A week after Nintendo nearly broke the Internet with a very cryptic and unnaturaly creepy video of a smiling man wearing a bag over his head, the company has finally revealed what the Emio viral campaign was all about. Turns out Emio is the star of a new game in a series dating back to the Family Computer (Famicom) Disk System days that is ab??out to make ?a spooky return.

Via a video that can only be accessed directly on YouTube, Yoshio Sakamoto, the man who's been behind the series this whole time, reveals that Emio is the star of Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.

What is Famicom Detective Club?

It's this club:

It's also the name of an adventure game series that has long been on hiatus. So far, it's composed of only two entries: The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind. They came out in?? 1988 and 19??89, respectively, and were both designed and directed by Sakamoto.

The Missing Heir is about the investigation of a mysterious death in the Ayashiro Dynasty, whereas The Girl Who Stands Behind is a prequel that follows the investigation of a creepier folklore tale seemingly more akin to what Emio is teasing.

These are adventure games in the visual novel style where we play as a young detec?tive who roams the Japanese countryside and solves mysteries by interrogating people and examining objects. Though its gameplay was similar to that seen i?n many visual novel titles of the time, this series was ground-breaking for its themes of murder and drug abuse.

The original games never saw the light of day outside of Japan, but you can play remakes of the two original Detective Club series on the Nintendo Switch. I've never played either game, but it seems like there are those, like Destructoid's own CJ, who likes their stories and finds the rem?akes engaging enough for you to get nowadays. There are also detractors, who claim that the original games haven't aged well for modern audiences, and that the great-looking remakes still suffer from the sam??e g??ameplay problems plaguing the original games.

Detective Club: Origins

Producer Yoshio Sakamoto joined Nintendo as a designer, working on games like Metroid and Kid Icarus before his start with the Detective Club series '88. His main inspiration was a 1983 Enix game for the NEC PC-6001, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which Sakamoto claims had a mind blowing effect on him. (Square Enix would later re-release Portopia using AI chat-bot technology, which did not go over well.) He'd previously thought games had to be all about action, ????not something such as procedural investigation.

In a 2000 interview translated by Shmuplations, Sakamoto tried to have Detective Club not emul??ate mystery novels, but something that would work effectively as a game.

"In the context of a game, I think a complex and detailed plot demands too much?? of the player, so I wrote a scenario tailored specifically to the format that, when viewed objectively, might seem a little half-baked, but is more concerned with having the player enjoy the flow of the plot," said Sakamoto.

Nintendo is a company known for holding on to its employees, so it's not particularly surprising that Sakamoto has been there for so long. But what has he been up to since the release of the last Detective Club game in '89? Well, it turns out that though he's not the most famous names in Nintendo's roster, he's stil?l one of its most prolific dev??elopers.

During the Detective Club hiatus, Sakamoto would continue to work on some notable Nintendo series, like Wario and Metroid. He wound up directing classics such as Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and also produced Metroid Dread. Do you like all the cool new mechanics introduced in Metroid Fusion? Well, according to another interview translated by Shmuplations, those came about because the team wanted Samus?? to sport a new look. Sakamoto tried to get them to think about new gameplay elemen??ts, and the in-game reason for them.

"The very first thing I needed them to understand was what kind of game Metroid is. I told them they were like a lowly enka singer who had suddenly struck it rich�but I don’t think they understood that. [Laughs] My goal, of course, was to impress upon them how important it is that the team that makes Metroid really understand what Metroid is all about."

Yoshio Sakamoto, via Shmuplations

While Sakamoto didn't create the Metroid series, he's arguably one of the most powerful creative forces in the history of 2D Metroid games. Then in the year 2000, Sakamoto even created and directed Card Hero, a Game Boy Color title inspired by Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering that ended up getting a physi??cal release as short-lived tr??ading card game. He's since worked on a variety of Nintendo games, including Rhythm Heaven, Tomodachi Life, and Metroid: Samus Returns.

My bet is that Nintendo didn't didn't greenlight a new Detective Club from Sakamoto solely due to the popularity of this series. I fully believe that Sakamoto and his team have spent a lot of time working out how to update the series for modern play?ers in a memorable way. Remember Samus' suit: this is not the kind of person to make games without good reason.

Let's see how the Detective Club series has evolved after so long in dormancy once Emio releases on the Switch on August 29.

The post With Emio’s reveal, here’s what to know about the Famicom Detective series appeared first on Destructoid.

Earlier this week, someone put up what was believed to be a prototype of Nintendo's Super Famicom console for auction. Such a rare piece of gaming history could very well have sold for a high price but,? ahead of ?the auction's May 12 end date, the prototype has now been pulled, and no one knows why.

As spotted by Kotaku, the prototype is no longer listed on Yahoo Japan. Right before it was removed, though, Kotaku was able to grab a screenshot of the listing, which shows that the auction ended with zero bids. This is rather strange since bids for the prototype were skyrocketing. When I last checked, it was going for a few thousand dollars, but Kotaku reports the bids shot up to several hundr??eds of thousands of dollars, before soon crossing the $3 mil??lion mark.

Given it ended at zero bids, it doesn't seem like the item was sold to anyone. So, what happened? While there's no definitive answer, VGC's Andy Robinson has suggested it's because of scam bids, meaning people were placing bids (or using bots to do so) with no intention of actually spending the money and artificially raising the price. By comparison, a prototype of a Nintendo Sony hybrid console only went for a 'mere' $360,000 (via CNN). That console never saw the light?? of the day thanks to an infamous falling out between Nintendo and Sony, so it's somewhat hard to imagine people would be willing to pay more than eight times as much for? a prototype of a console that actually did come out.

At the time of writing, there's also no way of knowing when or if the Super Famicom prototype will be put back up for auction. Although there's a discussion to be had about whether this item is genuine or not. It certainly looks authentic at a first glance, and does resemble how the Super Famicom looked in 90s magazines before it launched (as noted in this Tweet), but we'd need an expert historian to get their hands on it first and foremost. Whatever the case, it's worth keeping an eye out should the auction ever pop back up. With any luck, not only will the prototype be the real deal, but someone will be able to buy it and then donat??e it to a museum or someth??ing for the sake of posterity.

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Final Fantasy VII was release?d in 1997 on PlayStation. In those days, the NES, despit??e Nintendo only discontinuing it in 1995, was considered practically ancient. Things aged faster in the �0s.

By the time the PlayStation had passed into antiquity in the aughts, the denizens of Web 2.0 became aware of a Famicom/NES demake of Final Fantasy VII. Since Final Fantasy VII was still fondly remembered and the retro gamer identity was reaching its maturity,?? this was a fascinating topic of conversation. Just hearing about it took your imagination to i??nteresting places.

It was certainly fasci?nating to me. I didn’t know enough about the backend of video games to really have an idea for how this was possible; a 3-disc epic on a diminutive cartridge. What radical magic!

I never took the time to play it, however. At the time, I hadn’t spent much time with OG Final Fantasy VII, so I didn’t have any attachment to it. In the spirit of the coming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I felt it was time to fi??nally try it. And try it,?? I did.

I tried what I could before it crashed.

The Final Fantasy VII Demake wasn’t strictly some fan endeavor; it’s a Chinese bootleg. While the breadth and quality (compared to common Chinese bootlegs) suggest that i??ts creator(s) had some affection for the PS1 title, they e?ither didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to really make a convincing 8-bit facsimile.

Final Fantasy VII Demake, like so many other knock-offs, is made from the parts of other games. Music, sprites, the battle system; they’ve all been taken from other games. Typically these come from other games in the NES Final Fantasy trilogy,?? but some are pulled from a variety of other sources. One thing I haven’t been able? to identify is an actually unique asset.

The game itself supposedly covers much of the PS1 game’s story but is filled full of notable omissions. I wouldn’t know for sure because it won’t let me precede past the part when you arrive in the Sector 7 slums. I can make it to 7th Heaven??, but then th??e game freezes, often throwing the NES�typical garbage scramble into my face.

I thou??ght this might be a one-off glitch, an issue with my hardware setup, or maybe just a corrupt version of the game, but no matter how I approached it, the result was always the same. I ran through the opening section three times, and it still refused to allow me past the bar. I blame Tifa.

In my troubleshooting, I found other people having the same issue, so I know it’s just not me. In 2013, fans hacked the bootleg and replaced all the stolen assets with ones that actually resemble the original game. 10 will get you 20 that the newer patch wouldn’t have the same problem with crashing, but I feel like that defeats the purpose. Fans spending four years to make somethi??ng better isn’t as interesting as some developer cobbling together a vague facsimile of a popular title to sell in an inconsistent market.

The Final Fantasy VII demake?? wasn’t technically for the Famicom. It was actually for a series of bootleg “Famiclones�that were produced? under the Subor name. While Subor would start making clones of more powerful hardware, for a long time, they created different configurations of Nintendo’s famous 6502 console.

Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the only game to get demade for the bootleg market. The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, Harvest Moon, Resident Evil, and Chrono Trigger are among the titles to get backported to the system. Beyond that, they’d ?mash things together or make sequels to games that never received one. Before you get too excited, however, most of them a??re of extremely shaky quality. Most of the assets are just recycled from other games, and there wasn’t a whole lot of quality control.

Still, it’s quite the rabbit hole that isn’t well documented outside high-profile discoveries like the Final Fantasy VII bootleg. Most Chinese bootleg games are just copies of existing games released in massive compilations. It can be an adventure. Just because it says 50-in-1 doesn’t mean that you’re getting 50 unique games, as often they’d just be duplicates with, if you’re lucky, the difficulty tweaked a smidge. It might have Super Mario 64 on the cover, but it’s probably just Super Mario Bros. 3 on the PCB. Other times, it will just bafflingly mix up art by having, say, Little Nemo: Dream Master on the cover with Pokémon written over top of it. Wild stuff.

For that matter, the Final Fantasy VII demake came on a cartridge labeled Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which, if you’re?? not savvy, was the game’s sequel movie. No, none?? of the movie’s story makes it into the game.

The part that I did play was a bizarre experience. The st??ory, or at least the translation, is almost verbatim from the original. However, Midgar has a lot more brickwork than I remember. The environments are a mishmash of medieval fantasy tilesets. The Mako reactor that Avalanche blows up in the beginning is a dragon’s head. The slums look like an idyllic forest village rather than shanties cobbled together in ??a desolate, sun-deprived wasteland.

The monsters that show up in random battles are a similar mishmash. What’s worse is that the variety of them in just the first area is extensive and not balanced. One fight could be a group that goes down with a few swipes of Cloud’s large scimitar (the original bootleg had no buster sword), while the next could be a grueling bat?tle against armored foes that have healing spells. The reactor boss itself isn’t much of an issue, but it’s all down to luck if you make it to them at all.

You need a combination of extreme patience, a good imagination, and extensive knowledge of the original to really appreciate the Final Fantasy VII D?emake. With no real cutscenes, memorable mo?ments are kind of glossed over or omitted entirely. This is something that only existing fans would really appreciate. That, and people who don’t have access to the PS1 version.

This is just how some children in China experienced video games growing up, so many have nostalgia for the bootleg games and consoles that they had access to. It’s a unique way to ex??perience the industry; chewed up and provided in whatever way they could manage. I’m almost envious.

When the Final Fantasy VII bootleg was discovered and proliferated across the internet, some considered it an incredible achievement for the NES. On some parts of that, I disagree. The cartridge used a large PRG ROM to store everything, then moved CHR data to RAM. This is pretty much exactly how the Famicom version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as some other titles, did it. The scale of the game is also not much more impressive than something like Dragon Quest IV.

However, what was impressive is that a bootleg developer known mostly for hack jobs went to the effort of such an extensive remake. Demakes are a bit more prevalent today, with games like Bloodborne and Dead Space getting the PS1 treatment. Even then, those efforts usually just stop after a small, reimagined portion. Shenzhen Nanjing Technology probably could have done Midgar ?and called it a day, but to actually go beyond that shows some dedication beyond just wanting to fill a cartridge with a recognizable knock-off. That’s a weird sort of respect to show when you’re cobbling something together from stolen assets.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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The Famicom can be perceived as the birthplace of kusoge. While bad games have existed since the creation ?of the medium, the origin of the term itself is murky but generally is believed t??o have been coined in reference to a Famicom game.

Hoshi wo Miru Hito, translating roughly as Stargazer, was one such game that rose to the rank of kusoge no densetsu (crap game of legend). It’s easy to see why. RPGs blew up in Japan following the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, and here is a game that was quick to capitalize on that with one set in a sci-fi environment. It even predated Phantasy Star by roughly two months, but not Ultima, which had been doing sci-fi since 1982. Nonetheless, Hoshi wo Miru Hito wasn’t short on inventive ideas for the genre.

It’s just too bad they're buried b?eneath indescribable suffering.

Aaaargh!

This look comes with the help of the fan translation started by KingMike and ?finished by brandnewscooby. If it adds any glitches that werenâ€?™t present in the original unpatched version, I really wouldn’t be able to tell.

You are dropped, without explanation, in a forest. Having no initial context is hardly exclusive to Hoshi wo Miru Hito, but it’s the sort of situation where your Dragon Quest experience really pays off?. You’ll know that your first order of business will be to find the closest town. Tha??t town is actually one square to the West, but you’d have no idea just by looking at the screen. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show on the world map. If you didn’t immediately go West, you wouldn’t know it’s there.

This game is about space psychics maybe Hot-B tho?ught you might be psychic too!

There is someone who states that the town is hidden by the combined psychic power of its citizens, and I don’t know if that’s an excuse or if someone actually thought it was a good idea to have an invisible starting city. It’s honestly hard to tell with Hoshi wo Miru Hito, because there are already a tonne of design choices that leave you wondering if it come??s down to laziness, poor programming, ??or just baffling intention.

The hardest part of starting out isn’t even finding the first city. It’s actually surviving the first few battles in order to level up. There are, depending on your definition, three overworld areas, and each one has its own individual shuffle of enemies. In the first area, whether you face off against a foe that your underpowered protagonist can actually take on or a team of three mor?e powerful bullies ready to pound you into the mud is completely random.

In a normal RPG, you’d just be able to run from battles where you were overpowered, but fleeing in Hoshi wo Miru Hito is a skill (Teleport) that you don’t learn until you reach level six or find the second party character.?? You also need to be cautious, because Teleport is used on each character individually, and it’s possible? to leave behind the party members who can’t Teleport.

Aiiiieeee!

If you go to the Northern town of Deus, you learn some nonsense, but one helpful piece?? of information is that your first party member is far to the south. This is where it really sinks in that Hoshi wo Miru Hito isn’t merely an RPG; it’s also an excruciating ordeal.

This begins the moment you leave the second town. Instead of appearing in a tile adjacent to Deus, you find yourself back where you started the game, one tile east of the Mamus, the starting town. You loop back around, then begin your travel South, at which point you’ll invariably fall down a hole into a small dungeon. ??However, you? don’t need to traverse the dungeon. You can just turn around and go directly back out the door. You then find yourself�back at Mamus.

That littl??e trap-door dungeon appears randomly throughout the forest in your path to the southern reaches of the overworld. It’s extremely difficult to avoid it, so you’re constantly just sent back to the beginning to start the journey over. If you’re astute, you might notice that your protagonist learns to jump as they level up. This basically means that if you walk them into an obstacle (what kind of obstacle is seemingly arbitrary), they’ll leap over it for a set number of spaces. In the beginning, this allows you to take a shortcut over the water next to you, which is some sweet relief, however minor.

This doesn’t let you pass the pitfalls, though. I learned to get by them by going slightly north, then moving all the way to the ??East coast before heading south. There seems to be a shorter path where the trap doors h?appen.

N-Nooooo!

You go South, and eventually find another dungeon. Within that dungeon, you finally get the second party member, Shiba, who can jump higher than your original party member, Minami. Howe??ver, I’m a bit confused about how the doors work in that dungeon. If you exit the door you enter from, you emerge from the other side of a wall. If you then go back into the dungeon, you enter from a different door, and exiting from that puts you back where you started. I think that someone got the spawn points wrong, and then never fixed them.

So, that’s the first part of the game. In the second part, you start fighting more difficult enemies, and that kind of takes you back to square one, where you sometimes get into combat against enemies you can easily take, and other times you’re extremely outmatched. Plus, some of them can paralyze your characters, which you can’t heal until far later in the game. If you manage to win with your remaining party member, you can return to a healer, but they take damage for every step along the way and might die. In order to resurrect them, you need to brew a potion, take it to a different ?healer, and they’ll bring the?m back. Ugh, I feel frustrated just trying to explain it.

In the second area of the game, you quickly get your third party member, but you’re not done until you get the fourth. To do that, you have to talk to a few very specific people, and t??hey’re all behind locked doors. The locked doors are just kind of incredible. You need a keycard to go through them, but that doesn’t just unlock the door. The keycard is immediately used up, so to pass through it again, you need another. If you’re just carrying one key and you enter an enclosed area, yo?u become perpetually trapped. You have to save and load your game.

And that’s where I wouldn’t want to be playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito on original ??hardware. Saving just generates a? password. That’s not out of line with how the original Japanese version of Dragon Quest saved. However, it starts you off with only a rough approximation of the gold and XP you saved and sends you back to Mamus. Not being able to easily save before going through a locked door would drive me insane. I would just straight up eat the cartridge before too long.

Ugggghhhh...

Not that my sanity was entirely safe. To get the keycards to just test a door, you have to buy them, and their prices are completely insane. You’re going to be hammering the save sta?te button just so you don’t waste these precious cards. Even then, you’re still going to have to grind like a stripper for the money you need.

To give you a sense of how much grinding is in Hoshi wo Miru Hito, I initially planned on having this write-up done last week, but I needed more time so I cou??ld do more grinding.

It would take me a very long tim??e to explain all the w?ays that combat is an excruciating chore. From the absolutely atrocious balancing, to the mess of a UI, I feel physically nauseous when I think back to playing it. It�it hurts.

If you can believe it, I actually played Hoshi wo Miru Hito to completion. After endless grinding and talking to random people for a w??hile, you eventually go to the third area. There are, thankfully, a few tricks in this are??a that enable you to get through it a lot quicker.

You go i?nto space, which is depicted as a few pieces of floating debris against a starry backdrop. But weirdly, you can just walk through empty space. I don’t mean jump, like you can over certain barriers and bodies of water. Your c??haracters just straight up walk normally through the starfield. You can then bypass a lot of combat by walking on walls, and then it’s just a matter of trekking across Hell’s half-acre to talk to some porpoises.

Hrmph!

Don’t worry about not being leveled up enough for some grand end-game encounter because there isn’t one. The finale of Hoshi wo Miru Hito gives you dialogue with three options, and then you’re just given an ending based on ?your selection. You literally just choose yo?ur ending.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Hoshi wo Miru Hito and just how horrendously awful it is, but this write-up is already a lot longer than I usually aim for. It’s just�incredible. The best thing I can say about the game is that the music didn’t make my ears ble?ed.

This is quite possibly the worst game I have ever played, and I’ve been writing a column on bad games for nearly three years. I own Action 52 on the NES, and while that collection of games is equally �if not more �inept, at least the pain is relatively short-lived. Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken, Japan’s kyuukyoku no kusoge (ultimate crappy game), is at least compellingly terrible. Playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito was a mistake. It’s not just terrible; it’s designed to prolong your sufferin?g. Any merit it may have is drowned out by the screams of its victims.?? I think it might violate international law.

It was recently ?ported and re-released on Switch, but only in Japan. Hopefully, we’ll get a localized version in the West, but for now, we can torture ourselves with the fan translation.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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The Nintendo Family Computer (more commonly known as the Famicom) launched in 1983 in Japan, a full two years before its Western analog, the NES, debuted in North? America. This was right as the video game market underwent a temporary implosion in other parts of the world and was strangely the best time possible for Nintendo to break into the home market. 

Co??llecting for a Japanese console can cause some hesitation for an Anglophone. The fear is that the best games will remain in their native language, and you’ll be left with piles of RPGs where you can't even navigate the menus. That can certainly be a problem as you get into later generations of consoles, but with the Famicom, there are a lot of great games that don’t require much reading comprehension.

To make things more tantalizing, the Famicom is a relatively cheap con??sole to collect for. While the price of NES games have been climbing to upsetting levels over the past few years, the Japanese collector’s market hasn’t really moved much. Mo?st titles in the system’s library don’t exceed $50, and many of them have a higher price tag because they’re regional variations of expensive NES titles.

Because ??of its accessibility and affordability, the Famicom has remained my favorite console to import for??, so I’m going to share some of that knowledge with you.

The Games

The Famicom is a lot more than just the Japanese NES. While you can get nearly identical versions of popular titles like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda on both platforms, the Famicom offers a whole world beyond that. If you love the N??ES but feel you’ve plumbed the depths of its library for all the gems it has to offer, then the Famicom is where you should go next.

When I started out with the Famicom, I mostly targeted three main groups: Nintendo, Kunio-Kun, and Konami.

There are very few Nintendo games that stayed exclusively in Japan. Of these, most are on the Famicom Disk System and are visual novel titles that are impossible to play unless you speak the language. But two of them stand out: Joy Mecha Fight and Devil’s World. The former is a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter II, while the latter is a weird maze game (like Pac-Man) designed by Shigeru Miyamoto.

A great deal of the Kunio-Kun/Nekketsu/Downtown games stayed in Japan. You might know these games better as one of their localized titles: River City Ransom or Crash ‘N�the Boys. Since they’re all part of one series, you might expect that there would only be a small number of titles, but there’s actually just short of a dozen. My personal favorites are Ike! Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu and Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes. Note that you can now get all of these titles as part of the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle.

Finally, there are the titles Konami never localized, and there's a lot of them. Over here, we knew the company mainly for titles like Contra or Castlevania, but in Japan, they offered a whole lot more. There are the Ganbare Goemon games (including two RPGS), a port of Parodius Da, Crisis Force, and several hidden gems. Then there are the two Wai Wai World crossover games. I spend a lot of time extolling the greatness of?? Konami’s Japan-onl?y library, and that isn’t about to stop.

The Hardware

The most common version of the Famicom is the original beige and red model. It’s a little uncomfortable for modern gamers for a few rea??sons. The first concern is over the console's extremely short controller cables hardwired into the system. The idea is that you’ll pull it off the s?helf and play it on the floor, but that’s not a very Western thing to do. The easiest way about it might be to just use a long AV and power cable so you can pull the whole console over to where you sit.

If you’re crafty, you can modify the controller cables to give you more length. However, another op??tion is to use the extension port on the side. There’s a variety of third-party controllers that you can buy, as w??ell as extension cables and wireless controllers that can be used through that port. Be careful, though. A controller is wired either as a first player or second player. A player two controller plugged into the extension port will only act as a player two controller. So, if you're playing alone, you need to make sure you have a player one controller.

The other downside is that the original Famicom model only supports RF out. This looks terrible on modern T??Vs and can be rather grainy on CRT. You’ll need to modify ?the console if you want better output.

The one I use is a Sharp Famicom Twin model. These are unique because they have the Fami??com Disk System built in. They also support composite out, which provides a better video signal than RF. However, remember that these two have hardwired controllers with short cords.

The last common Famicom model is the “New Famicom,�sometimes called the “AV Famicom.�This one is visibly similar to the “New-Style NES�(or top-loader), with a few differences. Most importantly, the controllers aren’t hardwired, and it has a composite video output. It’s generally a bit more expensive than the standard Famicom, but it’s much cheaper th?an the Sharp Twin models.

You might also consider just using a Famicom adapter for your NES. This essentially just changes the Famicom’s 60-pin configuration to the NES�72-pin and allows you to play Famicom games on your NES with some caveats. First, Famicom game cartridges aren’t standardized, so some are much taller than others and won’t fit in an NES. Second, games that use specialized chips for additional audio channels will work, but you won’t get the boosted soundtrack. For example, Akumajou Densetsu, which is the Japanese version of Castlevania 3 won’t have its deeper soundtrack.

Since my NES is RGB modified w??hile my Famicom isn’t, I’ll often use my NES to get a better picture through an upscaler. However, I love hooking the Famicom up to an old CRT for that authenti??c feel.

Finally, there are plenty of clone Famicoms available. While a lot of these are rather inconsistent in quality, there are enthusiast consoles like the Retr?oUSB AVS and the Analogue NT Mini. They can be useful if you want a simple, all-in-one?? solution without the need for tinkering.

The Famicom Disk System

If you’re feeling even more adventurous, it’s worth getting into the Famicom Disk System. This expansion to the console allows you to play a subset of games that were released on what are essentially recognized as floppy disks. This is where you’ll find games like Nintendo’s own Famicom Grand Prix 2: 3D Hot Rally and Nazo no Murasame-Jou.

Like standard Famicom games, these are generally cheap and easy to come by, with some standout titl??es being a bit more expensive. Nothing lik?e some games in the NES library, however.

Getting the Famicom Disk System itself isn’t too expensive either. There’s one thing to note, however. The FDS console’s drive b??elt is prone to, er, melting. It’s an almost unavoidable flaw of the system, and chances are, if you have an FDS, it either has a broken belt or one you've already replaced. Replacing the belt isn’t as easy as it sounds, either. Putting a ??new one in is simple enough, but disassembling, recalibrating, and reassembling is a bit more difficult.

Likewise, the disks have the same issue as normal floppy disks: they are prone to degaussing. That is to say, they can lose the data written to them. Of all the FDS games I’ve handled, I’ve only found one that doesn’t read. Most sellers will test the g??ames first, ?ensuring they're still functional.

The disks are rewritable, too. So, that's led to some fancy? hardware hacks allowing for the restoration of degaussed games. This isn’t easy or accessible, but in the future, there may be more options when it comes to restoring the data on t?hese disks.

Where to get a Famicom supplies

This one is a bit trickier. The absolute best way would be actually going?? to ?Japan and visiting one of their many fantastic retro game stores. Doing this will allow you to choose the condition of the games more easily. Likewise, it will give you access to a lot of games that still have their boxes and manuals. For some reason, Japanese gamers were in the habit of keeping their packaging, which is pretty cool.

However, that’s not a very realistic option. Unless you have a part??icularly well-stocked retro game store near you, you’re probably going to have to order online. Personally, I still use eBay, but there are non-auction websites you can go through. In the wake of COVID, there are a lot more stores that have turned to selling internationally on eBay, which is a benefit t??o importers. There are a tonne of well-stocked and reputable stores you can browse through.

Shipping can be?? an issue, especially if you’re buying consoles. Many sellers allow for combined shipping, and since many Famicom games reside in the $20 and below range, it's easy to score a big care package of games. Shipping fr??om Japan is often very quick unless you go with seamail. Seamail can take weeks, while I’ve had packages shipped by air arrive in a few short days.

Why you should get a Famicom

I’m not sure if I’ve said this enough, but the Famicom is more than simply a Japanese NES. It has an ecosystem of its own, with tons of quality titles unreleased in the West. Furthermore, there are unique experiences that we missed over here, like secret-heavy titles such as Atlantis no Nazo or fascinating kusoge like Spelunker II. E??ven while the NES h??as a well-rounded library of its own, the Famicom provides even more depth.

If you need recommendations, you can check out my old Famicom Friday column. However, I feel like part of the fun is diving into the unknown and seeing what you turn up. It??’s still a bit of a frontier for a lot of video game hobbyists, so there’s a lot to discover on your own. And that’s what’s so exciting about the Famicom. There’s a lot of stuff that you just don’t hear about in the West, and, personally, my favorite games are the ones I haven’t played before.

The post Destructoid’s guide to collecting for Famicom appeared first on Destructoid.

Ja! Ja! Jajamaru!

I’ve held water for Ninja Jajamaru-kun for some years now. I remember picking up its plum-hued cartridge and deciding it was worth the $5 just to see what was on it. My hunch was correct; it was indeed worth $5. While it’s a rather basic arcade-style title, it feels like the perfect encapsulation of the pre-Zelda Famicom market. It’s distinctly Japanese and already made to feel antiquated by Super Mario Bros., which was released a couple of months prior.

I often refer to the Ninja JaJaMaru series as “almost-classics.�They always seemed to be a few steps behind whatever was popular at the time. A follower, not a leader, and it's hard to tell ??if the games were an earnest attempt at being anything more.

Japan has had a collection of Ninja JaJaMaru games since 2019, and I really didn’t believe there was any possibility of that making its way anywhere else. I’m happy to see that ININ Games and City Connection were willing to put in the effort to localize these niche games. I’m swollen with enthusiasm to talk about them again. However, I’m in an awkward position. ??As much as I want people to experience these games, they’re definitely not required reading to begin with, and the actual package is rather lacking.

Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell Deluxe Edition is a bundle of two apps. The first is a selection of five of the classic side-scrollers in Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection. Next, there’s Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell which is a tribute game. I will probably circle back and review the two RPGs included in Ninja JaJaMaru: The Lost RPGs at a later date, but since there’s no way to buy it as part of ????one bundle, I’ve left it at the side for now.

[caption id="attachment_366801" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell Deluxe (PS4, Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: City Connection
Publisher: ININ Games
Released: February 21st, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

Starting with the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection, you get a mixed bag. For clarity,?? these ar??e the games included:

• Ninja JaJaMaru-Kun
• Ninja JaJaMaru’s Big Adventure (JaJaMaru no Daibouken)
• The Great World Adventure (Oira JaJaMaru! Sekai Daibouken)
• Operation Milky Way (Ninja JaJaMaru: Ginga Daisakusen)
•  Super Ninja-kid (Super Ninja-Kun)

Even if The Lost RPGs had been included, it’s hardly a comprehensive selection of games. The Ninja JaJaMaru games technically started with Ninja-Kun: Maj� no B�ken an arcade title by UPL and published by Taito. It was ported to Famicom by Tose and published by Jaleco in 1985. Jaleco then took that framework and spun it off into the JaJaMaru series, but the relationship is a little murky. UPL would go on to develop Ninja-Kun II, while Jaleco made more JaJaMaru games.

In any case, you can make the claim that these are two separate series, but if that’s the case, why is Super Ninja-Kun (localized here as Super Ninja Kid) here? If Super Ninja-Kun is here, why not the original Ninja-Kun?

This may be nit-picking, but the lack of certain games makes the collections feel less than definitive. A personal disappointment is the lack of the Wonderswan-exclusive Ganso JaJaMaru-kun. I also would have appreciated the Ninja JaJaMaru-Kun: Onigiri Ninp�ch� titles. There was one on Saturn and another on PlayS??tation, and despite the word “gold�being the only difference in their title, they were completely different. Neither are in this collection, th?ough, which is a drag.

[embed]//youtu.be/ayMEbq-o2NA[/embed]

Almost-classics

I’ve covered three of the titles in this collection in individual articles here on Destructoid: Ninja Jajamaru-Kun, Jajamaru no Daibouken (Ninja Jajamaru’s Big Adventure), and Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen (Ninja JaJaMaru: Operation Milky Way). Those overviews ??still ap??ply and go into greater depth than I could fit into this review.

To summarize, the former two games are charming titles that have a lot of clunk that go beyond what you’d normally expect from the time period they were developed in. Operation Milky Way, on the other hand, was a big overhaul to the series. In a lot of ways, it’s a bet??ter game; far less janky than you’d expect from playing the rest of the series. However, it also feels like a lot of the ch?arm was stripped away.

Ninja Jajamaru: The Great World Adventure was localized in North America previously on Game Boy as Maru’s Mission, and it is very insubstantial. Not only is the design lackadaisical, but it’s also extremely short and easy. The developers have re-translated t?he original version to at least give it back its identity. They also included a DX version that colorizes the previously monochrome title. So?, that’s certainly worth something.

Finally, Super Ninja-kid is fine. It’s a pretty flimsy game in its own right compared to othe?r SNES games that came ou?t at the time, but it’s not terrible.

[caption id="attachment_366800" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Rusty shuriken

W??hat is terrible is that the emulation doesn’t seem great. You have the option to turn on a CRT filter, which is cool, but on the Switch version it absolutely tanks the framerate. These filters actually often do require quite a bit of computational powe?r, but someone should have probably tested to make sure these were functional on the Switch version. I’m not sure if things are the same on the PlayStation.

You can just play with the CRT filter off, but I can’t explain what’s wrong with Ninja Jajamaru’s Big Adventure. The bosses don’t function properly. There’s something screwy with the hit detection and timing of them, like they're not actually where the sprite appears. You can beat them by firing in their general vicinity, but then they just die. I did some testin??g with both the filter and the bosses to see if I could figure out what was ??causing them to misbehave, but then I realized I shouldn’t be doing ININ’s QA, and gave up.

This is awful. At the bare m?inimum, you should expect that the games in your game collection work properly, but that’s just not the case here. Since I’m a bit delayed on this review, I kept checking to see if a patch would be released, but as? of writing, there has been none.

[caption id="attachment_366799" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Bare minimum

Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell is a little more inoffensive. It sort of expands on the gameplay of Ninja Jajamaru-kun, and that’s as far as it goes. You platform around and defeat enemies. Then it makes a big deal of your ??success by showering you in coins and unlocking new characters.

It’s not terrible. I played it with my nephews recently, and they dug it. It’s just a bit understated. When bought in a package with the Retro Collection, it makes sense as a tribute to the other games. As a standalone produc??t, I can’t really recommend it.

In fact?, it’s somewhat difficult to recommend the bundle as a whole. I’m pre?tty mixed.

On one hand, I appreciate that ININ Games finally took these games out of their homeland. Like I said, I want more people to experience these games. The price they’re asking for the full bundle also isn’t that extravagant. However, I’m not here to review their b??usiness model.

The Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection and Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell are both entirely ramshackle. While the latter is mostly inoffensive, the former is pretty d??isappointing. It’s nice to have these games translated and available again, but one of them doesn’t even function properly. The UI is terrible, the ex??tras are barely worth it. It’s a patch or two away from the bare minimum, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that it should already meet that quality.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Ninj????a JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle +Hell Deluxe appeared first on Destructoid.

Kyuukyoku no kusoge

I first heard of Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken on Game Centre CX where it was introdu??ced as “kyuukyoku no kusoge�or “ultimate crappy game.�The host, Shinya Arino, tackled it as part of a segment that ran throughout 9 of the 10 episodes of s??eason 3 (2005). The concept of the segment is that he’d try to tackle the game, and every time he’d get stuck or confused, he’d call a viewer to get hints on what to do.

He was eventually able to complete the game, but Super Monkey Daibouken is so incomp??rehensible that, in one of the episodes, he made absolutely no progress, and none of the viewers could help him?.

I decided that I’d try that out for myself. Obviously, no one views me (that I know of),?? so my goal was to complete the ga??me using the same viewer hints that Arino did. It’s an enlightening experience.

[caption id="attachment_363137" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Dragon Quest to the West

Released by Vap Inc. in 1986, Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken is a game based on Journey to the West, the classic of Chinese literature. I feel like I know very little about Journey to the West aside from all the ways it's been bastardized by popular? media over the years.

You play as the entourage for a monk who must, as the name implies, journey to the West. That’s more-or-less the best I can give you as a primer because, as I said, the game is incomprehensible. You play as the entire entourage, but the only one who’s worth a damn is Goku. It sort of follows Dragon Quest’s example (Dragon Quest having been released earlier that year) by having you na?vigate across an overworld while it throws random battles at you.

The battles are fun, by which I mean they’re barely functional. You scoot across an endlessly scrolling screen, trying to hit the enemies. All the characters can damage enemies, but only Goku and the horse/dragon actually have an attack animation, and even then, they’re essentially just suggestions for the enemies to feel pain. Goku has this slow, sticky bo staff swing, which looks like it would be self-explanatory, but enemies are only sometimes hit by it, and it seems to happen at all ranges. Sometimes if you’re directly overtop of an enemy, they give the damag?e blink. Other times, they need to be ??several paces away. Most of the time, they do nothing at all.

However, you’re not going anywhere unless you kill everyt??hing on screen, s??o you’ll need to just keep flailing and try not to take too much damage in the process. You can jump and even fly on a cloud, but so can the enemies so nowhere is safe. At the same time, everywhere is safe-ish.

[caption id="attachment_363138" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Success music

Along the way, you’re supposed to meet up with Hakkai, a pig, and Sha Gojo, the kappa. I don’t know why. If you defeat the weakest enemy in a battle first, an ally will appear. They’re not capable of much. They largely just move about at random, and sometimes when they bump into an enemy, the foe will take damage. Usually, they’re the ones that take damage, and when they’re dea??d, they’re dead. Sort of. They’re still with your party, they just don’t appear in battle.

You can also switch to the other members of the entourage, but, as I said previously, they don’t have attack animations, so there isn’t much you ca??n do with them. Keep mashing the A button and hope the enemies take damage. If?? Goku dies, you’re essentially screwed.

I’m having a crisis here. If I acknowledge that Goku’s attack animation doesn’t ensure the enemy takes damage, but the lack of animation doesn’t guarantee the enemy won’t take damage, then the characters are e??quivalent right? Agh, my ??brain!

In any case, once you wipe out all the enemies, you’re left standing there on the field. Super Monkey Daibouken will then just let you stand there until you ??hit the A button again, then it will display a load screen for a while before? spitting you back onto the overworld. It’s so disorienting. There is no success music, no stat roll telling you how much money or experience you earn �there is no money or experience. You’re just unceremoniously dropped back into horse mode to continue on westward.

[caption id="attachment_363139" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

The overworld brazenly hates you

If you watch any footage of Super Monkey Daibouken, you might think the worst part? of the overworld is that your entourage move??s tile by boring tile through an ugly, ugly world, but it really sucks on many, deeper levels. Let’s start at the beginning.

Have you ever seen a loading screen in an NES game? Probably not. There isn’t a lot going on there. It’s essentially a couple of chips communicating with a couple more chips. And while computer hardware works at an unfathomable speed, Super Monkey Daibouken loads slowly at an equally unfathomable level. It gives you a dialogue message??, which then vanishes and leaves you at a blank blue scree??n for seconds. Seconds are meaningless in the overall timeline of your life, but it’s a really long time to wait for an excruciatingly terrible Famicom game.

The next worst thing about the overworld is how brazenly it hates you. The overworld is a confusing mess, co??ntaining a holy heavenly shit tonne of dead ends. There are warp zones that lead to inescapable traps and others that don’t exist until a certain time of day. There’s a place that outright kills you if you get too close, and a giant desert that has absolutely no function. There’s a day/night cycle, and y??ou have to stop in houses to collect food and water, but be careful; some houses are full of ghosts.

Most of the game is just traversing this ugly, ugly world. There are sections where there are absolutely no random battles, so it’s just watching your party move tile by tile at glacial speeds across sprites. It gives you a lot of time to cradle your head and try to make sense of the?? tile set. It lets you really appreciate the overscan tiles that keep popping up. I liked to pretend the little grassy tiles were speed lines and the entourage was just screeching through the galaxy. Woooosh!

[caption id="attachment_363140" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Dirty message

It’s not all bad. For example, there are�uh�The music doesn’t hurt. The bosses are really easy. Sometimes when you go into a house, it will give you a password that you can punch in on the title screen and continue. It is technically possible to complete the game. There are worse games on Action 52. Probably. Playing it didn’t cause unexplained bleeding again. Oh, wait.??? Nevermind.

They charged money for Super Monkey Daibouken. There aren’t even credits within the game, neither for the developers nor the publisher. We know the name of one developer, however: Kaoru Nakajima. We know this because they decided to covertly implant a dirty message into one of the ??tilesets. I guess someo??ne at least wanted to be associated with the final product.

I suppose I’m at least happy to have experienced it. One of the great things about playing it along with the Game Center CX episodes is that many of the callers give their experience with it. One person mentioned buying it after seeing the commercial for it. Another recounted playing it a????longside two friends.

And that’s the magic of kusoge. I mean, sure, we’re suffering, but we’re suffering together. It’s almost like an analogy for life itself!

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken is known as the “Ultimate kusoge” appeared first on Destructoid.

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 e?xists, which is cr??iminal. No top-shelf Famicom game deserves 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 ship. The alie??ns 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 th??ree different configurations, which affects which direction your bullets 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 away from the techn?ical impressiveness of the tit??le, 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 a?ll directions for the amount 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 theyâ€??™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 loca?lized to North America, though there is no Japanese text in the game. It used Konami’s custom VRC4 chip, which might be the? reason it never made it over here.

It’s shame, as it’s o??ne of the console’s ?best shooters, and now it languishes in obscurity.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

The post Crisis Force is perhaps the most Famicom of Famicom shoot-’em-ups appeared first on Destructoid.

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, be?cause 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 random 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 t?o 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 inventory management. You have to jump over some holes, but not too many, an??d 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 wan??t to track off-screen enemie?s, 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 i??s a strangely sol??id game. I’m even going to go as far as saying I enjoyed it.

Your j??ob 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 lo??ot drops are different depending on which route you take, so there’s reasonable incentive to take different routes through 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 fr??om an enemy group, so unless you want to grind 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, just 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 the rare one is an actual shop. Some are even literally hidden behind otherwise solid w?alls. 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 t?o prepare, but what is the right amount of preparation? Thi?s is my dilemma. Don’t give me the ability to break the game because I always will. I have no respect for your 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 h?asn’t been ported to anything moder?n. That’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.

The post Zombie Hunter is a scream-y RPG enemy-smacker appeared first on Destructoid.

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 w?as going to throw it against the wall as many times as it could until it finally stu??ck.

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 better than no Gamapakkun at all. That would have been ve??ry upsetti??ng.

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 where you have to charge up your dash to make i??t 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 essentially everything after that is an afterthought.

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 develop??ment 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 extremely rare at the time. You can also select her without 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 sl?oppy. 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 ex?actly one enemy. This wasn’t random, 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 letters that you collect, but I couldn’t figure out what they do. The letters 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, but some of the t??racks 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 an?d perpetually tired adult who has seen their share of hop-and-bop, I couldn’t even stay attentive enough to get through the past coupl?e 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: more competent but entirely f?orgettable.

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 risky 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. Y?ou’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/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">crappy game of le??gend,�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 th?ey trying to make more money of??f the name, or were they trying to 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 protago?nist had bones made of breadsticks and could die if a bat pooped on th??????????????????????????em. 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 plumbing 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 stabbing 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 reall??y, 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 li?ttle 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 spike??s or tumbling down a long distance only hurt you instead of killing you outright. It’s a strange departure, which again calls 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 graph paper. ?There’s a certain amount of exploration and ba?cktracking 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 you’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 copy 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 comprehensible 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 confusi?on.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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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 in??volve 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 difficu??lty, make no mistake, each one is its own unique, short campaign. The objective of each one is largely the same, but through clever lev??el 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 enemies, 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 typ??e 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-pla??yer adversarial title, I can’t say I’ve ever considered narrative to be a possible path for improvement, but i?t 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 F?amicom, they just dumped a whole lot of sugar into the recipe?.

Damned tornadoes

As I mentioned before, gameplay is somewhat 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 something 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. There’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 pirates in the? West?

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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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.? But 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 pr??obably 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 j??ust as much a celebration of how great Konami 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, which 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 cha?nge. 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 (al??though I got stuck with Goemon going through Yomi, and I was forced to wait for him 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 ho??w 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 no?thing you can’t handle, but some 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 staying 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 fu??rther 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 betwee??n levels, but you can sk??ip 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 Famicom Frida??y, 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 ridiculous, 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 squat, backgrounds are sparse, and enemies are enormous. If you like the Famicom RPG aesthetic, it fit??s the look perfectly.

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 got 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 like 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. T??he 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 theme, and it’s not because I like? it. However, there’s a decent amount of music. Every so often, when it’s not beating yo?u 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 bi??zarre 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 tank 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 the game, all the par?ty 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 t?rip 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 much en??joyment f??rom 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 i?t also has a fan translation. It’s your call which you want to play. I’ll probably get to the remake sooner rather than late??r, 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 the 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 embarrassing. 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 pirate. Go save her. The big differen??ce 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 destructible 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 ma??ke 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, so 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 lo??ops back to the beginning) and no continues. Minute-by-minute, it’s easy-peasy, but actually climbing to the 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 the game’s sprite-work. Its squat critters ar??e 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 equivalent 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 happened. See you at the finish l??ine.

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 who??le game finished rather quickly, 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 localized version here in t?he 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 t?he 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 gi??r?l can dream. Sometimes I wish '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 jo??b 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 h??aving 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 g??ameplay 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 b?ad soundtrack. Hold on, I’ll tryâ€?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 better 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. Wi??th 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, which makes the save system almost a requirem??ent. 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 definitely worth the time, especially if you’re ?looking for something to slot into your Disk System. 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 i??t.

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 more useful translation would be for the manual, but t?here 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.

The post Ai Sens??hi Nicol teaches us what a love warrior is all about appeared first on Destructoid.

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 fi??rst 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 word?ed listing. The collector’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. Nothing that hasn’t been antiquated by later games in the series, but fun nonetheles??s.

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 happy? Did the co??mpany 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 Advance 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 truc??ks are separate units. The supply trucks deserve special mention becau?se 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 persistent 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 turned 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 games.

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?? exist without its predec?essor.

It’s easy to say that Famicom Wars was made obsolete by later games in the series, but I think it’s more important to appreciate how fun it still is. Even back in 1988, the foundation of t??he series was pretty strong. I just wish 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 p?oke 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 u?nit 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.

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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 so??me 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 significant chunk and don’t regret it. That is one weird damned show.

Anyway, there w??as 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 guys, 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 the 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 o??r 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 bosses, 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 real?ly 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. No 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 beating 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 end 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 leve?l. The whole ga??me 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 Am?erica back in 2018. Weird, but if you like the show, the game�exists.

Check out previous Famicom Fridays right here.

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We're definitely not gambling this Famicom Friday

From a young age, video games have covertly been teaching me to gamble, which is fun?ny 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 example, whic??h is potentially the cutest way to ?feed a burgeoning addiction.

If you do??n’t know what Pachinko is, I’ll tell you this: it definitely isn’t gambling. Gambling is illegal in Japan, after all. No, this 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, i??t’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 ba??lls 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 find the right vector and stick to it. Even after finding a vague spot where you find consistent success, the l??ever 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 you 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, an??d 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 PC-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 th??ink most of i??t 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, it’s perfectly playable without needing one. The 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 combin??ation 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 environmen?ts, some of the sections seem 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 t??hat you’re tasked with reclaiming all 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 situati?ons. You can have a stockpile of characters, 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 chips where it co?unt??s.

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 Famicom. 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 character since it’s the only way to know what projectile you’re saddling them with. However, for those English monolinguists amon??g 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 entering a name. To explain briefly, these marks change the consonant sound in Japanese syllables. Without 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 jus??t 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 for the creator o??f M?ega Man appeared first on Destructoid.

Taco Hog missed you

If there’s one Japanese trend that it’s maybe bette?r off we 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 to 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 maliciou??s because by looking 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 s?ome people don’t appreciate it when a bunch of rich people drive high-performance cars through impoverished 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 unfairly diff??i??cult 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 streets, 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 be??hind 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 summo?ns 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 get??ting across a couple of water hazard??s, 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 precarious cliffs. My 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 because 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 ma?rket. 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 provide 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 F?amicom Friday returns with the legendary bait-and-switch Paris-Dakar Ra??lly Special appeared first on Destructoid.

Famicom Frontiers

Earlier this week, the world lost one of the single most important pioneers in Nintendo history?. Masayuki Uemura, the man behind the creation of spectacular gaming consoles NES and SNES, passed away on December 6, 2021. He was 7?8.

A long-time electronics engineer, Uemura had worked within various fledgling Japanese companies such as the Sharp Corporation, researching new and innovative forms of technology such as solar energy cells and semiconductors. Joining Nintendo's R&D2 hardware division in the early 1970s, Uemura would be responsible for the publisher's groundbreaking forays into video gaming, including the Laser Clay Shooting System arcade and the company's first-ever console line, Color TV-Game, which launched in the summer of 1977.

This was merely the beginning, however, as Uemur??a would eventually be tasked by then Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi with creating a home console that could replicate the splendor of the arcade market. Leading a team ?of talented developers and designers, Uemura would create the Famicom unit, which launched to unheard-of success in the summer of 1983, selling 2.5 million units in its first two years of release. The Famicom was redesigned for the western market, launching as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985 and putting Nintendo on the map as a world market leader. In the wake of the '83-'85 video game crash, the NES revitalized home gaming on a global scale.

Not content with developing one of the most important consoles in gaming history, Uemura would go on to develop one of the best consoles in gaming history, designing the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1988. Worki??ng alongside Sony engineer and soon-to-be PlayStation dev Ken Kutaragi, the new console was completed at the dawn of the new decade, launching in Japan in the fall of 1990 before m??aking its way west in the summer of 1991. The rest is history. The SNES was another amazing success, cementing Nintendo as a frontrunner in video gaming.

Masayuki Uemura remained at Nintendo until 2004, when he finally left the company that owes him a great deal of its own success. Uemura spent his remaining years researching and teaching younger developers about the history of electronics, hardware, and game development. I hope that, in just a few short paragraphs, I have been able to encapsulate Uemura's importance to the gaming industry. Most developers live for the day they create something that truly breaks ground within their industry of choice, and Uemura reached those heights on multiple occasions. The video game industry, from the developers to the man??ufacturer?s, to we, the players, have been wholly enriched by his life and legacy.

We at Destructoid offer our condolences to hi???s family and friends

The post Masayuk??i Uemura, the pioneer behind the NES and SNES, passes away appeared first on Destructoid.

Strange Famicom shmups to return next week

Publisher City Connection, in association with developer Empty Clip Studios, has released the first full gameplay trailer for its retro double-pack Abarenbo Tengu & Zombie Nation, which will be available to purchase digitally on PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch from October 28. Just in time to offer retro gaming fans a solid dose of Halloween?? weirdness.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkW8zQ-D8K8

As we have previously reported, the twofer will offer fans a new (and in many cases, the first) opportunity to check out two obscure 8-bit shmups: 1990 Famicom release Abarenbo Tengu and its heavily localized 1991 NES release, Zombie Nation.

The player guides a ghostly Tengu mask or a disembodied samurai head, respectively, as they do battle with waves of undead monsters and supernatural beings �intent on enslaving the world through some barely explained form of mind control. While both games went somewhat under the radar in their heyday, they have since foun?d a cult fandom due to their garish visuals, frantic action, and �perhaps most importantly of all �their rampant silliness.

Abarenbo Tengu & Zombie Nation is a straight recreation of both games in their origina?l 8-bit glory, though both titles will include a handful of new features include redefinable controls, save states, a "Rewind" function, and online leaderboards. A Museum Mode will also showcase a gallery of the title's strange cover artwork and marketing materials.

While hardly stone-cold classics, it's always neat to see oddities such as t?hese resurrected for modern audiences �for preservati??on's sake at the very least. You can check out the mind-bending culture chaos for yourself come October 28.

The post Ch??eck out the strange Abarenbo Tengu and Zombie Nation 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 fulfilling than regu??rgitating games that people have more likely heard of, but the downside is that the cream usu?ally 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 heard 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 th?e belt and recalibrated it. Except, you’re probably going to ma?ke 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 attempts 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 exi?st 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 way because this was 1986 and we had just recently discovered that turtles live in the sewers and eat pizza. Yo??u’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 little tricks and secrets that can boost your score, but if you’r?e 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 game isn’t that difficult aside from the sometimes wonky jumping controls, but that just adds to the mind?less pleasure.

Electrician is pretty easy to figure out for any monolingual En??glish 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’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 ever see it again, because the original publisher, Synapse, became Broderbund and then becam?e 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 finally 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 treasure trove of marketable franchises, it’s strang?e 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 K??onami’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 along paths, attempting to find your w?ay 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 wh??ich 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 sloppy as a turkey avocado s??andwich.

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 the world. Once you have that, you?? can continue on to one of the i??slands 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 u?ntil 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.

Otherwise, the boss battles are pretty weak and the mazes are going to irk some pe??????????????????????????ople. 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 more than the sum of its parts. It’s stupid, sure. It’s unpolished, yes. But it’s got style f?or 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 still in Japanese only except for the option menus. Well, that was a roller coa?ster. 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 discover 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 re??ad 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 daibouken, and a monogatari.

So, no, I’m hardly fluent in the language. I don’t study as m?uch as I sh??ould. 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 actual language skills to translate this) "Popey????e’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 h??ave to know th?e word outright.

At least, that’s what Word ?Puzzle A is. Word Puzzle B just gives you how many letters a word is and you guess letters until you get it. I’m n??ot sure what the point is, even for someone learning English.

You get to select your category from six options: Animal, Country, Food, Sports, 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 t??hey 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’s a decent fit, even 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 tea??ch 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 voca??bulary 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 wa??y to speed it up. Still, I pop this cartridge every so often because there’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 co?mpete to collect letters dropped by Olive Oyl to spell o?ut 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 probably 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 without needing to learn a new al?phabet. 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 gam?e has never really been reissued, either. Honestly, I don’t think it needs to be. There are more efficient?? 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.

Try not to hate kittens after playing this kusoge

Do you remember the film The Adventures of Milo and Otis? I don’t. It was based on a 1986 Japanese film called Koneko Monogatari. It’s not bad, I guess, if you think you can trust critics. It’s about a kitten getting lost in the wild and a pug puppy that chases after him. Both have misadventures in their efforts to not die. Sort of like Homeward Bound with better public transportation and a vendin??g machine on every corner.

In the wake of Super Mario Bros., Koneko Monogatari was adapted into a game for the Famicom Disk System. Let’s be fair here, it was 1986. Chernobyl exploded, Microsoft went public, and developers were still struggling to figure out how to make console games that weren’t just inferior ports of successful arcade titles. There were definitely a good few 1986 releases, but Koneko Monogatari isn’t one of them.

Upon starting up Koneko Monogatari, you’ll realize two things: the graphics ar?e cute, though not very detailed, and your ears are bleeding. That’s right! The game has you playing as a pudgy, wide-eyed kitty that gallops through fields of green. A sun welcomes you from one corner of the screen, and flowers bloom in the background. Little mice in their underwear are prepared to kill you if you get in their personal space, ?and trees react to you jumping on them by dropping apples.

If you’re wondering about the blood, that’s because the soundtrack is the kind that you can hear with your teeth. While I would deign to call it music, it is so uncomfortably high-pitched and abrasive that it forcibly polishes your ear canal. What’s really upsetting is that I refused to mute the game, in case it started playing a new song. Beca?use when you drink from an abattoir’s mop bucket, you first have to take in its full bouquet; that’s part of the experience.

Again, let’s be fair. It was 1986. Top Gun came out, the fema??le orgas?m was discovered for the first time in the wild, and human hearing had only just developed. We didn’t know how to make good sounds yet.

The goal of Koneko Monogatari is to get from the left side of the world to the right side. Despite being a game that seems targeted at children, this is easier said than done. In as early as the second level, you’re forced to perform jumps over bottomless pits stretched so wide? you need pixel-perfect timing to make it over successfully. Every enemy can kill you with a mere touch, and the only way you can defend yourself is by dropping an egg on them. This is stupid for two reasons: the first is that it’s an egg, and the second is that if you’re over top of an enemy, you’ve already cleared them, so why not just complete your jump and keep going on your way. Killing them just s?eems spiteful.

The eggs only really make sense when you fight the bosses, but also, not really. At the end of some levels (and in the midst of later ones), the exit is blocked by a bear, and you win by jumping on this bear and dropping eggs.?? This gradually drives the bear in??to the ground, deeper and deeper, until you can walk past it. Drive the bear into the ground. Like a stake. With eggs. Was that in the movie?

Sometimes the eggs have letters on them, and if you collect enough to spell "HELP," you'll summon Otis (Poosky in the Japanese version). The idea is that you maybe get behind Otis and he takes out enemies for you, but whatever you do, don't touch that pug. Doing so will kill you instantly because apparently, friend??ship is just as lethal as bears.

It’s unfortunate because Koneko Monogatari is otherwise cute. Although the gameplay is basic and the controls suck on a corndog, it does have a habit of throwing new and interesting ??mechanics at you to apologize. There are things like hills and different colored bears. Also, you sometimes get to ride a box of water while happy clouds shed their deadly tears down upon you.

The game progresses?? through the months of the year, with a level for night and day on each month. If you do the math that’s… uh… 24 levels, which kind of elicits a dry heave when you think about it. This amounts to maybe two hours of playtime, which for a normal game might sound reasonable, but for one that is constantly flushing your ears out with Drano, it’s an eternity.

You don’t have to do it all in one sitting, but Koneko Monogatari really wants you to. Like many Famicom Disk System games, you can save, but you actually have to know a code to do so. On the game over screen, you have to press B+A+Up+Start to save. Then, when you’re starting a new game, you press B?+A+Down+Start. Intuitive, isn’t it? Especially considering it’s a feature and u?sually, those aren’t unlocked with super-secret cheat codes.

It at least e?nds. After planting a nice field of bears and avoiding constant death, there is an end screen. Then you can put the game back in its case, write your article on it, and cry beneath a cold shower.

I tried to find an ??example of the soundtrack on YouTube, but, if you can believe it, no one seems to have gon?e to the effort of uploading it. Maybe you’ll have better luck, but I dug in there trying to share the pain. You can watch a playthrough if you don’t trust me, but maybe just take my word for it. I’m only trying to help.

What is really unfortunate is that this game seems like it’s aimed at children and features a cute kitten on the cover. It was on the Famicom Disk System, so it probably wasn’t expensive. Some little boy or girl got Koneko Monogatari as a gift and learned to hate video games at a young age. We can even go a step farther and theorize that, by disc??ouraging a hopeful youth, they drove them away from a potentially illustrious career as a video game columnist. Heavens!

It would be nice if the game underneath all that caterwauling was any good, but it unfortunately plays ??like how you’d expect a licensed game from the ‘80s would. It’s maybe not as painful as slamming your open palm down on a des??ktop covered in thumbtacks, but you’ll still be feeling a sting of agony by level three. To be fair, this was 1986. One kilogram hailstones killed 92 in Bangladesh, L. Ron Hubbard died, and fun was still criminalized in 33 states.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Lear?n t?o plant bears in the ground in Koneko Monogatari appeared first on Destructoid.

Can you shut up all aliens this Famicom Friday?

The official release date of the Nintendo Entertainment System 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 th??is title is, let’s take 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 sa?ve himself, Chun 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 proves 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 directly, 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 le??vel 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 th??e PC-8801 release, but characters seem to snap a few pixels at a time. It’s nothing too distracting, but it’s interesting to s??ee 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 maybe not the most influential of developers in today’s market, but the fact that they’re still trucking as Spike C??hunsoft 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 t??hat’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 t?he 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&rsquo?;t completely 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 wrestler: a rotund 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 the 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 until you achieve the rank of Yokozuna.

The foundation of the game is a pre?tty 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&r??squ?o;ll start to pick up new techniques that allow you to better dominate your opponent. This includes lifting them up by the thong and carrying 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 sma?ll 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 crack 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 overpower 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 to 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 whi??le 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, bu??t 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 sh??ort runtime. If you have another player to compete with, it’s some nice, light entertainment. Just remember, in the he?at of the moment, 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&rsq?uo;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 trouble 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 a??n 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 attempt to beat them. There are segments that celebrate the games of yore and explore the many arcades that s?till 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 enjoyed screwing ?with the player unless th??ey 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 sur?pris?e that 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.” Certainly high ambitions, but you??'d have to be i??nsane 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 r??ight, 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 invin?cibility 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 bottomless 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, espe??cially when it comes to jumping, and 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 few are just small rooms ??that 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 charming due to how much of a jerk it is, like watching an energetic dog push a child into the mud. It&rs??quo;s just so cheerful 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 means 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. More 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, s?o I’m not exact?ly 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.