but it’s completely playable?? to English monolinguists. You’ll just miss out on all the food puns.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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You're not even my real dad

Spelunker may be considered by the Japanese to be a “densetsu no kusoge�or �a href="//jbsgame.com/meet-spelunker-one-of-japans-??most-treasured-bad-games/" targe?t="_blank" rel="noopener">crappy game of legend,�but I consider myself a fan. It wasn’t bad, it was just sort of a jerk. It made bank in Japan, but it then started filling up the bargain bins. So, you have to wonder what led to the development of Spelunker’s sequels: Spelunker II on arcade and, confusingly, Spelunker II on Famicom. Were they trying to make more ??money off the name, or were they trying t??o continue the legacy by making a worse game?

I don’t have an answer to that question, and by the end of this article, I still won’t have an answer. Spelunker II: Yuusha he no Chousen on Famicom isn’t terrible. It’s not great, but I’ve played much worse. More strikingly, it has very little to do with the original Spelunker.

Stabbing hams

The Famicom version of Spelunker was a simple game at its core. Your goal was simply to descend or “spelunk�a cave ?to the very bottom. The twist was your protagonist had bones made of bre??adsticks and could die if a bat pooped on them. It was a simple port of a Broderbund game that got blown out of proportion due to its reputation.

??For the console sequel, Irem licensed the title from Broderbund. After that, I can’t follow their logic. You start off by picking one of three characters: the explorer, the priest, and the esper. An esper, if you didn’t know, is someone who can use extra-sensory perception, which seems to just mean psychic powers to the Japanese. I’m not sure what a clergyman and a person who can tell what’s on the concealed side of a card are doing plumbin?g caves, but here we are.

The important thing is that they all have different abilities. While the explorer just has a gun and a knife to start with, they can carry more items. The priest casts spells that can hurt the undead. The Esper can, most notably, set points to warp back to. They ??each have different amounts of health and “toku,�which translates most directly to “virtue.�Your virtue ensures that Hell will kick you out whenever you fall into a pit, and you also need to be above a certain threshold to use the rosary. You lose it by taking damage, looting graves, or killing innocent deer, and you gain it back by stab??bing hams in caves. Or just by killing enemies.

Too much venison

You also start above ground, confusingly, but don’t go anywhere; I promise there actually is spelunking. Spelunker II is one of those exploration platformers that became big in the wake of Zelda and Metroid. There are three maps, but you? have to explore them to find the boss and the exit.

You may ask how that has anything in common with the original Spelunker, and really, there isn’t a lot. To say it is completely unrelated would be disingenuous. Some of the hazards are obviously taken from? the original title. The biggest difference, however, is that your hero is no longer suffering a tremendous hangover and can withstand more than a little poop.

You’ve got a tremendous health bar, and the only instant death I’ve really found is if you fell into a pit and have eaten too much venison. Even things like falling into spikes or tumbling down a long distance only hurt you instead of killing you outright. It’s a strange departure, which again ca??lls into question whether or not the developers were interested in replicating the spirit of the original.

Pure panic

Spelunker II isn’t a long game, especially if you ?know what you’re doing. However, if it’s your first time, it’s a good game for mapmaking if you feel like breaking out some gr?aph paper. There’s a certain amount of exploration and backtracking needed to reach the end, so if you want to avoid doing circles, taking notes is the way to go.

I really don’t mind Spelunker II. It maybe lacks a lot of the things that made the original so special, and the design is half-baked in some places, but as an exploration platformer, it’s better than some attempts. It’s nowhere near as cryptic as something like Super Pitfall or Goonies II, so once you know what youâ€??™re doing, it’s a? pretty alright time. I'm not entirely sure if that's on purpose, though.

It also has some incredible box art. I kind of wish I imported a boxed co?py since I can’t find any high-resolution images of it out there in cyberspace. But look at it. I’ve never seen panic so well encompassed in a single image.

We’d never get Spelunker II over here in North America. The series is still running with Spelunker HD Deluxe and Spelunker Party being reasonably recent. I don’t know why anyone would localize a niche Famicom title like this, but it could happen. In the meantime, it’s relatively comprehe?nsible to English speakers. If you want to deobfuscate it further, there is a fan translation you can slap onto it that will clear up any confusion.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Spelunker II on Famicom is a very confused sequel appeared first on Destructoid.

Not your dad's Rampart

I once described the SNES version of Rampart as not “the most faithful�but “the version that best fits on consoles.�I maybe stand by that, but I have a contender for the least faithful. While the NES got a decent version of Rampart, the Famicom, for whatever reason, got a completely different one. This isn’t the only time this has happened. The case of the NES/Famicom disparity of Maniac Mansion is another one. An equally confusing one.

Rampart on Famicom was developed by Konami by most of the team that would go on to create games like Lagrange Point and Batman Returns. A talented team to be sure. It’s clear that the development team played Rampart, but they didn’t seem that interested in replicating the ??gameplay.

We've got to protect grandma's house!

Rampart is an Atari arcade game about building fortifications out of Tetris blocks. In single-player, the goal is to defend your castle from invading pirate ships. Rampart on Famicom is about ?a variety of things, none of which ?involve ships. For example, easy mode has Little Red Riding Hood fortifying her way to grandma’s house. Medium is fantasy medieval, so you’re fighting dragons. Then finally, hard mode is Sengoku-era Japan. Weird.

But while the modes are labeled?? by difficulty, make no mistake, each one is its own unique, short campaign. The objective of each one is largely the same, but thr?ough clever level design, you’re given little wrinkles to deal with.

There are various ways to win each of the stages. You typically battle two types of enemies; big ones that destroy your fortifications and small ones that get in your way. One way to win is to destroy all the larger en??emies, as the smaller ones can’t break down walls. Another is to gain points by capturing as much territory within your walls as possible. Some levels push you to one type of victory in particular by, say, setting the goal score way too high to get in the limited number of turns you have.

Stop giving me 'S' blocks

There’s also a story told in cutscenes between levels; something else that I haven’t seen in any other version of Rampart. Once again, each difficulty level gets its own individual storyline to go with its unique aesthetic. Considering the arcade version of Rampart was developed as a three-player adversarial title, I c??an’t say I’ve ??ever considered narrative to be a possible path for improvement, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

It’s amusing to me that, instead of just choosing one aesthetic and sticking to it, Konami decided they’d give us multiple flavors. None of them really match the medieval Europe of the original, and while the gameplay is almost restrictively similar, they all have their own progression and design. It’s almost a demonstration of how Atari limited themselves by sticking to one theme. An example of how the Rampart series could continue. In a sense, it’s the sequel we never really got. Rampart on Super Nintendo may have taken the formula and made it more fit for consoles??, but on Famicom, they just dumped a whole lot of sugar into the recipe.

Damned tornadoes

As I mentioned before, gameplay is somewha??t limited. Not that it wasn’t in its original incarnation, but at least there, it had the excuse of just being a quarter muncher. I think a lot of this comes down to what they could fit on screen. While the arcade original was a single-screen title, the SNES version added scrolling to allow for bigger levels. On the Famicom, everything feels a lot more snug.?? There doesn’t feel like a lot of territory to conquer or battle on. It makes the game almost feel cheap.

This carries through to multiplayer. Although the rules are largely the same as most two-player versions, the fact that the maps are so condensed really affects the strategy. You can definitely do better in terms of multiplayer Rampart,?? though most won’t let you choose your aesthetic.

More could have been done with the ideas that were used to mutate Rampart, but it doesn’t feel like it was much of a priority for Konami. While there were obviously plenty of talented people on the project who poured their love into it, there are hints that the company saw it as nothing more than an arcade port that might sink or swim. It wasn’t even put on Konami’s usual custom cartridge, instead using the generic Famicom style. It’s all right, Rampart; you’re still loved.

Completely off script

If you didn’t like Rampart before, the Famicom version isn’t going to change your mind. However, if you like or even love Rampart, then you should do yourself a favor and check out this flavor. It’s interesting to see a developer look at a game that they were porting and decide they wanted to do somethin??g different. Normally, I’d attribute this to the limitations of hardware not being able to replicate the experience, but Jaleco managed to do it just fine in the Western version.

There is a translation if ?you want to enjoy the cutscenes or at least navigate the menus. Thereâ€??™s a surprising amount of text when you consider there was no story at all in the original versions.

As for whether or not we’ll ever see an actual localization, I wouldn’t count on it. Considering it was a licensed port, you’d probably need to get Konami and Rampart’s current rights holder (I believe it’s WB) to work out a deal. Even then, how much demand is there for an obscure port of Rampart. When was the last time we even saw a port of Rampart in any of its iterations? Midway Arcade Origins in 2012? Yeesh.

For a final note, I'm not done with my Rampart exploration. Apparently, Jaleco did a Game Boy port and went pretty off script with it, as well. Japan-exclusive, as well. Why did we only have to deal with pir?ates in the West?

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Rampa??rt on Famic??om is a strange twist on the formula appeared first on Destructoid.

Why Wai Wai?

It’s hard not to look back at Konami’s Famicom days and not get a little misty-eyed about how it used to be a fun company before the soul was sold out from under it by the corporate powers. It’s even harder once you look at Wai Wai World 2. Playing the game is like finding a horse murderer’s photo album and discovering it’s full of colorful pictures of ponies. It’s all wide-eyed and cute until you realize, “These were their first victims.�/p>

The original Wai Wai World was a blast, just not a very big blast. It did its job bringing together a bunch of awesome Konami characters but did so into a clunky game full of annoyances. If you can believe it Wai Wai World 2 does the same thing, but with only one real annoyance: Upa. Bu??t then, babies ruin absolutely everything.

I don't care who you bokutte

Wai Wai World 2 is a completely different beast from the first game. While the original was some sort of exploration-based platformer, the sequel shifts genres quite a bit. The biggest slice of it is an action platformer. You choose a set of three heroes from predefined combos. There’s Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Fuuma from Getsu Fuuma Den, Bill Rizer from Contra, Goemon from Ganbare Goemon, and Upa from Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. Your first thought is probably some combination of everyone but Upa,?? however, there’s only one setup where Upa isn’t there. Sadly, this combo also omits Simon, so is it even worth it?

Each character has skills based on how they played in their respective ?games. Simon has a whip, Bill Rizer shoots things, and Upa uses a rattle to turn his enemies into clouds. They’ve all been unified by a cutesy chibi art style.? Simon looks fantastic in his big-eyed form, but Upa once again just looks like Upa. Upa sucks.

You’ll notice that characters like Mikey from The Goonies and King Kong from King Kong 2 are missing, and that’s because they were licensed. This list of cameos may seem rather anemic in comparison, but in other modes of gameplay, you jump in as Twinbee and Vic Viper. Despite having fewer characters, Wai Wai World 2 is just ??as much a celebration of how great Kon?ami used to be.

Child endangerment

Rather than just choosing what character you play as you always start off as a generic-looking dude named Rickle (maybe). In order to change into one of your set of characters, you first need to grab a power-up, wh??ich then starts cycling through your chosen heroes. You then intuitively hit up and jump to transform into them. This is more of a power-up than a character change. A clock ticks down, and when it runs out, you turn back into Rickle. Taking damage decreases the time you have left, but you can also pick up health to increase it. If you play carefully, it’s possible to stay in your favorite character’s form for the duration of a level.

Some of the characters have special advantages on levels inspired by their games. Upa, that horrid infant, can swim faster and open his boxes. Fuuma can smash skulls in Yomi. Any character can get through any stage (although I got stuck with Goemon going through Yomi, and I was forced to wait for h?im to turn back into Rickle so I could proceed), so?? it’s generally just a bonus when you get to their respective level. That’s probably for the best, as you cannot change your character group at any point. You’re stuck with who you chose at the beginning.

Big-eyed Simon Belmont

Konami Wai Wai World 2 certainly loves its source material. While the unification of different genres means that certain levels don’t feel anywhere close to the games they were based on, few sacrifices are really made. There are sections based on Twinbee and Gradius, and remarkably, they play strikingly similar to Twinbee and Gradius. The stage based on Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa might ??as well be ripped straight?? from the game based on how convincingly it replicates the experience. Which isn’t great.

Speaking of which, I hope you have some experience in Twinbee and Gradius, otherwise, those stages are probably going to kick your butt. The side-scroller stages are all pretty simple, but those shooter stages are perfect reflections of the genre. It can be quite a derailment, especially if you’re not familiar with their mechanics. It’s like being invited to the 100m hurdles and suddenly being forced into the high jump. Or when you take a swig of water and it turns out to be moonshine. It’s nothing you can’t handle, but so??me warning might have been nice.

A serial killer's photo album

The clean, chibi art style is what really sells Wai Wai World 2 to me. I didn’t realize how much I wanted a cutified, big-eyed Simon Belmont, but now I need a t-shirt. It’s a unique, uniformly silly way to look at these classic games. It's even better when you play it with a friend, which is more I can say for the original Wai Wait World.

The soundtrack, however, I can’t say I’m a fan. It’s not bad, but it’s drawing from a lot of games where the soundtracks are great. They’re once again remixed in a way that fits with their new style, but the result is that a lot of their punch is gone. Look, the Stage 1 theme in Contra was perfect. You can’t improve on that perfection. The first Wai Wai World did a better job of st?aying true to the original games, I’m not sure why that can’t be said here.

Once again, Konami ignored us over here in the West when it came to Wai Wai World 2’s release. To be fair, many of the characters available would be a mystery over her, though we’d soon see Goemon as Kid Ying in Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Konami was also still releasing games for the NES in North America through to 1993. We’d eventually get Konami Wai Wai Racing Advance as Konami Krazy Racers furt??her down the line if you want to be optimistic.

Lucky for you, if you can’t read Japanese, Konami Wai Wai World 2 is still rather simple to play. There are some brief bits of dialogue between levels, but you can skip by them. If you’d rather, there is a fan translation available so you can read what’s going on. Too ??bad there isn’t a patch that removes Upa.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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The protagonist is not named Max

I fell hopelessly in love with Metal Max Xeno Reborn. It was my first time with the series, which has been running in Japan since 1991. It was quite the roller coaster for me. I immediately jumped online and placed an order for some of the series�early games. I felt the heartbreak of Metal Max: Wild West getting canceled. Then I found love again in Metal Max for the Famicom. Then I reminded myself that Metal Max: Wild West was canceled, and now I’m sad again.

Metal Max has largely stayed in Japan, outside of Xeno and its Reborn cousin. We got Metal Saga on PS2, but that went by without much notice. Maybe we’ll get a re-release on PS5 now that Sony is doing that again. There were many titles that flitted by without our anglophone notice, and I plan on delving through as many as I can get my nimble fingers on. Metal Max is one ?I can communicate via Fa??micom Friday, so allow me to share it with you.

Get a real job

I love Metal Max. Famicom RPGs can be a struggle, whether or not they’re a Dragon Quest or a Mother. It was kind of a crappy era for console RPGs. No, maybe that’s inaccurate. It was an awkward era for console RPGs. A great era for PC RPGs, but console RPGs were kind of lopsided. Regardless, I ate Metal Max without any discomfort. Without any boredom.

It helps that a lot of what I loved about Metal Max Xeno Reborn was already true on the Famicom. It’s a post-apocalyptic JRPG that focuses on tanks. The plot is light, instead getting out of your way so you can hunt monsters. The focus is mainly on finding vehicles and accumulating enough money to make them over-powered. The monsters are ridiculo??us, and there’s this sly, dark sense of humor underlying all of it.

It’s also rather polished for a JRPG of this vintage. I had the option of playing the Famicom version or the Super Famicom remake, Metal Max Returns. I opted for the original, because its art-style is so classic for the system. It’s obvious that, much like other RPGs of the era, it got a lot of influence from Dragon Quest. Characters are s??quat, backgrounds are sparse, and enemies are enormous. If you like the Famicom RPG aesthetic, it fits the look perfec?tly.

Mad Muscle

The gameplay reveals a similar shine. It’s entirely possible for you to overpower yourself, and grinding is an option, but in terms of gameplay loop, it go?t it down perfectly. You travel the world and hunt down Wanted Monsters. But the Wanted Monsters are only a suggestion; a great way to make loads of money really fast. There are more facets to the core gameplay: find better tanks, find better weapons, and solve the problems of the various towns you cross if you feel l??ike it.

It’s almost open-world. The progression from town to town is largely linear, but it doesn’t have any objections to backtracking or skipping ahead. The? Wanted Monsters aren’t bosses. You can proceed without killing them. There ?are some objectives you need to complete to get let through the gate, but these are largely in the early portions of the game. I suppose it’s more accurate to say it’s an open-narrative game. Character development mostly occurs in your head. You’re given your humble beginnings, but you figure out the motivation. Wealth, money, a kick-ass tank? I’m definitely in it for the tanks.

Mammoth Tank

It’s somewhat strange to call a turn-based RPG “fun.�Menu-based combat is not fun. I guess instead, I will say that Metal Max is compelling. It’s exciting to find new tanks and grab new equipment. It’s satisfying to line up your artillery against big bad monsters. If anything, I wish the world was more reactive. People don’t ask much of you, so they don’t really care about your successes. Towns are largely unchanging and static. Perhaps, that is the price of Metal Max’s polish.

The soundtrack is excellent but also repetitive; not really uncommon for a JRPG. I mean, off the top of my head, I can probably hum Dragon Quest’s overworld the??me, and it’s not because I like it. However, there’s a decent amount of music. Every so often, when it’s not beating you with the battle or? overworld music, it throws in something new and interesting.

The power of electricity

What makes Metal Max so enjoyable is the progression, but the icing on top is its bizarre sense of humor. Many of the enemies are amalgamations of animals and war machines. The scenarios you ??get pulled into are sometimes bizarre, like when you need to convince a factory full of flower lovers to give you a vehicle. But a lot of the mechanics are pretty strange to begin with.

You heal at the inn, you resupply your tank at the ta??nk supply place, and when you die, you’re resurrected by a mad scientist. Seriously, whenever a character gets capped, they become a corpse that gets dragged behind the other characters. You deliver their “fresh corpse�to the doctor and he zaps them back to life. So, really, by the end of th??e game, all the party members are just zombies denied the peaceful embrace of death. If all your characters get wiped, your father begrudgingly revives you, and then you have to round up your dead teammates. It is absolutely the most morbid revival system I have yet to encounter.

One of the things that has really drawn me to the series is its sparse narrative. Not that heavy narrative was really that prevalent in the 8-bit days of the JRPG, but Metal Max amuses me in the fact that you don’t really know who the central antagonist is until you basically trip over them. Then, when it’s all over, no one realizes you saved the world because they never knew it was imperiled in the first place. James Bond probably knows how that feels, but the protagonist here doesn’t even get any congratulatory?? sex.

Save the world while you’re at it

Metal Max is, without hyperbole, the best RPG I’ve played on the Famicom. Yes, I’d rate it above the Dragon Quest tetralogy, Final Fantasy, and even Mother. It has Mother’s weirdness and the tightness of Dragon Quest. I can safely say that I have never gotten this muc?h enjoyment from an 8-bit RPG.

We didn’t get it over here, though. Most of the series passed us by. To date, we’ve received Metal Saga on PS2 and Metal Max Xeno and its remake/remaster. Why we never got the DS titles, I will never understand. Unless I can convince a few million people to climb aboard the Metal Max Xeno Reborn wagon, I doubt we’ll ever really see them. I’m not confident we’ll ever even see the series again after Metal Max: Wild West’s cancellation.

Fortunately, there’s a fan translation of Metal Max, which you’ll see I used here, as there’s just too much Japanese text for me. I could have maybe pushed through, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much. As I mentioned earlier, Metal Max got a 1996 remake on the SNES called Metal Max Returns, and it also has a?? fan translation. It’s your call which you want to play. I’ll probably get to the remake sooner rather than later, but I have a whole series that I now need to dig my treads into.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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Daibouken means "big adventure"

I have a serious soft-spot for Jajamaru-Kun. It was Jaleco’s almost-classic series of games. None were all that great, but they tried their little hearts out. 1986’s Jajamaru no Daibouken was the second game in the series (third if you count Ninja-Kun). Super Mario Bros. dominated t?he previous year, so for the sequel, Jaleco decided to change the formula to be more of a side-scrolling platformer.

1986 was the year that Metroid and Castlevania hit the scene. Next to them, Jajamaru no Daibouken is pretty embarras??sing. It’s an obvious attempt to keep up with the pack but makes so many mistakes that it’s not batting in the same league. Despite that, it’s everything I love about plumbing the Famicom library. It’s unique, it’s blatantly Japanese, and it seems to exist in a moment that we never saw in the West.

Jajamaru no Daibouken has the same story as Ninja Jajamaru-kun. The princess has been taken prisoner by the Catfish p?irate. Go save her. The big difference here is?? that instead of clearing out a bunch of short levels, you alternate between reaching the right side of the level and fighting a boss.

The levels are completely horizontal and typically consist of a bunch of floating platforms. Some of the blocks are destru??ctible and contain either money, power-ups, or a bomb so you can die in a fire. There’s a wide variety of enemies standing in your way, and you throw shurikens to make them die. Pretty standard stuff.

The controls in Jajamaru no Daibouken are extraordinarily floaty. You’re also allowed only two projectiles on screen at a time, s??o if you miss, you’re waiting until those babies fall off the edge of the screen before you throw another. It’s not that difficult in concept, but there are 20 levels (before it just loops back to the beginning) and no continues. Minute-by-minute, it’s easy-peasy, but actually climbing to th??e top is monumental.

Seizure warning

The bosses are fun, but not in the sense that they’re enjoyable to fight. They’re very basic and rather easy to defeat, but they’re things like warrior monks and Raijin (who appears to be peeing at the ground at high velocity). The monsters themselves are unique. I was delighted when I hit the game’s depiction of rokurokubi, the long-necked woman yokai. In ??general, I enjoy th??e game’s sprite-work. Its squat critters are quite charming.

The power-ups are where things get weird. The contents of blocks are randomized, so you could get one at any time, and four of the five of them cause invincibility. There’s a cart that lets you run over enemies, a potion that turns you intangible, and if you collect those ???and the shuriken upgrade, the screen just goes ballistic, and everything that appears on screen instantly dies. Seizure warning. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find Jajamaru-kun’s frog, Gamapakkun. Also seizure warning. He too makes you invulnerable and can eat enemies. Each one of these overpowered pick-ups lasts a long time, so you can scoot through huge portions of a level on a single power-up.

The fact that finding these are based entirely on luck is hilarious to me. You can find a cart in the first block you break, then the level is just cake. It’s the eq??uivalent of being born rich. Struggling is for poor people. Just tell the game that your dad plays golf with the chief of police and that DUI never hap?pened. See you at the finish line.

As sloppy as Jajamaru no Daibouken is, I found it to be a lot of fun. As I said, it’s not in the same league as Castlevania, but it has an infectious charm to it. If you’re privileged enough to find all the good power-ups, you can have the whole game finished rather quic??kly, but luck has a habit of not arriving on time. It had the mindset of arcade-to-console ports at the time in the fact that you were supposed to play them for the high score.

To my knowledge, Jajamaru no Daibouken was never ported from the Famicom. That is until the Famicom games were gathered up into the Ninja Jajamaru Collection on Switch and PS4. Of course, that was only released in Japan, but we’re living in a (mostly) region-free world. It’s just too bad we didn’t get a localize??d version here in the west, since some of the games are more text-heavy.

You don’t really need to know Japanese to play Jajamaru no Daibouken, though. There isn’t much text at all, and? the hardest to discern part of it is the score that each enemy gives, as it’s written in the classic Japanese style. If that still throws you off, I was able to find a fan translation of it.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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Shootin' at the walls of heartache

I have this headcanon with Ai Senshi Nicol, that it’s about a female protagonist out to rescue her girlfriend. It’s not much of a stretch. The title translates to Love Warrior Nicol (perhaps they meant Nicole, but the English text spells it Nicol). The protagonist has bright pink hair (which isn't strictly gendered, just to be clear). They’re named Nicol. Maybe it’s an unlikely subtext for a game released before even Caper in the Castro, but a girl can dream. Sometimes I wis?h '80s video ?games were a little gayer.

Ai Senshi Nicol is a top-down, flip-screen shooter by Konami. If you think The Guardian Legend but without the shoot-’em-up sections, I’ll have to take your word for it because it has been years since I last played it. I mostly just remember the awesome heroine who could turn into a spaceship. Maybe the top-down sections from Blaster Master are a better point of reference. The plot is that you need to save your girlfriend, whose name?? isn’t Nicole. It’s Stella.

Your job is to collect three crystals on each level. They’re hidden in underground sections of each stage and ??are largely dispersed to the far corners. To reach them, you have to do some light top-down platforming and shoot through a plethora of baddies. There’s no instant death. Even if you screw up a jump, you just fall into an underworld area and have to climb out to continue. That’s nice because death means you’re starting the stage over.

To avoid having to repeat entire stages, you’ll need to seek out power-ups. Astro Wear, Astro Pants, Power Shoes, and others.?? Oh, I see you've already got your?? Astro Pants on. Because your butt is out of this world.

As goofy as the nomenclature is, It’s really important to seek out this equipment. Astro Wear cuts down on the damage you’re taking, Power Shoes make you go faster, and Astro Pants prevent space lava from scalding your hyper legs. These aren’t dropped by enemies, which is fortunate, since it cuts down on the amount of grinding you might be tempted to do. Instead, they’re littered throughout the environment, giving Ai Senshi Nicol a hint of resource management. You’ll have an easier time if you stock up early and then don’t die. The Raiden or Gradius strategy.

The gameplay is extremely straightforward. The shooting, ?platforming, and exploration are extremely boilerplate. Even if it isn’t exceptional, it is rather tight, which is never guaranteed with 8-bit games. It’s fun, just not exactly inventive.

Where it does excel is in its variety of enemies, excellent sprite work, and musical score. It’s not exactly Journey to Silius in terms of soundtrack, but it has a few good bops. It’s Konami after all, and I can’t name one of their Famicom games that had a bad soundtrack. Hold on, I’ll try�Nope??, not coming to me.

The place where Ai Senshi Nicol satisfies the most is in its secrets. Being a Famicom Disk System game, you’re able to save, but it might be best to make a habit of starting the game over. Certain power-ups are significantly bett??er than your standard Cosmo Ball. There are hidden upgrades that increase your health and weapon. They’re used sparingly and only on certain levels, so figuring out where they are can give you a huge advantage in the game's final stages.

Even without them, Ai Senshi Nicol doesn’t carry a deadly challenge. With a bit of patience, it’s all doable, but it’s maybe a bit more fun if you get Nicol nice and doped. There are seven levels in all, whic??h makes the save system almost a requirement. You can probably beat it in an afternoon, just don’t make any other plans.

While not in the running for my favorite Konami Famicom discoveries, Ai Senshi Nicol is def??initely worth the time, especially if you’re looking for something to slot into your Disk Sys?tem. What it lacks in memorability, it makes up for by just being a quality game. Of course, you might remember it better if you adopt my gay headcanon for it.

Aside from the title screen’s logo, I don’t recall seeing even a spot of Japanese text in Ai Senshi Nicol. There’s no dialogue (aside from Oh! Mygod.) and the inventory screen is in English. A mor??e useful translation would be for the manual, but there isn’t information there you can’t find elsewhere on the internet.

Like many Konami Famicom games, Ai Senshi Nicol was re-released once on mobile phones in 2006. However, it was never localized, even though it would have been a great fit for the 3DS Virtual Console. Konami has been releasing some surprising collections lately, so fingers crossed that we’ll see something that rounds out their early releases that don’t necessarily fit in with a longer series. Games like Ai Senshi Nicol, Getsu Fuuma Den, and Yume Penguin Monogatari. Again, a girl can dream.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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Sweaty men not included

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Advance Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp since its announcement. I’ve loved the series since I first played it on Game Boy Advance back in 2001. At the time, I had no idea that the games date back to the Famicom, and, for some reason, Advance Wars was just the first we got in?? North America. When I started collecting for the Famicom, it was one of the first games I looked for.

I wound up with Daisenryaku due to a strangely worded l??isting. The colle??ctor’s market was kind of weird back then.

I did eventually land what I was looking for. I had the privilege of trying it out with a friend of mine who also loves the series. As it turned out, there was some to be had. N??othing t??hat hasn’t been antiquated by later games in the series, but fun nonetheless.

I want to talk about the box art to Famicom Wars because it’s one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. Forget about bearded fellows playing the banjo or horrible Sega Master System covers, Famicom Wars decided to promote itself using a row of sweaty boot camp trainees screaming at the camera. I honestly cannot fathom the discussions that went on around the use of it. Was Nintendo happy? Was the development team happ??y? Did the company that put this together ever find work again?

Those sweaty men don’t feature within the game. Instead, it’s the?? same bizarre light-hearted approach to war that we’re used to from the series. Okay, there’s no dialogue, so we don’t get COs patting each other on the back for the great battle that resulted in untold collateral damage and lives lots, but it’s still presented in?? an off-puttingly goofy fashion. Forget the horrors of war, just focus on the strategy.

Perhaps predictably, Famicom Wars is the formula distilled down to its purest elements. You’ve got the Red Star and Blue Moon armies. They’re evenly matched, and the COs are just generic army dudes. However, the main gameplay elements are all here. Grid-based, units with strengths and weaknesses, terrain that offers defensive cover, and capturing cities for a better daily income. If you know how to play Advanc?e Wars, then you’re all set here. If you don’t, then just know it’s a simple take on the tactical war genre.

Many of the units that would be carried through the Game Boy Wars games and into Advance Wars existed here. Tanks and artillery in light and heavy flavors, infantry, bazooka infantry, battleships, and bombers. The big difference is that APCs and supply trucks are separate unit?s. The supply trucks deserve special mention because they’re very unintuitive. When in a group of units, they always resupply the unit closer to the enemy. They would also sometimes just refuse to resupply for reasons I couldn’t discern. Maybe if I had the instruction manual.

One feature that I wished was carried over to later games in the series is the persist??ent campaign. There’s no story mode, but there’s a series of islands to be taken over. If you’re playing a 2-player campaign, then you’re essentially fighting to see who ?can capture the most islands. There’s a battery backup in the cartridge, which means that you can keep the campaign going over multiple play sessions. Unfortunately, the battery in my cartridge died. Have you ever tried opening a Nintendo-type Famicom cartridge? There are no screws, just plastic clips. Taking them apart without breaking those clips is a harrowing experience.

There are some drawbacks. The AI takes all the time to make its moves as a human player would, but without the conversation and smack talk. It’s not bad in early maps where there aren’t many units fielded, but in the bigger maps, I would literally walk away from the game and come back after a few minutes to find that they were still thinking about moving units. This was a problem with a lot of early turn-based strategy games. SD Gundam World, for example, or even Game Boy Wars.

It’s also a rather unbalanced game. I recall a match where I was being trampled by a friend of mine in 1v1. I was on the ropes, but I tu??rned the whole battle around because I was the first one to drop the money on a battleship. Those beasts hit anything; land, sea, air. They’re the ultimate artillery and I can’t think of a single strategy that could defeat a blockade of those things. Of course, I’m no, uh�Captain Picard. I’m drawing a blank here on actual military leaders.

I had to bring up that time I won because he was always better than me at strategy ga??mes.

It’s somewhat important to note that, while both games are similar, Famicom Wars predated Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light by about two years. Both were designed by Intelligent Systems, or perhaps more accurately programmed by Toru Narihiro. While Fire Emblem is a much more advanced game with its narrative, persistent unit death, and RPG elements, there’s a lot of Famicom Wars DNA in there, and it’s unlikely it would e??xist with??out its predecessor.

It’s easy to say that Famicom Wars was made obsolete by later games in the series, but I think it’s more im??portant to appreciate how fun it still is. Even back in 1988, the foundation of the series was pretty strong. I just wi??sh we got it over here.

Nintendo did recently go to the effort of localizing the original Famicom version of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, though they only offered it for a limited amount of time and then, mystifyingly, pulled it from stores. However, they tend to have more respect for the Fire Emblem series since the western audience latched onto it and turned it into a million-seller. Maybe if Advance Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp succeeds, we’ll finally see a localization. On the other hand, you could just use the map editor to remake all the Famicom Wars maps, so what do I know?

As for what’s there now, if you’re brave, you can poke around with the Japanese menus and try to? figure things out. Otherwise, you need to know the language. There’s no story, but there are a lot of stats?? and unit types. Luckily, there is a fan translation available. Maybe check it out if you’d like to see where this series spawned.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Famicom Wars was alre?ady a solid foundation for Advance Wars appeared first on Destructoid.

Ikuze!

It’s an absolute crime that we got so few titles from the Ganbare Goemon series in the West. Not that all of them were terrific, but they almost always tried new things and were usually enjoyable. We didn’t see our first until the third (Fourth? Fifth? It’s complicated) game in the series, localized as 1992’s Legend of the Mystical Ninja on SNES.

While the original Ganbare Goemon on Famicom got the series off to a good start, it would be 1989's Ganbare Goemon 2 that would establis?h one of the franchise’s hallmark features: simultaneous co-op.

As the st??ory goes, Goemon is in prison, where he meets his soon-to-be BFF Ebisumaru. Ebisu-chan tells of a mystical treasure. Bored of life in prison, the duo decides to just leave and traipse across Japan to look for this treasure.

There’s a lot borrowed and a lot changed from the first Ganbare Goemon. The original title had a pretty strict gameplay loop of having you seek out three passes in each level to proceed. While that makes a return for some stages, Ganbare Goemon 2 shakes things up by ending others with bosses and cutscenes. There’s less emphasis on finding holes in the ground by jumping over them. It also doubl?es down on the mini-games and ana??chronism jokes.

The Goemon series has never been totally straight-faced, but there’s an obvious decline into insanity throughout the titles. Ganbare Goemon 2 for example, has yokai-interrupted strip shows, the option to run into the women’s bath, and a store that sells Konami game cartridges that changes the enemies into popular characters from other games. While there are no roller-skating giant robots just yet, the weirdness Goemon is known for is in full swing.

It’s also where Goemon really begins his traipse across Japan. Most games in the series involve him traveling around his home country, but the original Ganbare Goemon stuck to one prefecture. Here, you travel from Kyushu to Hokkaido, one level at a time. Feudal Japan is maybe not as splendiferous as it would be on the SNES, but it gives the Ganbare Goemon 2 a decent sense of variety and a tangible feeling ??of progression.

It can be a grind, h??owever. Most le?vels subscribe to the rule of two passes being underground and one of them being in a �D�maze. However, you can also buy passes in stores, which can be expensive. There’s no indication of where the underground passages are hidden, so you jump in slightly conspicuous spots to find them. You might just wind up buying the passes to avoid the hit and miss of leaping across the levels.

But one stage doesn’t even give you the option. You have to buy all three passes. The only ways to get money are bopping enemies and gambling, so if you haven’t managed to accumulate all the needed scratch by the time y??ou get to that level, you’re left to grind for the rest. This is painful, especially in co-op.

It’s maybe not the best game in the Goemon series, but it is a formative title, cementing standards that would be held through the series�run. One thing to note is that while the Ganbare Goemon series is consistently enjoyable, it’s very rarely great. Most titles have little issues that hold them back, and the fo??rmula in them changes so substantially from game to game that it never quite gets things nailed down.

Ganbare Goemon 2’s setbacks larger come down to difficulty and the need to grind. Money can get you far. Items will allow you to take extra hits, you can heal at many shops and ??inns around the stages, and you can even buy more lives. It makes a big difference when it comes to getting through the more difficult areas, of which there are quite a few. It’s not impossible, and I’ve made? it through with a co-op partner on more than one occasion; it can just make things a lot more troublesome.

Still, there’s a lot of fun to have in co-op, as long as someone doesn’t mind being the bizarre Ebisumaru. While the first Famicom title may have arrived too early to feel the full effects of The Legend of Zelda and Metroid’s impact on console games, Ganbare Goemon 2 ditche??d all the old arcade hold-overs and is a much more enjoyable experience than the first game. It’s a pretty solid title for t?he Famicom overall.

Can you get through Ganbare Goemon 2 without knowing Japanese? That’s tough. I’ve done it multiple times knowing minimal Japanese, but it’s enough to let me know what each building does. However, the basics of gameplay are easy enough to grasp without it. Luckily, if you can’t navigate the language, there are fan translations out there that can grea?tly demystify things.

It was ported to the Wii U and 3DS Virtual Consoles, but only in Japan. I’m still holding out hope that Konami will bring us a Goemon collection, but considering they had M2 port Getsu Fuuma Den to modern consoles and didn’t bother translating it; forgive me if I'm doubtful.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Ganbare Goemon 2 is where the series sta??rts getting weird appeared first on Destructoid.

Jetto, Jetto, Jetto-man!

I was at the perfect age when Mighty Morphin Power Rangers hit the scene. I absolutely ate it up like almost every kid my age. Then my sister made fun of me for watching it so hard that I actually became too ashamed to tune in. Whenever I bring this up to her, she just says, "you're welcome." Older sisters suck.

I don’t remember what lead me to watch Choujin Sentai Jetman. It was Toei’s 15th entry in the Super Sentai series and was the one right before Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger: the series that was adapted into Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I was learning Japanese, and for some reason, I was curious about Tokusatsu, so I just grabbed the series. I didn’t make it through its 50-some-odd episodes, but I watched a sig?nificant chunk and don’t? regret it. That is one weird damned show.

Anyway, there was a Famicom game based on it, and while I wasn?’t expecting much, I had to have it. It definitely wasn’t much.

Choujin Sentai Jetman translates to “bird-person squadron Jetman,�which I find rather amusing since it implies that its members are both birds and jets. The story of the show is that a space station explodes while trying to make super-??soldiers, and random people in Japan are hit with “birdonic waves.�The group behind Jetman decide to just recruit these people to help save the world from aliens, and understandably, two of the five don’t even want to be there.

From there, if you’re familiar with the Power Rangers formula, it isn’t much different here. The bad gu??ys, who look like they’re from a Visual Kei band, create monsters to terrorize Japan, and the bird-people jet-men show up to deal with them. They fight their goons, then they fight the monster, then t?he monster grows so they summon their robot and fight while causing extraordinary collateral damage.

What I loved about Choujin Sentai Jetman was how weird it was. The monsters were things like a bus or a camera, and then there was my favorite: an evil cup of instant ramen. It had a love triangle, for some reason, and the lead guy never stops pining for his dead love, who later turns out to?? be alive or something.

None of this is translated into the game, but love triangles are a little advanced for the Famicom. Actually, there isn’t much plot?? represented within the game at all. That would probably take effort, which I don’t think the team at Natsume cared to invest in. Monsters from the show make appearances as bo?sses, but I don’t really think their levels reflect the episodes they’re from. Granted, it’s been ten years since I watched the show, but I mostly remember the battles happening in quarries and public parks.

Each of the five levels has two parts: a really boring sidescroller and a very crappy fighting game. You select from the five bird-jets, each using their weapons from the show. Blue Swallow and White Swan have bird blasters. ??Black Condor and Red Eagle have swords, and Yellow Owl has the gauntlet. Yellow Owl is probably the best, but in the show he’s the comic relief character. N??o one wants to play the comic relief character. They want to play as Gai, the Black Condor, because he smokes and rides a motorcycle. He’s like Japanese Wolverine.

I want to be clear: Choujin Sentai Jetman isn’t strictly bad; it’s just extremely low-effort. The sidescrolling sections are so basic. The only real difference between them is the odd enemy that shows up in some levels but not others. They only scroll horizontally; there isn’t even a token elevator section. It plays like Shatterhand with none of its redeeming qualities.

The boss battles are equally as interchangeable but twice as bullshit. Each boss is largely the same, but to keep you guessing, sometimes they throw two punches in a row, and other times they throw three punches. You have a special bar that charges over time and is the real key to bea??ting the bosses, but you can’t just back off and wait for it to charge, or it??’ll be death by chip damage. It really comes down to trying to do more damage than the enemy.

If you’re going to die, it’s probably going to be during the boss battles. That sucks, because if you die during the sidescroller sections, you switch ?to another ranger and start from the checkpoint, but if you lose to the boss, you start the whole level over again. The levels are stupid-short, so it’s not the en??d of the world, but when you just want to learn the boss battle, it’s frustrating that you have to do the whole level again.

After you beat the five initial levels, you’re sent to the end game, which plays out basically the same as any normal level. The whole game can be finished in less? than an hour if you already know the basics.

Again, Choujin Sentai Jetman isn’t horrible to play; it is just startlingly routine. It’s like the development team created a generic video game template, slapped on the license, and forgot to add the fun. The only thing going for it is that you get to play as your favorite jet-people. It fits my very specific definition of a game.

You don’t really need a translation for Choujin Sentai Jetman. The logo is in Japanese, but the main menu is in English, and there’s no dialogue. You might think there’s no point to it getting released in North America, but Shout! Factory actually released the TV series on DVD in North America?? back in 2018. Weird, but if you like the show, the game�exists.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Choujin Sentai Jetman w??as more spandex than the Famicom could handle appeared first on Destructoid.

We're definitely not gambling this Famicom Friday

From a young age, video games have covertly been teaching me ??to gamble, which is funny because I don’t. I think my parents took me to a casino for my 19th birthday. I won $300 on a slot machine and decided to never gamble again. That means I beat the system. I beat it for $300.

I think video games have just taught me how boring gambling is. Why leave winning up to random chance when I can use my big beefy thumbs to take me up gratitude lane? Even games that mix in some skill aren’t that interesting when I can play against Sam from Sam & Max in Poker Night in the Inventory. Oh, I guess you can’t really buy that anymore. Okay, then against bikini’d women in Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2.

I digress; video games have been at it essentially since video games became a thing. It was no different in Japan, except they also had Pachinko games. Take Mezase Pachi Pro: Pachio-kun for exa?mple, which is potentially the cutest way to feed a burgeoning addicti??on.

If you don’t know what ??Pachinko is, I’ll tell you this: it definitely isn’t gambling. Gambling is illegal in Japan, after all. No, thi??s is nothing like it. You win balls, not money, then you take those balls and trade them for a special token. You can then take that special token somewhere else (completely unrelated to the pachinko establishment, I assure you) and sell it for money. See? Nothing like gambling.

Despite not being gambling, a not insignificant percentage of Japan’s GDP is generated by Pachinko and Pachislot. It’s ?rooted in the country’s culture, and like gambling over here, it’s ruined some lives.

So here’s Pachio-kun to teach you the basics. Like in, say, Casino Kid, you roam the parlor as an anthropomorphic pachinko ball. There are rows of machines �72 in all. Only three machines are really unique, but each has ?different angles for its pins, affecting how the balls bounce. Your goal is, I’m told, to drain all those balls. Each machine has a set amount, and you ??need to suck them all dry. Listen, it’s very monotonous, and my brain had ample time to start thinking up juvenile analogies involving balls.

You adjust the strength that the balls are ejected, then you just�hold the button down, making small adjustments and trying to get them into the machine’s various holes. Because of the various ways that the pins are bent, it’s impossible to just fin??d the right vector and stick to it. Even after finding a vague spot where you find consistent success, the lever loosens over time, so you have to stay awake and just keep moving it?? back to where it was.

You can inspect the pins, and maybe that will give yo??u some way of strategizing the quickest way of defeating the machine, but?? this is an 8-bit system. Chances are that lever has 255 settings, and most of those are too strong or too soft to really matter. It is not difficult to find a sweet spot, and then it’s just a matter of keeping your eyes open to keep the balls flying to the right place.

There were at least twelve of these Pachio-Kun games: five on the Famicom and three on the Super Famicom. On top of that, there were another three on the P??C-Engine CD and one on the PC-FX. That seems a little excessive, but at leas??t on the Famicom they’re cheap and fun to collect.

They’re also interesting for maybe ten minutes, and after that, if you’re still playing, it’s probably for that constant endorphin rush of seeing numbers go up. I guess some people have more desire for that than I do. Games that are entirely just slot machines are still created to this day, and those just involve pressing a button and passively awaiting the results. At least Pachio-kun lets you annoy the other patrons.

Speaking of which, there’s a shocking amount of text in Pachio-Kun, but I think most of it is for flavor. I looked for a translation and found hints that one was being worked on but couldn't find the finished product. Still, i??t’s perfectly playable without needing one. T?he language of balls is universal.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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Break out the rohos for this Famicom Friday

One of the holy grails of the NES library is a game called Little Samson. While it’s a pretty solid game, it commands the highest value for an official NES game (yes, Stadium Events is more expensive, but it’s just a different title screen for World Class Track Meet). It was developed by Takeru, and if you’re unfamiliar with the name, that’s because North America only got one of their games, and it was Little Samson. So, that’s not very helpful.

They made one other game for the Famicom, and that was Cocoron. Let me show you its pedigree: Cocoron was designed by Akira Kitamura. Have you heard of him? He created Mega Man. He was the designer of Mega Man and Mega Man 2. Excited yet? Maybe cool those jets.

Mega Man, this is not, but it certainly tries. Cocoron is definitely an action platformer, but its focus is more on fusion. You start off by creating a character by choosing a ?head?, body, and projectile. Depending on what you put together, you’ll get something with completely different firepower, jump height, and speed. While you start off with this character, as you progress, you start building a stable of freakish monstrosities to choose from.

But that’s not all! The level progression, like Mega Man, has you simply pick where you ?want to go next. However, the stage you’re presented with is a combination of the one you’re currently at and the one you’ve chosen with a boss at the end of it. Stages change depending on what sequence you pick, so, technically?, there are a lot of unique places to visit.

Unfortunately, that’s the main problem you’ll bump into. Because the stages are all stitched together, their design is positively posterior. Each segment has its own obstacles, but none are as interesting as something you’d find in, say, Mega Man. Even in different environments, some of? the sections se??em a little too similar.

There’s a big finale after you’ve defeated the main bosses and rescued the princess, which, once again, is just like Mega Man. The big difference is that you’re tasked with reclaiming al??l your constructed heroes who have been captured. It hits when it’s needed and is a nice? change of pace.

There are also a lot of options for your character, but certain ones like the boat body ??don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Yeah, it can make certain segments of a level easier, but it seems more practical to create a general use character that works for most situations. You can have a stockpile of cha??racters, but they each level up individually, so it makes more sense to use only one or two. You can only choose a new one at the beginning of each level, so it’s not like you can just swap to the most optimal one for each obstacle.

It’s kind of unfortunate because the platforming is as tight as you’d expect from the creator of Mega Man. The graphics also show a lot of love and detail. Characters who stand on a slope, for example, will change posture to fit the slope. It kind of makes Cocoron feel extremely tech first; one of those games that is trying to see how much it could squeeze from Nintendo’s 8-bit powerhouse but sort of forgets to place its ch?ips where it counts.

That’s not to say that Cocoron isn’t fun; it’s just a whole heap of wasted potential. The variety that is such a focus is wasted because the design doesn’t necessitate its use enough. The result is a game that doesn’t even provide a convincing argument against Mega Man’s imitators like Bucky O’Hare.

Cocoron is still worth checking out, but more as a curio or tech ??demo. You won’t find anything quite like it on the F?amicom. It feels more like a “can we do it�sort of game rather than a “will it be fun�approach.

There’s a decent amount of Japanese text, but you can mostly ignore it. It’s most helpful to know the language when building your charact??er since it’s the only way to know what projectile you’re saddling them with. However, for those English monolinguists among us, there is a fan translation available.

Speaking of the language, there’s one strange quirk with Cocoron: I could never figure out how to add a tenten or maru mark when ente?ring a name. To explain briefly, these marks change the consonant sound in Japanese syllables. Wit??hout them, I couldn’t spell, for example, robo. It can only be spelled as roho. It’s a strange oversight considering the dialogue has these marks. Maybe I’m just missing something, but I don’t know where you hide a function on a Famicom controller. The second player controller’s microphone?

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Cocoron is a strange departure fo?r ?the creator of Mega Man appeared first on Destructoid.

Taco Hog missed you

If there’s one Japanese trend that it’s maybe better off w?e missed out on in the Famicom era, it’s their non-games. Or anti-games, maybe? They were deliberate kusoge that played with the expectations players had learned in much more popular games. They were designed to confound. If the gameplay wasn’t obtuse, it was obnoxiously inconvenient, or insurmountably difficult.

??That’s how you teach children what it’s like t??o be an adult.

I’m not sure if these were supposed to be funny, but the joke wears thin pretty quickly. Off the top of my head, I can name three of these games: the legendary Takeshi no Chousenjou, the bizarre Utsurun Desu, and 1988's Paris-Dakar Rally Special. I think the latter is the most malicious because by loo?king at the name or cover art, you can’t really tell it’s anything but a racing game.

The Paris-Dakar Rally was an endurance race that, appropriately, started in Paris, France, and ended in Dakar, Senegal. Due to security concerns, it ended in 2008 and just became the Dakar Rally, moving to other regions. I guess some people don’t appreciate it when a bunch of rich people drive high-performance cars through impover??ished areas of Western Africa.

Inequality aside, that’s not a bad idea to base a game on, but I don’t think the developers at ISCO, Inc really wanted to. I’m not sure they wanted to make a game at all. In fact, I feel like the notoriety behind Transformers: Convoy no Nazo might have motivated them to top it as an ??unfairl?y difficult kusoge.

Forget what you know about rally driving, which will be easy if you’re like me because I know very little. Paris-Dakar Rally Special starts you off trying ?to acquire a car, a sponsor, and a co-driver. This means walking the stre?ets, entering every building, and inquiring each of them about the above things. Despite being the most needlessly complicated part of the game, it’s also the easiest because you can’t die or run out of time.

Then it’s time to actually race, and this is where Paris-Dakar Rally Special really starts showing its contempt for you. It’s easy enough, at? first, as you avoid cars and barrels, but then other cars start coming up from behind and you have little room and time to get out of their way. A single hit drops a life off your gauge, and you can only get hit three times before you have to start the whole level over.

This was the part I was stuck on for the longest. Mainly because it goes on forever. Partially because I wasn’t acclimated to Paris-Dakar Rally Special’s maliciousness.

The next level is, like, sort of a maze. You’re still trying to reach the top of the screen, but ??you need to pilot your rally car through city streets while other cars meander about. It’s straightforward once you learn that going onto the left-most street summons a death car gunning for your tailpipe. However, once again, this segment just keeps going and going. You have to be precise and not make any mistakes to get to the end.

After that is a side-scroller where your car can shoot for some reason. There’s some light puzzle-solving as you need to get out of your car to hit a button and extend a bridge or open a gate. I found this to be one of the easier levels in Paris-Dakar Rally Special.

It looks like you’re in for more of the same in the following stage since it ?too is a sidescroller. However, after carefully getting across a couple of water hazards, suddenly you just descend underwater to live under the sea. I guess you have to get across the Mediterranean somehow. This is a water stage, much like the ones that haunted children of the �0s. However, I didn’t find this to be overly taxing.

Then, you’re offroading. This is like a less annoying version of Stage 1. The hardest part is getting across the bodies of water by using rafts. The controls are ?just kind?? of terrible and missing the raft means death. This version is probably the easiest of the top-down stages, but that’s not saying much.

After that, you’re attacked by either the military or aliens or both. The vehicles look kind of otherworldly to me, but that might just be bad pixel art. Anyway, they want you dead. They ?did not authorize a race in this vicinity. Thankfully, this leg of the race is one of the shorter ones, and I still think you can die faster on the streets of Paris on level 1.

Finally, the 7th stage of Paris-Dakar Rally Special has you drive along precariou??s cliffs. M?y advice: take it slow. It’s a long segment, but there’s plenty of time.

Maybe don’t take my advice in going slow, because Paris-Dakar Rally Special ranks you at the end based on your time. Seriously, there’s a bad ending if you didn’t. It isn’t too difficult to beat all the other drivers, but, I mean, it’s a real bummer if you don’t. Paris-Dakar Rally Special is a pretty brutal game. Not the hardest I’ve encountered on the system, but just really?? stupid hard for ??what it is.

It’s mostly notable bec?ause it’s easy to think this is a game strictly based on the Paris-Dakar Rally, when it is blatantly not that. Not unless I missed something and the drivers actually swim their cars through the Mediterranean Sea. It’s just really weird. It feels like something that shouldn’t exist and probably wouldn’t in today’s market. There are many anti-games that still get released today, but I don’t think any went to the effort of acquiring a license just to pull a bait-and-switch.

If you’re wondering if English monolinguists can play it; sort of. The first section is text-heavy, but you can get pretty far just by going into every building and selecting every option. That’s because you essentially need to do that even if you know the language. It’s hard to know which ??building will give you money and which will provid??e you with a co-driver. It might help if you patch in the fan translation. Feeling your way through the first area might be the least of your challenges, however.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Famicom Friday returns wit?h the legendary bai?t-and-switch Paris-Dakar Rally Special appeared first on Destructoid.

Get a real job this Famicom Friday

For Famicom Friday, I cover a lot of obscure titles because I find it more fulfilli??ng than regurgitating games that people have more likely heard of, but the downside is that the cream usually rises to the top. Often, you haven’t heard of something because it’s not worth hearing of. Not always.

Take Kemco’s Electrician, for example. It’s an obscure Famicom Disk System game from 1986 that I hadn’t hear?d of until a shopkeep convinced me to buy it one day. I’m glad I took the advice, because Electrician is some of the most fun I’ve had on my Famicom Disk System since the day I changed the belt and recalibrated it. Except, you’re probably going to make fun of me for liking it so much.

ELECTRICIAN
Developer: David Bunch
Publisher: Kemco
Released: December 1986
Also Available On: Atari 8-Bit

Developed by David Bunch, Electrician began its life on Atari 8-bit computers in 1984. I’m not exactly sure why Kemco decided to pick this already overlooked American computer game to port to Famicom for Japanese audiences, but they did in 1986. They brushed it up, ?added a more finite gameplay loop, injected some cuteness into the graphics, and made a few other tweaks.

The game stars Richard Light as he attempt?s to restore power to the entirety of the United States after it was knocked out by an earthquake. To do this, he must reconnect wires to each room across various towers.

Mmm. There’s something so ??satisfying about the connection mechanic. You actually run the wires and plug them into little ports in each of the rooms. Don’t judge me, sometimes working in a game can be fun.

The game is split into two portions. The first is what I already went?? over -- plug in all the rooms -- the other is navigating a dark sewer because… I guess electricians travel ?by sewer? There are enemies, of course, that you must avoid but will electrocute themself against live wires. They mostly just exist to get in the way and frustrate your attempts at re-energizing the world. More likely, you’re going to just die because you missed a jump in the tower stages because the controls aren’t super great.

In the sewer stages, you use your flashlight to try and find the best way to get to the right side of the screen. Turtles attempt to get in your w??ay because this was 1986 and we had just recently discovered that turtles live in the sewers and eat pizza. You’ve only got a flashlight to navigate the dark corridors, so the challenge is mostly in finding your way past walls that you can’t see until you’re right beside them. There’s also moles (I think?) and caterpillars. Sometimes you have to go over water in a boat.

Which isn’t as cool as connecting wires to rooms. You may be asking if that’s it and, yeah, basically. Rewire rooms, cross sewers, repeat for several levels until all of the U.S. is patched up. It’s arcade style gameplay, but you can save and the game ends after you complete enough levels. Then you kiss the Statue of Liberty and try again for the high score. There are lots of li?ttle tricks and secrets that can boost your score, but if you’re not the type to chase numbers, it’s not likely going to sway you.

I don’t know what to tell you, I just love Electrician. It doesn’t have the challenge of something like Donkey Kong, but I find the task of wiring in rooms to be extremely satisfying. It’s simple, instant gratification. It’s calming busy-work. The ga??me isn’t that ??difficult aside from the sometimes wonky jumping controls, but that just adds to the mindless pleasure.

Electrician is pretty easy to figure out for any monolingual English speakers. However, what is still in Japanese can be deobfuscated using a fan translation. It’s kind of strange that we never got an NES version? of this, as the save system isn’t that necessary, and it was a Western game to begin with. I&rsquo?;m just kind of mad that we got the NES version of Superman from Kemco, but not this.

As far as I’ve found, Electrician was never re-released. It’s doubtful we’ll ev??er see it again, because the original publisher, Synapse, became Broderbund and then became just a wisp of a company. They still release old titles, but I doubt they’d be interested in getting back in bed with Kemco to re-release a game that no one has really heard of.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Rewire the entire United States in Kemco’s Electrician appeared first on Destructoid.

Dare to dream that Konami is getting it back together this Famicom Friday

The announcement of GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon caught me off guard. It’s like running into your human wreckage of an ex. You thought all they did was gamble away their money constantly, but here they are talking about their new job like nothing ever happened. You start remembering all the good times, you dare to believe that maybe they’ve finall??y cleaned up their act. Maybe Konami has really changed and this is proof of that. Truthfully, I’m expecting to wake up and find my wallet and jewelry missing.

What’s weird about this, however, is that GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon is actually based on a Famicom exclusive title from 1987; Getsu Fuuma Den. It was never released in North America, it never received a sequel, all we got were some cameos in games like Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, while Japan would see him again in the Wai Wai World titles. I wouldn’t go as far as saying the series was forgotten, but when Konami is sitting on a tr??easure trove of marketable franchises, it’s strange to see them reach this far into the bucket.

Of course, it’s unlikely you’ll need to be versed in Getsu Fuuma Den to understand the new game. It’s technically a sequel taking place 1000 years later, with the actual core gameplay ??being completely different. There is a connection there for fans, but likely nothing so intense you’ll need to have the background. Nonetheless, let’s take a moment to get acquainted with Konami’s not-quite-classic.

GETSU FUUMA DEN
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: July 1987
Also Available On: Wii, 3DS, Wii U, PC

Getsu Fuuma Den is the story of Getsu Fuuma (the den is short for “densetsu” or “legend”). His two brothers ventured off to defeat ?the Ryukotsuki and were defeated. As the last Getsu brother, he has to venture into Yomi to retrieve three swords and defeat Ryukotsuki. Yomi, in case you weren’t aware, is the Japanese Shinto version of the underworld. It’s typically translated to “Hell” because it’s a dark place that dead people go, but I find this to be inaccurate. It’s more like the ancient Greek concept of Hades in that everybody goes there when they die, regardless of whether they are good or bad.

In any case, Yomi is depicted as an overworld maze. You walk alon??g paths, attempting to find your way around, and are blocked by various Shinto gates. Once you bump into one of these, the game transitions into a side-scroller where you have to get from one end of ??the screen to the other, depending on which direction you were heading in the overworld.

It’s often considered to be a sort of sister title to Castlevania, but don’t get too excited. While they’re both side-scrolling action games with dark themes, that’s generally where the similarities end. Castlevania is a strictly linear but well-crafted experience whereas Getsu Fuuma Den is as slippery and slop??py as a turkey avocado sandwich.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, but get a hold of those floaty controls. You’re given a life bar the length of a Twizzler and you’ll need it, because the combat is just as loose as the movement and you’ll take your hits. A lot of enemies just charge at you and take two hits that are usually difficult to land before they make contact. The levels are slapdash collections of ledges, pits, and hazards that throw enemies at you just, like, wherever. It’s pretty far removed from Castlevania’s extremely thoughtful design, but there’s also about a million more levels than Castlevania had.

The truth is that the design just has completely different focuses. Getsu Fuuma Den is more of an action-packed murder sprint as you cut your way through the denizens of Yomi. The floatiness of the controls is something you’ll probably get used to eventually, I just want to set expectations here. Getsu Fuuma Den is not Castlevania. It just looks the part.

The point of your exploration is to find a "Demon Pass", given to you by winning a boss fight hidden somewhere in t?he world. Once you have that, you can continue on to one of the islands where you search for the dungeon.

The dungeons are little third-person mazes, not entirely unlike the ones in Ganbare Goemon, and yeah, it might be a good ??idea to grab some graph paper to make a map in case you get lost. Also, don’t go in the first one until you have bought the candle and compass from the shop. Within, you’ll find some sub-boss battles before you finally reach the head honcho and defeat him in side-scrolling combat. You’re rewarded with a sword. Repeat twice more.

I feel like I’m underselling the game while trying not to oversell it. Getsu Fuuma Den isn’t a rock hard classic like Ganbare Goemon 2 or Contra, but that doesn’t mean ??it’s not fun. The color palette takes some getting used to, but the music is absolutely fantastic. The overworld theme in particular is catchy as? hell and almost worth just sitting on the map screen to listen to.

Otherwis?e, the boss battles are pretty weak and the?? mazes are going to irk some people. Just set your expectations accordingly, and you’ll have a good time.

I personally love Getsu Fuuma Den, ?warts and all. It may be because it was part of my first run of Famicom games that I imported, or it may just be that it’s mor??e than the sum of its parts. It’s stupid, sure. It’s unpolished, yes. But it’s got style for days and there’s something captivating about it. Try it yourself and see what you think.

Getsu Fuuma Den is something of a Konami staple, and as such, it has been ported to Nintendo’s various Virtual Consoles. Never in North America, however, except… *gasp*, people who buy GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon in early access will get a copy of the Famicom game ported to PC by M2! Oh… It’s st??ill in Japanese only except for the option menus. Well, that was a roller coaster. In the meantime, there are fan translations out there.

It’s a shame, too. There’s a lot of text in Getsu Fuuma Den, and while it is completely possible to play without understanding any of it, you’re missing out on a lot of flavor and the entire story. I’d say that this is probably the best we could expect from Konami, but honestly, they recently released the Famicom version of Kid Dracula in English alongside their Castlevania Anniversary Collection, so there is precedent. Maybe if this new title does well enough they’ll decide to go the extra mile. Or, maybe we’ll just di?scover them?? crying in front of the pachinko parlor.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Get acquainted with Konami’s Getsu Fuuma Den before playing Undying Moon appeared first on Destructoid.

Just stop Bluto from punching that baby this Famicom Friday

We’ve been friends for a while now, right? And after all these Famicom articles, you’re probably thinking, “gee, that lady sure does know Japanese.” That’s not true. My Japanese can best be described as existent. I can sometimes take directions and pick out the odd word from a sentence. I can read some parts of instruction manuals, just enough that I can figure out what is a power-up and what increases your speedo. I was able to tell someone I don’t drink coffee, and I know the difference between a densetsu, a daib??ouken, and a monogatari.

So, no, I’m hardly fluent in the language. I don’t study as much as I should. Famicom games just rarely ?require a high level of comprehension.

So, for this Famicom Friday, we’re going to get a little vocabulary practice in using Popeye no Eigo Asobi or (and I’m using my actua?l language skills to translate this) "Popeye’s English Game". Or play. Or pastime. Let’s go with my first translation.

Popeye no Eigo Asobi
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 1983
Also Available On: Nothing

If you can’t tell from the name, Popeye no Eigo Asobi is a game to teach kids how to speak the English language. That may seem like it has absolutely no application to you or me, however, it’s vocabulary, so it works perfectly fine in reverse so long as you have the basis in katakana (and you can honestly learn it in, like, a week maximum. I believe in you.) The game plays by giving you a word in katakana and having you guess what it is in English. It’s letter by letter like Hangman or Wheel of Fortune, so you don’t have to know the w??ord outright.

At least, that&rsq?uo;s what Word Puzzle A is. Word Puzzle B just gives you ho??w many letters a word is and you guess letters until you get it. I’m not sure what the point is, even for someone learning English.

You get to ??select your category from six options: Animal, Country, Food, Spor??ts, Science, and Other. It’s not a bad spread, but you’ll probably get more mileage out of some more than others. For example, a lot of countries are basically the same in Japanese as they are in English. It’s not difficult to figure out that “Angora” is “Angola” in English. Maybe “Chuugoku” being “China” will trip you up, but that’s more of an exception. Meanwhile, I rarely have to read or say the word for "giraffe", so it’s helpful to be drilled on it.

Really, the game is sort of like Donkey Kong Jr. Math in that it repurposes assets from another Famicom title to make learning tolerable. In this case, it’s Popeye, a port of the arcade game from Nintendo.

It&rsqu?o;s a decent fit, e??ven though I’m pretty sure Popeye fought the Japanese in WWII. You run around as Popeye, selecting letters, while Olive Oyl throws down the question using hearts, and Bluto punches a baby every time you guess an incorrect letter. I mean, what better people to teach you vocabulary than a group who only know how to resolve their arguments with heaping amounts of violence?

You may be asking if Popeye no Eigo Asobi is a worthwhile purchase if you want to learn the language. The answer is: no, absolutely not. We live in the future, and there are better ways to drill vocabulary into your brain out there on the internet. My main issue with doing it this way ??????????????????????????is it takes, like, a year for Olive to scatter her love to the ground in the form of a question, and there’s no way to speed it up. Still, I pop this cartridge every so often because there&??rsquo;s something unique about this form of education.

There’s also a two-player mode. One player controls Bluto and the other Popeye, and they compete to collect letters dropped by Olive Oyl to spell out the English equivalent to Japanese words. It’s a decent way for two people to study together, I guess. I mean, I think flashcards are pr??obably more stimulating, but there’s less undertone of violence.

This may surprise you, since it certainly surprised me, but there is a fan translation for Popeye no Eigo Asobi??. It essentially replaces the katakana with romaji so it can be read wit??hout needing to learn a new alphabet. I don’t really see the point, but it’s there for those who want it.

Unlike Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Popeye no Eigo Asobi has never been re-released. This is most likely due to the attached licensing, since the Popeye arcade game has never really been reissued, either. Honestly, I don’t think it needs to be. There are more effi?cient ways to drill vocabulary, but if you’re learning the language to play Famicom games, what better?? place to learn than on a Famicom?

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Learn Japanese using the power of love and violence in Nintendo’s Popeye no Eigo Asobi appeared first on Destructoid.

Can you shut up all aliens this Famicom Friday?

The official release date of the Nintendo Entertainment Syste??m was October 1985, but in truth, that was a test launch. Most people in North America didn’t? have a chance to buy the console until Autumn of ‘86. At that point, the Famicom had been on the market for three years in Japan.

Three years is a lot of time to build up a catalog of games, and the Famicom certainly did that. Most of the important titles would find their way to North American shores, but many during these lost years of the 8-bit platform fell by the wayside, regardless of their relevance. Take Door Door, for example. It’s a game that’s ingrained in the Japanese console player’s mindset, but it’s practically unknown here. It was the title that helped launch Enix into a position as a major player that would be solidified by the release of Dragon Quest.

If that doesn’t tell you how significant this title is, le?t’s ta?ke a closer look.

Door Door
Developer: Chunsoft
Publisher: Enix
Released: July 1985
Also available on: 8-Bit Home Computers, Mobile

Door Door is a concept by Koichi Nakamura, who entered it into a contest being held by the newly formed Enix. At the time, most game publishers developed their own games in-house, then released them as one entity, so the concept of picking up outside contractors and offering them royalties for their work was pretty novel. The title was first released in 1983 on the NEC PC-8801, a Japanese 8-bit home computer. It was then ported to various other computers until it finally landed on the Famicom, where it exploded in the vacuum that existed before Super Mario Bros.

The game features a little blob named Chun, who is being chased by a set of aliens. In order to save himself, Ch??un must open doors for the aliens to enter, then shut them once they’re inside. Something about opening doors for people really appeals to my Canadian mentality.

It may sound simple, and it definitely is in concept. However, if you go into it expecting to get by on your reflexes, you’re going to get trounced. While, on the surface, Door Door looks like a more action-based game like Pac-Man or Burgertime — and, indeed, there are clear similarities — using the same approach?? as you would with those titles quickly pro??ves ineffectual as the game limits the number of doors.

It’s better to come to Door Door like it’s a puzzle game. The aliens are controlled by deterministic artificial intelligence, meaning that they react to what you’re doing in a somewhat mindless fashion. If you’ve ever watched a breakdown of Pac-Man’s ghost AI, you probably know what I’m talking about. Two of the aliens chase you directl?y, one reacts to jumps, and the other tries to take the scenic route. The trick to high-level play is therefore to learn how to corral the enemies into a tight group and then trap them in the same door. Sometimes, only one door is available, so this isn’t just a strategy, but a necessity.

There are 50 levels in all, but don’t expect a win screen. This is strictly from the arcade-dominated 8-bit era, so the game is entirely cyclical and mostly concerned with having you set an unbeatable high score. This means it’s more likely to resonate with people who enjoy the old-fashioned arcade mindset. I like the odd game of Ms. Pac-Man, Burgertime, and Space Invaders, but I’ve never really taken much time to try and master one. Same goes for Door Door. I haven’t seen level 50, but it’s fun to ?p??ick up occasionally.

A lot of the game’s charm comes from its detailed and colorful visuals. It’s actually somewhat interesting to see a game?? so well animated and packed with character in a 1985 title. The one downside is that the movement is weirdly choppy. This might be a holdover limitation from the PC-8801 release, but characters seem to snap a few pixels at a time. It’s nothing too distracting, but it’s interesting to see in a Famicom title, even of this vintage.

Door Door would not only help see the rise of Enix in the industry, but would also lead to Koichi Nakamura establishing his own contracting company, Chunsoft, named after the title character. This would lead to the creation of Dragon Quest, the various Mystery Dungeon titles, and Danganronpa. They’re may?be not the mo??st influential of developers in today’s market, but the fact that they’re still trucking as Spike Chunsoft and releasing beloved games after all these years says a lot.

Despite being such a landmark game in Japan, one that is remembered with reverence, Door Door hasn’t seen much in terms of re-releases. It hasn’t hit a Virtual Console, for example, and is absent from Nintendo Switch Online. There was a mobile port for mobile phones in ??Japan through a service in 2004, but that’s the last we’ve seen of it.

Luckily, Door Door doesn’t use any Japanese in its screens, so it’s ??easily understood by English speakers. This is to the point where I don’t think there has been a release of a fan translation, as there isn’t anything to translate. It would be nice if it was easier to get a hold of here in North America, and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why it isn’t, but maybe the door isn’t com??pletely shut on the possibility.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Mind your manners and hold the door in Enix’s Door Door appeared first on Destructoid.

Aim for the title of Yokozuna this Famicom Friday

I don’t have much to say about the sport of sumo. It’s really old and has held onto many of its traditions. It’s also not difficult to get the gist of. Push the other rikishi out of the ring or knock them off their feet. Because of this, size is a major advantage and that gives us the typical image of a sumo wrestl??er: a ro??tund mass of human. Immovable objects that walk like men.

It’s interesting to me, but not enough that I’ve gone to the effort of actually seeking it out. If I want a dose of Japanese culture, I typically turn to dating simulators and my Famicom. What luck! Crossover! Way back in 1987, Tecmo released Tsuppari Oozumou, a simulation of the sport. Sort of.

Tsuppari Oozumou
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Released: September 1987
Also Available On: Wii, Wii U, 3DS, Famicom Classic Mini, Nintendo Switch Online

Tsuppari Oozumou may be the first Famicom sumo game, but it is neither th??e first sumo game nor the only one to be released on the system. It also doesn’t seem to be all that interested in presenting a simple simulation, but rather a fun in-between. Your goal is to progress through a series of tournaments, building up your rikishi un??til you achieve the rank of Yokozuna.

The foundation of the game is a p?retty simple progression of matches without much variance. Different rikishi employ different strategies, which is kind of cool for a 1987 release, but it’s always the same thing; same ring, same goal, same parameters. It may seem like something that would get old fast, but certain facets give it a one-more-tournament kind of value.

For starters, your rikishi levels up as you win fights, so you’re constantly getting stronger. Also, while the game is rather simple, through playing it, you’ll start to pick up new techniques that allow you to better dominate your opponent. This includes lifting them up by the thong and carr??ying them forward or countering them as they charge at you. I might be overselling the depth, but the point is that there is just enough that it reaches an almost addicting quality.

It helps that the graphics are adorable. It looks great for a 1987 title, featuring well animated and expressive wrestlers. The more cartoonish approach ??to the sport works for it through small details. Pause the game before a match starts and a dude will sweep the ring, get a really good throw on an opponent and they might cra?ck the ground, and the look on the face of a victorious rikishi is just so endearing. Even though you’re staring at the same arena the whole time, it’s still pretty visually stimulating.

Just be careful; the secret to winning is not mashing buttons as hard as you can. It can be really tempting to try and overpow??er your opponent by slapping the A button until they fall out of the ring, but you’re just going to wear out your thumb. Like actual sumo wrestling, it’s more about figuring how to wear down your opponent and use their momentum against them. Are you getting too close to the edge? Spin them around to turn the tables. Are they a little too aggressive? Give them a few face slaps t?o settle them down. Don’t just go on hugging and think that you can move them out of the ring, there is definitely some strategy involved.

There are some advanced ?techniques that involve pulling off certain moves while your stamina bar is flashing. It’s a little difficult to figure out at first, but as I reached the end of the game, I was starting to pull off suplexes with some regularity.

It may have taken me most of my night, but I was able to reach the rank of Yokozuna without tremendous difficulty. There’s a password system that? lets you continue from any point in the game, so you can ??put it down whenever your thumb tires out.

Tsuppari Oozumou is a pretty simple game, so I don’t want to oversell it, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s a sunny, light-hearted look at the sport, and it remains fun for its rather short runtime. If you have another player to compete with, it’s some nice, light entertainment. ?Just remember, in the heat of the mo??ment, don’t mash on the A button.

It’s no mystery why Tsuppari Oozumou never reached Western shores. While I think there was room for a sumo game in the NES library, it would have been a big risk for whatever publisher attempted it. As well as its Famicom release, it hit the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS Virtual Console. Additionally, It was included as one of the 30 games on the Famicom Classic Mini. ??These days, it can be found on Japan’s Nintendo Switch Online service, so if you feel like region hopping, you can try it out.

As for a translation, that’s a bit more difficult. There’s one that demystifies the menu options, but most of the game’s text is written in classic top-to-bottom reading style, and it makes heavy use of kanji. You can certainly play it without knowing the language, but you might have t?rouble tracking your progress. Maybe if you just want to play the two-player mode. In which case, it’s the bottom option on the main menu.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Brush up on your suplexes for Tecmo’s Tsuppari Oozumou appeared first on Destructoid.

Maybe blow yourself up to find a warp zone this Famicom Friday

Part of what draws me to Famicom games is the fact that I missed out entirely on the culture around it. Not only am I of an age that would have given the Super Famicom more significance, but -- and this ?may shock you -- I’m not Japanese.

One of my biggest windows into the Famicom culture is Game Center CX, a Japanese show that involves a guy, Shinya Arino, in an office playing video games for hours at a time in an attemp??t to beat them. There are segments that celebrate the games of yore and explore the many arcades that still exist scattered across the country, and bit by bit, you’re given insight into the Japanese perspective.

Among the things I’ve learned is that there was a period in the mid-‘80s where players seemed to be obsessed with “secrets.” This would sometimes merely be the presence of a warp zone, a concept that was grasped by Western audiences as well. Other times it would be a cameo appearance by characters from another game. But developers would occasionally go overboard. The most high-profile example of this in the West is probably Milon’s Secret Castle or Super Pitfall, impenetrable games that are almost impossible to topple without some sort of guide. We’d also be spared from the true Super Mario Bros. 2, which equally e?njoyed screwing with the p??layer unless they knew what they were doing.

Dig deep enough, and you’ll find quite a few examples of this, but one of my favorites is the absolutely stupid Atlantis no Nazo.

Atlantis No Nazo
Developed by: Sunsoft
Published by: Sunsoft
Released: April 1986
Also Available On: Playstation, Windows, Famicom Classic Mini, Nintendo Switch Online

Super Mario Bros. was released a few months previous to Atlantis no Nazo (Mystery of Atlantis) to great success. It was a transformative game that captivated audiences. By the time Atlantis no Nazo was released, Nintendo’s new whiz kid had sold 3 million copies in Japan alone. It’s no surprise th?at publishers wanted in on that frenzy, and Sunsoft was no exception.

However, no one really understood the special sauce that made Super Mario Bros. so successful. Most of the time, the strategy to beat it was to throw out a platformer crammed with warp zones, power-ups, and levels, and hope gamers would like it better. Atlantis no Nazo was advertised with the tagline “Ano Super Mario wo koeta,” or “That one that exceeded (or surpassed) Super Mario.&rd?quo; Certainly high ambitions, but you'd have to be insane? to push that comparison on yourself.

Atlantis no Nazo holds few similarities to Super Mario Bros. They’re both sidescrolling platformers, sure, but one protagonist jumps on turtles to save a princess, while the other throws dynamite at everything to save his master. The reason that Atlantis no Nazo compared itself favorably to Super Mario Bros. comes down to how many levels are included: 100 compared to the 32 found in Super Mario Bros. Take that, Mario.

I’d say the Mario Bros. comparison is actually a disservice to Atlantis no Nazo because it ignores what makes the game special. While Super Mario Bros. was a linear progression (unless you took warp zones), Atlantis no Nazo has you jump all over the place between its 100 ??levels. Most areas included multiple exits, screens scrolled both left and right, and it was up to you to find a route to level 100. Not easy considering how bizarrely cryptic the game is.

To prepare myself, I re-watched Game Center CX’s episode on the game to see the route Arino took. Although he deviated to a path that allowed him to pick up an invincibility power-up, it’s possible to get through the ??game rather?? quickly by using a few obscure warps, two of which require you to kill yourself at just the right spot on the screen to get transported further.

Those aren’t just outside examples of bizarre continuation points. During Arino’s run-through, he accidentally fell down a seemingly bottomles?s pit and was transported to another level. There are also warps that take you back to previous zones, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost progress, it’s just that the game jumps all over the place. It’s non-linearity in the most arbitrary way possible.

The sequence of warps isn’t even the most unfriendly part of this game. The controls are a bit ridiculous, especially when it comes to jumping, a?nd the structure of the platforming stages can seem a little unfair. You also die in a single hit, and your only weapon is unreliable at best. ?Many of the jumps are set up so you require ludicrously good timing or simply unreasonably precision with your button presses.

There’s also a zone in the game that just has the words “Black Hole” written in the background and drops you to your death repeatedly with no escape. So that’s fun. Three of the levels are reportedly not even connected to other zones, meaning you can only get to them with a level skip cheat. A fe?w are just small rooms tha??t contain a single door. You’re not truly getting 100 challenges, just 100 zones, if we’re being charitable.

To be fair, it was 1986, and platformers were still learning how to not suck. Most from that year probably did suck. It’s not as bad as, say, Milon's Secret Castle or Koneko Monogatari, but it’s definitely a sinner.

I understand a lot of complaints and even praise I have towards Atlantis no Nazo makes it sound like the formula for an awful game, and maybe it is. However, like Spelunker, I have a special soft spot for it. I think I just find it ch??arming due to how much of a jerk it is, like watching an energetic dog push a child into the mud. It’s just so che?erful about it that you can’t hate it!

We nearly got Atlantis no Nazo over here in the West, as Activision attempted to rebrand it as Super Pitfall 2, which is funny because the game obviously has no connection to that series aside from being extraordinarily obtuse. I’m not exactly sure why we never got a port, aside from the fact that the NES was still in its infancy in 1986, but I’m straining to think of a single case of the Japanese language being present aside from the title screen. That mean??s if you’re unfamiliar with the language, you can still conquer its 100(ish) levels.

It was re-released in a couple Sunsoft compilations on PS1 and Windows. Mor??e recently, it was chosen as one of the 30 games on the Famicom Classic Mini console that Japan got. It’s also available on Japan’s Nintendo Switch Online, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned up over here. Maybe. It’??s definitely a game that’s made for Japanese tastes, so I’m not exactly holding my breath.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Travel to the 32th zone in Sunsoft’s Atlantis no Nazo appeared first on Destructoid.

Are you tuff enough to save your friends this Famicom Friday? Get it?

I love Moai. It’s an interesting aesthetic; huge, monolithic humans with warped proportions. But do you know who loves Moai more? Japanese video game developers. They show up as bosses and in the background all the time in a wide variety of games such as Atlantis no Nazo, Rainbow Islands, and StarTropics. Even more so, Konami seemed to be crazy about the stone statues. They were a staple in their games, even appearing in Castlevania as a bonus item.

The heavy-browed monoliths would often alternate between antagonist and protagonist roles. They were a mainstay baddie in the Gradius series, while Konami Wai Wai World featured a Moai as one of its playable protagonists even though it had yet to feature in a title of its own. But the Moai would finally get the spotlight in Moai-Kun, a side-scrolling puzzle game fo??und only on the Famicom.

Moai-Kun
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: March 1990
Also Available On: Nothing

This sort of puzzle game certainly had its day in Japan. We got a few of them over here: Solomon’s Key and Adventures of Lolo are two such examples, but in Japan, they lived on through the ‘90s in games like Mario & Wario and Super Gussun Oyoyo. They’re heavily focused on moving blocks to make it to the exit with a few bad guys thrown in for good measure. Maoi-Kun is rather ?simple in that rega??rd; block moving and bad guys.

The goal of each level is to rescue all the other Moai scattered about and escape through the door. There’s some light combat, gentle platforming, and the occasional bomb to plant, but mostly it&rsq?uo;s about moving blocks or breaking them with your head. Each level is exactly one screen in size, with 56 levels in all. They start off dead simple but quickly ramp up in difficulty. There’s a password system that allows you to continue from various checkpoints, and while you do have an allotment of lives, there are infinite continues.

It’s a pretty tight little game from beginning to end. The puzzles are well thought out and I did find myself getting stuck every so often. The life system is a little unusual, especially since it sometimes sends you back a few stages and, since each one has but one solution, there’s little difficu??lty in replaying them. I get that lives were sort of a vestigial feature of the tim?e period, but I feel it’s something that doesn’t fit with the genre.

However, I’d say that the game’s greatest strength is its aesthetic. The graphics are bright and colorful, or at least as bright and colorful as a Famicom can get. The music is jaunty and fun, but there aren’t t??hat many tracks to it. It’s simply an infectiously light-hearted game.

Except there’s a suicide button if you irrevocab??ly screw up. Not unusual for ??the genre, but kind of jarring in such a cute title.

It’s also kind of insubstantial to the point where it feels somewhat like a bargain title. I couldn’t find any data on its initial value to disprove this, but most cartridge games didn’t budge on their price tag. Fifty-six levels can go by pretty quickly, and once you’re done, you’re done. You’ve figured everything out and could do it all over again if you love repetition. It’s not as taxing as Solomon’s Key but it does have more puzzles than Adventures of Lolo. It’s a great experience while it lasts, but your mileage is def?initely going to vary.

I find Moai-Kun to be somewhat irresistible. Adventures of Lolo is cute and all, but the backgrounds are extremely similar and without personality. Moai-Kun has personality to spare. I kind of wish the art style and c?haracter were applied elsewhere in other titles, potentially of different genres, but it's too late to change that now, and my time machine was damaged after I went back and prevented the Nintendo PlayStation from ever happening. You’re welcome.

Unfortunately, it looks like the game has never been re-released, with the Famicom remaining its only home. I imagine that chances are dim that it will find its way to a new platform at this point, but you never know. Maybe if we make enough noise, Konami will be roused from atop its dragon’s h??orde and relinquish the corpses of some of its favourite kills.

Luckily, Moai-Kun is almost entirely in English, so it’s ready to play, even if you don’t know Japanese. There is a fan translation if y?ou absolutely can’t stand looking at katakana and the title screen is some sort of affront to you. I think that’s a weird hang-up to have, b?ut I’m not here to judge.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Uncover the block moving secrets of the Rapa Nui in Konami’s Moai-Kun appeared first on Destructoid.

Help solve the mystery of what those little squiggles are this Famicom Friday

Nineteen eighty-six was a transformative year for Nintendo. Super Mario Bros. had released at the end of the previous year and ushered in a slew of influential games. The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus (I guess), many of which were riding on the?? features of the Famicom Disk System, which also released that year. Home console games would quickly shift away from the cyclical arcade model and more toward adventure??s with endpoints; final goals to work towards, rather than just a high score.

We received many of the fruits of this labor. The Legend of Zelda would ship with a special battery backed cartridge to allow saving on the NES, while Metroid and Kid Icarus would swap to passwords. One notable game, however, was left in the dust among those titles; the second original title on the Famicom Disk System, Nazo no Murasame-Jou. Whether it was because it was too Japanese for Western audiences or… actually, that’s the only reason I can think of because it’s an excellent game that could have totally gotten away with just using a password syste??m.

Nazo no Murasame-Jou
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: April 1986
Also Available On: Game Boy Advance, Wii, Wii U, 3DS

It’s hard to describe Nazo no Murasame-Jou without simply slapping on the label “action game.” What it isn’t is The Legend of Zelda, despite what its release period, top-down perspective, flip-screens, and save screen might imply. You throw shurikens as ??your primary form of attack, but if you get close to an enemy, you can smack them with your katana, so it’s hard to call it a shooter or a hack-and-slash. You’re also positively swarmed by enemies at all times, so, yeah, it&rsquo?;s an action game.

The plot involves an alien invasion in feudal Japan. You play as Takamaru, an apprentice Samurai, who has?? to infiltrate five castles; four of them to eliminate evil Daimyo, and the last to remove the alien threat. Along the way, you battle hordes of ninjas and creatures out of folklore, save some giant princesses, and fight these weird samurai who look like they’re throwing snakes at every stairway.

It bears repeating that you are constantly under assault by enemies in this game. Most stages are split ?into two parts: the journey to the castle and the attack on the interior. All throughout, you rarely get a moment’s peace. Ninjas pop out of everywhere, big dudes block doors, and statues spit projectiles. If you’re not moving, it’s probably because you just died.

Levels are non-linear and filled with dead-ends?? and alternate routes. Helpful signs guide the way, but take it from me: if a big guy is blocking the way, that’s where you go. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of constantly moving and trying to progress. There’s no greater relief than finding the end of a level and knowing your progress has been solidified.

You have three lives to make it to the end of each section, with each allowing you three hits before you drop dead. Every bar of health is precious. You can gain extra lives and refill your health by rescuing princesses and finding hidden bento boxes, but let me warn you: the princesses are sometimes randomly masks that haunt you throughout the castle, and I don’t think there’s any way to tell before you touch one. So tha??t kind of sucks.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. I assumed that one princess in each castle was real and the others were randomly masks. This is not the case! Any princess can be rea??l, and any can be masks, and it’s completely random. Sometimes you can collect three live?s in a castle, other times, you can just eat shit.

It’s an old game, but Castlevania was released the same year, and it’s the best game on the NES and I won’t hear any arguments. Like Castlevania, it’s also very difficult, so the save system is appreciated, if only because you can walk away from it after you get killed by one of those naginata jerks for the m??illionth time.

You kind of have to memorize the later levels to get through them. Not just to find the quickest route but also to find all the power-ups and princesses. In particular, figure out where the bow power-ups are as they increase your throwing speed. You’ll also want to find the geta sandals which increase ??your walking speed. Then just hope the princesses aren’t masks. Don’t? go charging at them since you’ll take damage if you’re in the same neighborhood when they transform.

Even then, it hurts so good. Your luck can turn quickly for the worst and it gives you that merciless old-school despair. The kind that makes you throw your controller or hit your head against the coffee table. I used to punch pillows, now I just usually practice my? cussing. Also, don’t throw?? a Famicom controller. They’re hardwired into the console and the wire isn’t very long.

As long as you’re up for a challenge, Nazo no Murasame-Jou is a fun time. Extremely so. Even while I was throwing colorful phrases at the screen, I had trouble putting it down. It definitely belongs alongside The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, even if history doesn’t remember it as well. There’d be no sequels for it, but Takamaru made a few cameos, such as an appearance and dedicated mode in the Wii version of Samurai Warriors 3 and some Mii costumes in recent Smash Bros. titles.

It?? would be a stapl?e of Japanese re-releases. It first got a classic edition on the Game Boy Advance, then hit both the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console libraries.

Then something amazing happened.

Nintendo realized that with very little effort, North Americans could understand the game and released it as The Mysterious Murasame Castle in North America on the 3DS Virtual Console. It makes sense, be??cause, for a game as steeped in Japanese culture as it was, it’s easy to understand without knowing the language. A few tweaks, and it’s ready for western audiences. Hopefully, Nintendo will have the wisdom to add it to their Nintendo Switch Online service sometime in the not-too-distant future, but you can still nab it on 3DS. For now.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Nazo ??no Murasame-Jou deserves to be remembered alongside Metroid and Zelda appeared first on Destructoid.

Boom shakalaka! It's Famicom Friday!

River City Ransom was an important game in the development of my retro appreciation. My early attempts at familiarizing myself with the NES included such titles as Kid Icarus, Friday the 13th, and -- I swear this is true -- Total Recall. It left me with the impression that I just didn’t like NES-era video games. River City Ransom and Punch-Out!! corrected that perspective and led me down the path o??f having difficulty conver??sing with normal people.

It would also lead me to explore the Kunio-Kun series. See, in Japan, River City Ransom was part of this staggeringly large series of games that had the absolute most inconsistent and complicated naming scheme imaginable. Alternating between Kunio-Kun, Nekketsu, Downtown, and even Dodgeball Club, their monikers were typically long and all over the place, but the titles were unified with a cartoonish appreciation for vio??lence and a memorably weird art style.

We got a few over here in the West, such as Super Dodge Ball and Crash ‘N’ the Boys, but the majority stay??ed in their home country. The unfortunate truth is that the best games in t??he series never landed on the NES. Let us introduce you to one of them.

Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes
Published By: Technos Japan
Developed By: Technos Japan
Released: December 1993
Also Available On: Gameboy Advance, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Kunio-Kun is no stranger to sports, with a good portion of the series invested in weird titles devoted to dodge ball, soccer, and track and field. Being Japanese, however, I certainly didn’t expect a hockey title, and further than that, I can’t believe there’s a basketball one. Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes is just the type of basketball game you’d expe??ct to come from a Japanese developer; one that takes, ahem, liberties with the sport.

The story sees Kunio winning a trip to Ame?rica on some sort of quiz show. His friends Riki and Godai decide to stowaway and join him. Suddenly basketball. Apparently, there’s some so??rt of street basket tournament going on and Riki is hellbent on winning it. I actually had to watch the opening cutscene again to see if I missed something. Nope. Go to America. Win basketball.

Street basket is a two-on-two twist on the sport, which makes sense since Nekketsu would frequently push the system’s ?multi-tap p?eripheral. However, it only gets weirder from there. Instead of points being based on where the shot was made from, here we have three nets stacked on top of each other towering into the sky. Slam a wicked dunk in the top net and there’s a chance it will drain through the two beneath it, giving you an accumulation of points.

But wait, it gets weirder.

The nets are apparently just velcroed on, so they fall off with some regularity. If one of your nets falls off, you can actually pick it up, carry it?? to your opponent’s side, and stick it to one of their backboards, allowing you to gain more points from a successful drain.

Of course, this is a Nekketsu game, which means a joyful approach to violence. There are no penalties, and you’re allowed to throw punches and garbage cans at the competition as much as you want and they’ll do the same. You can also do things like skateboard, walk on the background scenery, and set up ladders. You can dunk higher by jumping on car trunks or getting kicked by a horse. It gets chaotic, to say the least, but it wouldn’t be Nekketsu/Kunio-Kun/Downtown/Dodgeball-Club if it didn’t.

If you don’t already think this game is awesome, it also has some of the best co-op in the series. Most of the Nekketsu sports games feature co-op, but too many of them force Player 2 into the net where they goaltend and sulk while Player 1 has all the fun. Ganbare Dunk Heroes puts both?? player??s on the same level and lets them go nuts.

It’s perfect for mismatched pairs. Got a little brother who can’t make the power throws? He can just go around keeping th??e other team well punched while your skills pay the bills. I even played through the story with my father, who, while he’s no slouch, isn’t as well versed in retro games.

As you beat the se??ven teams in the main story mode, they’ll provide you with gifts of shoes and other knick-knacks that power up your players. These seem to be given randomly, so it is entirely possible that you’ll get something that ups your accuracy to the moon after the first team. Others, I don’t?? even know what they do. One of them seemed to randomize my power shots, but I couldn’t tell you what piece of my outfit did it. I guess the randomization of equipment makes every playthrough a bit different. Balance was never really the series’ strong suit, anyway, and this game does nothing to change that.

There are other minor weaknesses. For example, the Florida team is a bunch of cheaters. They teleport everywhere, including directly in front of your hard-earned shot, and it can seem like a ridiculous advantage. You also have to beat every team twice, once on their court and once on your own (which is apparently Niagara Falls, for some reason). Even with that obvious padding, the game is noticeably short and not very difficult, with no option??s to in??crease it or incentive to play it again. It lives on better as a multi-player game since you can’t really find basketball this ridiculous anywhere else.

There’s also a lot of sprite flicker, but if you’re an established fan of the series, you’ll already know that’s essentially a hallmark of Nekketsu. Honestly, it’s not as bad as, say, Super Dodge Ball, where the ball can disappear entirely when you’re trying to catch it. It was released in late 1993,?? so Technos had a lot of practice with the hardware by t??his point.

It’s not all bad news with Famicom Friday since Kunio-Kun’s new owners, Arc System Works, finally localized Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes in the West as part of the Double Dragon & Kunio-Kun: Retro Brawler Bundle. They went the extra mile and fully translated the game, giving it the new moniker Nekketsu! Street Basketball: All-Out Dunk Heroes. Some of the Nekketsu?? titles are available piecemeal, but not this one for some reason. Doesn’t m?atter. If you want a recommendation, the collection is definitely worth it. It also adds online play, so fight me!

Otherwise, it can be found on the Famicom for a pretty hefty price. It was later ported to the Game Boy Advance as part of the Kunio-Kun Nekketsu Collection 1. As for my precious localized bundle; that can be found on Switch, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. Hold on, I should end this with a basketball reference. Um, how about: It's game time! Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties? and your Gatorade, and we'll pick up a ??Big Mac on the way to the ballpark. Oh. No, wait...

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Simon Belmont and Ishikawa Goemon team up this Famicom Friday

If you’re familiar with my Famicom Friday articles, you’ll know I’ve already bemoaned the lost soul of Konami, and I don’t plan to stop sulking anytime soon. What you might not know are the depths of my despair. They weren’t just great for Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid, they were once a company that constantly pus?hed the limits of technology and design, and they did it playfully without carrying the whiff ??of corporate oversight.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but if I was to make presumptions of the corporation’s Famicom years, I would envision a friendly company full of camaraderie and passionate people based on their output. There was a level o?f cohesion I can only imagine coming from a group wh??o supported each other and their projects. Maybe I’m being a little idealistic, but Konami’s Famicom catalogue is my comfort zone. It’s a warm and safe place to explore, full of wonders and oddities, and this game may be one of the most interesting. To look at, if nothing else.

KONAMI WAI WAI WORLD
Published By: Konami
Developed By: Konami
Released: January 1988
Also Available On: Mobile

There’s nowhere that Konami’s early cohesion can be as clearly seen as it can in Konami Wai Wai World, and that’s because it’s literally a crossover game that takes characters from all over the developer's Famicom catalogue and puts them into one game. It’s the earliest example I can think of for a full crossover game until 1990’s Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.

The game involves Konami Man and Konami Lady -- the former of which made cameos in Konami titles previous to this -- who must travel through six worlds to rescue various Konami characters. These include Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Goemon from Ganbare Goemon, Mikey from The Goonies, King Kong from King Kong 2, Fuuma from Getsu Fuuma Den, ??and a Moai?? statue from the Japanese video game industry’s weird obsession with Moai statues.

The worlds are therefore themed around the characters. They’re presented as somewhat non-linear maps where you seek out the character and?? find out how to free them. Unfortunately, that’s the first place the game stumbles: you’re able to select any level from the start, but you can only complete some of them after you’ve acquired a certain character and their special ability. Of course, you’re not going to discover this until you make an attempt and find yourself unable to proceed, which is a dr??ag.

Permit me to descend further into the depths of criticism for a moment, as Wai Wai World unfortunatel??y has a few problems. First, it’s extremely unpolished. Maybe it’s because of the scope of the game, but its controls are stupid simplistic a??nd the animation is junk. The screen only advances when you’re near the very edge of it, which means you have little time to react to what comes at you. It just feels off overall, and it makes the whole experience seem a little rickety.

Then there’s the fact that if one of your characters die, you have to revive them. That’s not too strange, but you have to spend 100 bullets to do so, and it’s the dumbest mechanic. You wind up having to grind enemies to revive just one of your characters, but don’t do that. It’s stupid. Just grab the ??latest password and quit. Enter the password and all your characters are back in healthy conditions. The passwords are ludicrously long, but it’ll save you having to grind and that’s just the most depressing thing about the game.

There’s also 2-player co-op??, which sounds like a nice addition, but winds ?up just being a quicker way to kill your characters. Try not to strangle your significant other because you were grinding for bullets and someone fell down a hole.

What I wanted to get at is: you really have to love Konami’s Famicom output to love Konami Wai Wai World because it’s not a particularly good game on its own. It&rsquo?;s not total garbage, but it’s middling in the most charitable of terms.

If you do love Konami, it’s completely worthwhile. Switching to Simon Belmont and having Vampire Killer kick in as the background music is absolutely mouthwatering. It’s just too bad that most of the represented games were never released in the West. But those of us who played Getsu Fuuma Den will probably be e??????????????????????????xcited? for the chance to go to hell.

You should also have some shoot-’em-up chops, because the game puts you through an enactment of Twinbee before you reach the final boss, and it has absolutely no mercy. That’s kind of the thing with the Wai Wai titles; either you’re fully in, or you’ll p??robably be left out. Its reverence of the Konami catalogue is strict, and if you’re not familiar, you may find yourself lost.

With the inclusion of two licensed characters, Mikey and King Kong, re-releasing Konami Wai Wai World is a tricky proposition. It was done once on mobile phones where Mikey was replaced with Upa from Bio-Miracle Upa and Kong was replaced with a gigantic Penta the penguin, but I’m talking pre-smart mobile phones, so it’s basically lost at this point. There was, however, a direct sequel in Konami Wai Wai World 2, which is completely ?different and a far better game.

You’ll probably need a fan translation or good Japanese reading skills to get through this one. Even if you’re proficient in reading Japanese, the game makes the weird choice of using ??katakana for all text, which is pretty uncomfortable to read to a non-native. It’s like reading cursive handwriting; you see it so rarely that you forget what a capital “Z” looks like.

We’re unlikely to get an officially localized version of this, not simply because of the licensed charact??er but also because most of these games didn’t make it West. Though, I wo??uldn’t say no to Konami releasing a full compilation of their Famicom releases. They’re not that cool, though. At least, not anymore.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Konami Wai Wai World brings some of the best K??onami characters together into one game appeared first on Destructoid.

You'll be wanting Sukapon for Smash after this Famicom Friday

In 1991, Street Fighter II radically altered the video game landscape. It opened a portal through which all sorts of pretenders started flowing out. Some of them were good! Most of them were bad. The one I present to you this Fami?com Friday has mostly been forgotten.

That’s right, Famicom. And not Super Famicom, either. This one was entirely 8-Bit and was a pretty incredible effort to replicate the 1v1 experience on the aging console. By 1993, most arcade kids were arguing about whether Mortal Kombat’s blood and fatalities were better than Street Fighter II’s actually good?? gameplay, but on the Famicom, you were hard-pressed to find anything close.

JOY MECHA FIGHT
Published by: Nintendo
Developed by: Nintendo
Released: May 1993
Also Available On: Nintendo Switch Online

Nineteen ninety-three was incredibly late in the Famicom’s lifespan, but some great titles were still coming out. Joy Mecha Fight (I know that fan translations refer to it as Joy Mech Fight, but the literal reading of its title is Joi Meka Faito, so try and stop me) is exactly how I described it; a Street Fighter II style 1v1 fighter.

What’s incredible is that the Famicom isn’t built for that sort of action. There was technically a bootleg port of Street Fighter II, but, while impressive in its own right, it obviously isn’t the best way to play the game. There are some pretty extreme limitations in the Famicom’s sprite rendering capabilities which meant that big characters weren’t ??possible, and if you crammed too much on-screen at one time, you’d wind up with a flicke?ry mess.

Nintendo’s solution to this was breaking those characters up into floating components. Think Ballz 3D and then stop thinking about it. I’m s??orry. The characters are essentially comprised of a floating torso, head, two feet, and two hands, plus whatever other weapons are given to them. That may sound like it would be difficult to keep track of the action, but I never had any serious issues.

The storyline is frighteningly reminiscent of Mega Man: Dr. Little Emon and Dr. Ivan Walnuts created a bun??ch of robots for the good of mankind, but Dr. Walnuts goes, er, nuts and decides he wants to conquer the world, making off with 7 of the robots. Dr. Emon then reprograms a comedian robot to go and fight Walnut’s tw??isted machines.

One of the more interesting lunch meats that Joy Mecha Fight brings to the fighting game table is its progression. While most fighting game story modes at the time had you fight a linear, sometimes randomized assortment of fighters until you get to the incredibly cheap boss battle, Joy Mecha Fight takes you through a series of four worlds where you select who you’re going to fight next, Mega Man-style. On top of that, you only start off with boring old Sukapon to choose from, but as you defeat bosses, they get added to your stable of fighters. How many in total? A hefty 36, but, hon??estly, it can be hard to tell the difference between some of them.

Considering this is a two-button f??ighting game, the moves are prett??y simplified. Most fighters have 4 special moves, and their combinations are extremely easy to pull off. Most just involve holding a direction and hitting a button. Others just require you to press A+B at the same time. It makes it easy to switch to a new fighter but does nothing in helping them feel distinct.

The game’s animation style allows combat to feel rather fluid. Even as a two-button fighter, the battles feel dynamic. The movelist may be small, but it doesn’t necessarily feel that way when playing it. It’s probably a lot easier to master than something like Street Fighter II,?? where high-level play means assembling combos. But that doesn’t mean there’s no strategy to be found here. It probably won&??rsquo;t satisfy the hardcore crowd, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun while it lasts.

There are multiple difficulty modes to unlock, which are needed to get the boss robots into your stable. For a ??1v1 fighting game??, it has legs beyond its competitive aspect.

Joy Mecha Fight probably isn’t going to get any fighting fan’s thighs grinding, but it’s a charming and colourful little experience in its own right. I feel it was smart to put so much effort into the single-player aspect of the game, as it would be difficul?t to squeeze a lot of competitive depth out of a two-button fighting set-up. With things set up as they are, you can focus on unlocking dudes or teach your buddy to play in an afternoon.

Having been released in 1993, it was a pretty late game for the Famicom. But while North America would continue seeing Nintendo titles on their console until late 1994, Joy Mecha Fight wasn’t among them. Recently, it was added to Japan’s Nintendo Switch Online service, which is nice since the only acknowledgement Nintendo has given the game otherwise has been cameos in titles like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Surprisingly, there’s quite a lot of text in Joy Mecha Fight, and it may be difficult for someone who doesn&??rsquo;t know the language to figure out the menus. Fortunately, fans have translated the game for those unable to interpret those Japanese scribbles. Given that Nintendo has gone to the effort of localizing some of their old Famicom classics, an official Western release isn’t completely out of the question, but I’d certainly be surprised at this point.

The post Throw down in Nintendo’s own lost classic, Joy Mecha Fight appeared first on Destructoid.

If you're lucky, you'll get to ride a frog this Famicom Friday

While the Famicom saw release in the middle of 1983, most of North America wouldn’t see the NES until sometime in 1986. There’s actually a good few games that came out before the NES landed that never really got localized, such as Challenger, Chack’n Pop, and Antarctic Adventure. Being on the wrong side of The Legend of Zelda's and Metroid’s releases, most are cyclical arcade jaunts, but s?ome are still worthwhile places to visit.

On this Famicom Friday, we’ll be taking a look at one of these primordial games that would go on to spawn its own franchise. Perhaps not a series as landmark as Ganbare Goemon, but one? that has a place in gaming’s history. Japanese gaming history, anyway, we didn’t get too many of them ov?er on this side of the pond.

Ninja Jajamaru-Kun
Published By: Jaleco
Developed By: Jaleco
Released: November 1985
Also Available On: MSX, Wii, Wii U, 3DS

Jaleco’s Jajamaru-Kun series is almost a classic. It began with a port of UPL’s Ninja-Kun for the Famicom, after which Jaleco lifted the title character for their own set?? of games on the console. The series would continue on, mutating heavily over the years, gradually shifting genres and reinventing its??elf multiple times before sputtering out with one final 3D title for the Playstation and Saturn and punching its ticket to the early-3D graveyard.

It all started in earnest with the Famicom’s Ninja Jajamaru-Kun, which is an absolute mouthful to say. While not actually based on an arcade title, the game borrows heavily from the experience. There are few similarities linking it to the original Ninja-Kun. Each level takes place ?on a four-story field, with t??he objective being to eliminate all enemies by hitting them with giant shuriken.

Gameplay is pretty simple. You ascend floors by bashing blocks with your head and jumping through, similar to Ice Climbers. Most levels have a singular strong enemy on the top floor, and it can sometimes be pretty challenging to get the jump on them. You can also stun enemies by hopping on the??ir heads, though this can feel somewhat inconsistent with the jumping being so stiff and the hit detection being so wonky.

Power-ups are hidden in some of the floor blocks, allowing you to throw shuriken further, move faster, or gain extra lives. If you reach four lives in a single?? game or collect three distinct power-ups, Jajamaru’s pet frog, Gamapa-Kun, appears and gives you the opportunity to gobble up all the enemies. It’s a cool ability, but power-ups drop randomly, so it’s difficult to strategize for when it will happen.

That’s all there r??eally is to the game. It goes for about 21 levels before it starts repeating itself from the beginning. It’s a pretty typical arcade framework that can entertain for an afternoon unless you’re into pursuing the high score. However, I feel that the random nature of the game’s power-ups disqualify it from being a good score-chasing game since luck is too much of a factor. What do I know, though? I’ve never met a kill screen in my life.

Despite its short lifespan and simple gameplay, I really enjoy Ninja Jajamaru-Kun. It’s a nice, light snack that I pop into the Famicom every once and a while. It spawned a series that would continue on the Famicom in different configurations, including an RPG. It enjoyed something of a remake on the Wonderswan titled Ganso Jajamaru-Kun, which added ?a bit of progression to the game through the use of ??a world map. It’s also stupid difficult, and I haven’t figured out how to get very far.

Surprisingly, Ninja Jajamaru-Kun actually did see a North American release on the Wii’s Virtual Console in? 2007. It, unfortunately, did not see a re-relea??se on either the 3DS or Wii U iterations of the service, but there’s always a chance that it could wind up on Nintendo’s current NES library available to Online subscribers.

Or perhaps not, because Japan also received the game as part of a Ninja Jajamaru-Kun Collection currently out on Sw?itch and PS4. With luck, we may see a localization of it, but you can always import? it.

The Japanese language d??oesn’t play a major role in this game. Between level title-cards give the names of the enemies in kanji, but that’s about it. It’s extremely simple to play without knowing the language. If ?that is still too confusing, there is a fan translation to clear up those title-cards.

The post Save the princess from a catfish pirate in Jaleco’s Ninja Jajamaru-Kun appeared first on Destructoid.

Or maybe just try and find your lost self-respect this Famicom Friday

Konami’s output on the Famicom was simply amazing. While we certainly got some good games on this side of the pond, such as Castlevania and Contra, there were a plethora of great titles that stayed in their homelan??d.

They were once a playful company with a cohesive catalog. Many games in their early days made reference to their other releases, and they even pioneered the idea of crossover titles with Konami Wai Wai World. I really, badly miss those days that I was too young and also in the wrong country to rea??lly experience. Creativity was rampant among those titles, and it wound up giving us some really memorable concepts.

Yume Penguin Monogatari
Published by: Konami
Developed by: Konami
Released: January 1991
Also on: Nothing

One of these games was a loosely connected series that revolved around a penguin named Penta, sometimes known as Pentarou (though whether the characters are indeed the same is a little murky). Penta was a weird entity that starred in a bleak anime where he suffered from PTSD caused by a stint in the Vietnam War. He also advertised for Suntory Beer, so add alcoholism to the list of his personal demons. Perhaps the lowest part of his career, however, was when he dealt with body image issues and an abusive relationship in 1991’s Yume Penguin Monogatari.

Translated to Dream Penguin Story, Yume Penguin Monogatari has Penta overeating, assumedly to deal with ??the crushing emotional issues he has. His girlfriend, Penko, who, as it turns out, was dating him for his looks and not his personality, gets fed up with his massive weight gain and leaves him for another penguin. Penta, having no self-respect, then sets off to trim his waist and win back his love.

Food has often been used as a way of healing or powering up gaming protagonists, but in Yume Penguin Monogatari, you must avoid it at all costs. Prominently displayed on the HUD is Penta’s current w?eight, and your goal is to finish each level with your waistline slimmed down past a given threshold. Food adds more ??junk to the trunk, but instead of exercising, you become lean by collecting as many bottles of diet drink as you can.

Gameplay alternates between sidescroller platforming sections and horizontal ??shoot-’em-ups. Neither mode is particularly deep, but they are colorful and offer simple tastes of the genre. Most levels are capped off with a boss battle, which is usually pretty formulaic, but ??having to work off the last bit of weight while fighting a big baddy is kind of entertaining.

Yume Penguin Monogatari may be the sort of game that is more fun to discuss than to actually play. It only lasts around 6 levels, and it’s not too taxing to make it through them. Aside f??rom the core weight-loss mechanic, the gameplay isn’t anything special as far as platformers go. Colorful, yes. Memorable, yes. Inventive, not really.

Even with that said, it’s a fun little snack of a game. Something bright and lighthearted to chew on for a moment before moving onto something new. Its premise makes it stand out because, after all, you’d be hard-pressed to find another game in which you help a penguin lose weight. Really, though,?? Penta should probably consider working on his self-esteem rather ?than just hurrying to get back with his terrible girlfriend.

Much to my shock and dismay, it would appear that Yume Penguin Monogatari was never re-released on another platform. Unless you count the I-Revo online platform in 2006, but why would you? I feel the likelihood of it finding a new home at this point is pretty dim. The subject matter has gotten a little touchy, and Konami hates its fans and wants to bury its history. At this point, I’d be happy if we just got to see Parodius again.

Unfortunately, all the cutscenes are fully in Japanese. You can bypass them a??nd just enjoy the gameplay, but you will? miss out on Penta’s ex-girlfriend sassing him about his weight problems. Luckily, there are fan translations out there that lets you listen in on this toxic relationship.

The post Trim your waistline in Konami’s Yume Penguin Monogatari appeared first on Destructoid.

Let's munch on some onigiri this Famicom Friday

One of the fears that big decision-makers had in the ‘80s and ‘90s when it came to localizing games was whether or not it would appeal to Western audiences?. We hadn&rsq??uo;t been indoctrinated with enough anime and Pocky yet, so ideas like tatami floors and bowls of rice were thought of as alien and terrifying to Westerners.

If we did get one of these too-Japanese-for-market games, typically, changes would be made. For example, Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyuushutsu Emaki, which was localized as Legend of the Mystical Ninja in the West, replaced onigiri with pizza to ??prevent confusion. Aft?er all, we universally understand that pizza makes you healthier, but what even is an onigiri? A ball of rice? Rice goes in a burrito and that’s it.

The other alternative was to just not localize it, and because this option was often the one taken, we missed out on entire series of games. We luckily got a few of the Ganbare Goemon games in North America, but the lion’s share skipped our sho??res. Not least of which were the Famicom titles.

Ganbare Goemon: Karakuri Douchuu
Published By: Konami
Developed By: Konami
Released: July 1986
Also Available On: MSX2, Game Boy Advance, Mobile, Wii, 3DS, Wii U

Konami’s recent fall from grace has been heartbreaking to watch. As they gr??adually sputter out games of som?etimes questionable quality, it’s hard not to mourn the treasure trove of properties they’re just sitting on. Goemon has been missing since 2005 unless you count the Pachislot titles, which you should only do if you want to see me cry.

Over here in North America, we got a small, disconnected scattershot of titles in the series, but in Japan, it was a major franchise with a plethora of games spread over nearly two decades. Starting as a simple arcade game called Mr. Goemon, the series would expand to many different platforms before being relegated to the pachinko parlors, where Konami seems to send the corpses of all its licenses so they ??may be displayed like your taxidermied pet dog.

The series would come home for the first time with the Famicom’s Ganbare Goemon: Karakuri Douchuu. Released in 1986, what started as a port of Mr. Goemon mutated heavily into something that more closely resembles a cross between The Legend of Zelda and a beat ‘em up.

The point of each level is to gather three gate passes. These are typically bought from stores, hidden in mazes, and buried in holes ??that you uncover by jumping over them. The holes are pretty key since they provide shortcuts, and two of them hide passes in each level. There’s no sure way to tell where a hole is hidden, so get used to bunny hopping everywhere since that’s the only way to uncover them.

The game’s charm comes from its somewhat wacky approach to Japanese history. The title character is based on the mythical noble thief, Ishikawa Goemon, but as the series progressed, it became weirder and weirder. The original Ganbare Goemon was relatively grounded but still rather cartoonish. It was laying the groundwork for?? some truly bizarre things, but we’re not there yet.

Although it’s impossible to pin the series to a single formula, Ganbare Goemon establishes the one that most games would return to. Visiting shops, stopping to talk to residents, taking part in distracting mini-games; that all started here. It lacks some of the features that would become staple in later games of the series (like simultaneous multi-player), but it did more to establish the franchise than Mr. Goemon did before it.

The game is thirteen? levels long, and it takes a reasonably significant amount of time to get through them all. There’s no password or level skip, so you have to do it in one sitting, which can be quite a feat. However, the game then pulls the “okay, now beat it again, but harder” strategy. That would be bad enough, but the game actually loops 8 times before it’s finally completely complete. If you can topple all 8 prefectures, that’s pretty hardcore.

It can be difficult to play through Ganbare Goemon without knowing the local language, though it’s still possible. You will, however, have to make guesses as to the function of each building, as well ??as miss out on the flavor text spat at you by the game’s denizens. Fortunately, there is a fan transla??tion floating around if you’re curious, and it’s recommended if you can’t read the language.

As one of Konami’s more landmark titles, Ganbare Goemon: Karakuri Douchuu has been released multiple times. A modified port would first land on the MSX2 home computer, adding a few things and changing out the smooth horiz?ontal scrolling for flip-screens. The Famicom version would be ported multiple times, starting with a Famicom Mini release on the Game Boy Advance. It would also land on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS Virtual Consoles. There was even a port available for mobile phones in 2005.

However, it never found its way to be localized. I still hold out hope that we’ll get a Ganbare Goemon collection in some form one day, but this is Konami we’re talking about, and I’m still reeling that we got the Castlevania and Gradius collections.

The post Konami’s Ganbare Goemon: Karakuri Douchuu might have been too Japanese for the NES appeared first on Destructoid.

Cruising on the Famicom Disk System this Famicom Friday

For this Famicom Friday, I think it’s time to jump straight to the Famicom Disk System. You may worry we’re moving too fast, but I’ve never felt this way before about anyo??ne; I’m ready to take the next step in the relationship.

Once again, we’re looking at some of the games that we never saw here in the West. The worl?d of Famicom was a much different place than the one we saw through the lens of the NES. From absolutely bizarre concoctions that defy logic to literally, actually karaoke, the Japanese really knew how to rock their 8-bit console. If you haven’t yet taken a look, let us open the door for you and show you around.

Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally
Published By: Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Developed By: Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Released: April 1988
Also Available On: Nothing

I’ve always loved a good raster racer. From OutRun to Top Gear, I can’t get enough of that pseudo-3D effect. Admittedly, there’s a certain monotony to these, but I get a lot of comfort from those gentle corners and rolling hills. Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally, a game that? released exclusively on the Fam?icom Disk System, is one I frequently go back to.

Although Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally is technically a sequel, it bears little resemblance to the first Famicom Grand Prix. Whilst the latter is a top-down light F1 Simulator, 3D Hot Rally is a long-distance trek across rough, often off-road terrain wit??h the view nestled directly behind your car. There’s very little that connects t??he two games aside from four wheels and a road.

3D Hot Rally follows the OutRun formula. You're tasked with making it to the end of each leg of the journey within a certain time limit, but a few tweaks make it more of an endurance challenge. It consists of three long tracks that split off in various configurations. You can generally choose which path you take on the fly, but at th??e outset, you’re provided with a map that shows all the routes. Before the race starts, you’re asked to place a pit stop on one of the intersections, and if you manage to navigate through it, it will top up your health gauge.

It’s a nice bit of strategy since you’ll doubtlessly take some damage along the way, and if you don’t watch your driving, you’ll wind up broken down at the side of the road. So whether you place it near the end of the race to get you through the last leg or somewhere in the middle where you know you’ll be hurting can make all the difference. Just make sure you remember the route, or you’ll miss ?it entirely.

Adding to the strategy is the placement of “hot points” on the track, which fill a gauge as you pick them up. Once you have enough, you can temporarily switch into the “hot dash,” a fifth gear that acts as a boost. Obviously, you’ll want to reser??ve this for times when you know you’re not going to smash into the scenery.

With only three similar tracks and three unique cars to choose from, 3D Hot Rally can be a pretty short-lived experience. There’s no special campaign mode to keep things progressing, but being on the?? Famicom Disk System, it can save your best time, giving incentive to find the fastest routes on every course.

You may assume that the ”3D” part of 3D Hot Rally refers to its pseudo-3D, raster enabled perspective, but it’s actually because it could be played with a special 3D glasses peripheral. Turn on the 3D effect without them and you’ll be treat??ed to a broken, flickery mess, but with a pair in place, you’ll witness the splendor of depth. Speaking of which, the game has a weird flicker to its HUD. I didn’t notice it until I took screenshots, and it only appeared as a black bar in some of them, but my husband said it was hard to look at for him on a CRT TV.

One more interesting note is that the game came out on a special blue disk that signifies that i?t’s one of the games in Nintendo’s fax series. What this meant is that you ?can save your best times to the disk, take it into a special kiosk at participating stores, and fax your achievements to Nintendo to be entered into a contest. You could win a Disk-Kun stationery set, and I wish I had one! As you can probably guess, this contest is no longer ongoing, but the menus for it are still in the game.

A bit of Japanese may be ?required t??o navigate the initial menus, but if you can feel your way through them, then you’re off to the races. Almost everything else is in English, but if those menus are too much of a barrier, there is a fan translation available to demystify them.

3D Hot Rally never made it to North America, and as far as I could find, it has never been re-released in Japan. It’s rather strange, since Mario and Luigi make appearances, and one of the cars, the Monster, has been represented in Mario Kart Wii as the “Tiny Titan.” Yet, despite Nintendo making a few references to it, it has remain?ed parked on the Famicom Disk System.

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