“Is committing adultery at age 32 wrong?”

Part of an occasional series where I translate the oddly poetic Japanese dating-site spam I get in the mail. I wish I got more sometimes.

Hello.
My name is Yuka Mita; I’m a 32-year-old housewife with one child.

My life has been perfectly average lately — every day, I do the chores around the house, watching TV to while away the time. The other day, though, I looked at myself in the mirror and a thought suddenly crossed my mind: “Am I just going to keep growing older like this?” The face in the mirror was familiar enough, but for that one moment, it looked different from usual.

I’ve given everything I had to my motherly duties, and I believe I’ve tried my best for my husband. But I never want to forget the happiness I feel when people look at me as a woman. No matter how old I get, I want to be the same woman I was when I was born — that’s how I’ve been thinking now.

I have run out of patience with my husband. Would you be able to look at me as a woman — as a girl, and a girl alone?

I have a child and I don’t want to destroy our family, so we have to be honest with the role of our relationship in our lives. I’d like for both of us to fully respect each other’s private matters.

My photo and full profile is published below.
[URL removed]

My desire to be seen as a woman is always with me, and my body shape isn’t that far removed from what it was in my twenties.

If we could start just by talking about the trivial things in our life and build from there, that would be wonderful. I’ll wait for you to contact me.

…:’|

I’ll save you, Yuka!!! I just turned 32 and everything, too!!! :’(

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Rad Mobile (Sega, February 1991)

I’ve got fond memories of this. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that it’s my favorite “sprite-scaling” arcade racer of all time; certainly it’s the pinnacle of the sub-genre, which got its start with Out Run back in 1986. It’s packed with awesome little details, from the hilarious voice work to the way your avatar adjusts his gloves right after the start of the game — and no, you can’t control the car while he’s doing this.

The first game on Sega’s System 32 platform (and therefore the first 32-bit arcade game ever), Rad Mobile is neat partly because of its sheer length. A successful trip through Out Run takes about six to eight minutes; crossing the USA in Rad Mobile takes up to eighteen. It’s a test of concentration, especially in the later stages where the roads narrow and get packed full with cars driving at high speed and switching lanes without signaling — a very realistic simulation of East Coast traffic, even today.

Sega released a port called Gale Racer for the Saturn in Japan, but it’s not very good — I mean, the cars are 3D models, for Chrissakes.

Also worth noting: This game actually beat out Sonic the Hedgehog, the Genesis game, to market by about five months, making this (believe it or not) the character’s video-game debut. Wikipedia has no citation for this, but my copy of Famitsu DC’s Sega Arcade History — itself a collector’s item these days, going for 5000 yen or so in the aftermarket shops — confirms the dates.

More Marble Madness madness

As if to answer yesterday’s prayers, I managed to track down a video of someone (Japanese, of course) finishing Marble Madness, the arcade original, at very high speed while recording his hands working the trackball. The three minutes and change it comprises are jaw-dropping.

“Recorded 12/30/2008 at Shinjuku MIKADO. ‘Marble Madness is a sport,’ as they say, so I threw up a video I had handy. An utterly stupid mistake on the last stage keeps me from finishing with 99 seconds, but otherwise it’s a relatively decent run. If I can get a flawless run on video, I’d like to update this.”

I knew about the Silly Maze shortcut, but not the one right at the very end. Sheesh!

Marble Madness [EA, 1986]

Marble Madness, Mark Cerny’s first game-industry credit, is a game near and dear to my heart. People still link to the archived Video-fenky page where I described in detail how to beat the secret stage in the Commodore 64 version. The world it portrays is remarkably well-defined, especially for its time — clean, calculated, wonderful, and merciless. I’d like to think its visual style still influences modern stuff like Mirror’s Edge to this day, but ah, wishful thinking will only get me so far in our modern, shiny, Hollywood-ized game industry, won’t it?

The Amiga version, coded by Larry Reed (who may or may not be the Larry Reed who codes for Crystal Dynamics nowadays), is worth special note. It was the Amiga’s “killer app” for much of the system’s early life in the US, the one title that stood out as massively superior to any other home gaming experience. Even though the Amiga debuted at $1295 (compared to $300-ish for a full C64 hardware set at the time) and Commodore attempted to position it as a professional/business computer, they still used media of the Marble Madness port in much of their advertising. As a kid growing up in the northeastern US, I remember playing only two Amiga games: this one, and Turrican, both of which blew my NES-addled mind.

I never really followed the Amiga the way I should’ve, and I’m in the midst of teaching myself the ins and outs of its game library, a process that I’m sure will happily occupy my free time for eons to come. Along the way, I came across the above YouTube video, demonstrating a pretty astonishing annotated speedrun of the Amiga Marble Madness. The non-TAS-enhanced player winds up with a final score totaling over 200,000 points, which is about 2.5 times what an average player manages in a complete runthrough. Seeing the player wrangle his trackball in person must be a thing of technical beauty, like a master seamstress at the loom or a mile-long line of Toyota assembly robots churning out Camrys. I wish I was there.

The review on the right is from an autumn 1986 issue of Amazing Computing magazine. Click the cut to view another look, this one from the March/April 1987 edition of Amiga World — one of my favorite reviews ever for the sheer looneyness lurking between the lines.

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[I ♥ The PC Engine] Wonder Momo

Wonder Momo
(ワンダーモモ)

Maker: Namco
Release Date: 4/21/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 21.12 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Wonder Momo is the most common PC Engine game in God’s creation. It’s not quite the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt of the PCE’s library, but it’s definitely the StarTropics. If you pay for a complete copy — doesn’t matter how much — then you overpaid. Up until about 2001, one could take a stroll into Akihabara and find entire shipping cartons of Wonder Momo (six sealed games in each carton) on sale for 50 yen.

It’s therefore a vital part of every PCE fan’s collection, for the simple fact that if you somehow didn’t trip over a free copy somewhere along the line, then cripes, man, you just ain’t trying hard enough.

Like Dragon Spirit and Yōkai Dōchūki before it, Wonder Momo is a port of a 1987 Namco arcade game, one that wasn’t a massive income success but had a massive impact on the impressionable minds of ’80s arcade rats. If you haven’t played it on MAME, the basic idea is this: You’re Momo, a magical lady from the planet Lolicott (ugh), and you fight tokusatsu enemies onstage in front of an audience of rabid otaku, all wearing identical white bandannas. It’s funny to think that creepy Power Ranger fan subcultures existed in Japan way back in 1987 — and was prevalent enough that Namco parodied it, right down to the pudgy photographer trying to nab upskirt shots of our innocent hero. That photographer’s probably stuck in with a wife, one or two kids, and a dead-end middle management job nowadays. Scary.

There’s a real game here, though, and it’s classic Namco — simple mechanics that require robotic hand-eye coordination to master. Wonder Momo, like the better Game & Watch titles, is all about time management. You have to carefully observe how each enemy moves and attacks, figure out how to dispatch them all as efficiently as possible, and keep a cool head as the monster waves accelerate in speed. Your “Wonder” gauge, the bar that governs how long sweet, innocent Momo can become arse-kicking dervish Wonder Momo, becomes both your best friend and bitterest enemy. Learning the exact right moment to transform (too soon and you’ll run out of Wonder and be a sitting duck; too late and you’ll die from massive, overwhelming enemy attack before you have a chance to pull off the transformation) becomes key from the second half on. Better players can devise patterns for both of these core gameplay aspects, since each stage throws the same sequence of bad guys at you every time. Just like Ken Uston’s classic Pac-Man patterns, you can use those rote bits of joystick input to beat the game with your mind on cruise control — eyes connected directly to the nervous system, connected directly to your fingers — once you memorize them well enough.

Not that you can execute these patterns in any home port. Sadly, the PC Engine version (like Namco’s other PCE ports) is heavily cut down from the arcade — voices are cut entirely, along with assorted enemies and four out of the original’s 16 stages. Even the PlayStation version, released exclusively in Japan as part of Namco Museum Encore (1997), isn’t quite right — Momo’s Wonder Ring moves faster than in the arcade version, which destroys all the patterns for defeating bosses. 24 years on, if you want a perfect port, it’s still MAME or nothin’. (What the PCE version does have are cutscenes featuring Momo in skimpy clothing. I can’t complain about that too loudly, I suppose, but it woulda been nice if they used the ROM space to add those missing enemies, at least.)

I’ve chosen a video from the second half of the PCE Wonder Momo to demonstrate the Game & Watch-y aspect of its gameplay. Note how this player defeats each enemy wave in nearly the exact same way every time, deviating from the patterns only long enough to eliminate any unforeseen threat that’s blundered onscreen. It’s a thing of beauty to see in motion, it is.

Are you a bad enough dude to buy the April issue of Famitsu Xbox 360?

Front

Back

Well, do you? Like, you know, without hiding the magazine between a couple of newspapers or something? Do you have the guts, the bravery to look the (female, did I mention she was female) clerk in the eye and say This, please! No, I don’t need a bag!

Me, I can. That’s because every PC Engine mag looked like this by the end of 1993. I got experience!

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Energy

Energy
(エナジー)

Maker: NCS/Masaya
Release Date: 4/14/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (2mb)
Genre: Action (or, according to the box, “ESP Adventure”)
PC Engine FAN Score: 16.83 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Energy is arguably the most so-bad-it’s-good game ever released on the PC Engine. It’s certainly one of the most harshly reviewed. Famicom Tsushin gave it 4/5/6/3 for a total of 18 points. Marukatsu PC Engine, Kadokawa Shoten’s monthly PCE mag, was a bit kinder with its 5/5/6/4 rating, but I can count on one hand the number of times Marukatsu gave out scores below 5/10, so the presence of a 4 up there indicates we’re into deepest, darkest kusoge territory with this one.

f

Like a man in arseless chaps taking your order at McDonald’s, Energy does not offer the best of first impressions. The game’s a loose port of Ashe (a PC-8801 title released by Quasar Soft), and for whatever reason, the developers thought it’d be a smart idea to copy the original’s habit of scrolling on a flick-screen basis as opposed to smoothly following the action. That wouldn’t be so bad, either, if it weren’t for how slooooooowly the game switches between screens — something that’s aggressively agonizing when not playing on an emulator with fast-forward.

But that’s not the only way Energy makes you wait around. Everything seems to have a delay built into it here, similar to how the Colecovision made you wait 15 seconds before starting a game for no obvious reason. Beat a boss, and it takes about ten seconds for the program to notice and trigger the ensuing level or cutscene. So it is with the barriers in some rooms (top left screenshot), which only disappear several seconds after all the enemies onscreen are killed. You have to mash down the I button for about half a second to skip through dialogue, even. It’s just weird — as if the game’s always just a couple of instructions away from crashing and freezing — and it makes you appreciate how much more serious hardware companies were with third-party quality control over in the US.

The controls are similarly wonky, often for no apparent reason. Your hero, an intrepid member of the “Demon-Busting Squad” (討魔隊) eradicating hideous monsters from a destroyed Tokyo, jerks around like a jackrabbit in heat whenever caught against a platform or wall, requiring a needless head start to jump up to a higher spot. Even more egregious is a point where you must travel through a long vertical section by executing a super-jump…somehow. I haven’t quite figured out how to trigger this super jump, and neither has anyone else judging by my Internet search, so instead you must hop around at random for half a minute before the game finally offers you forgiveness and propels your character upward like some kind of deus ex machina.

But I suppose the real comedy is reserved for those who know Japanese. That way, you get a crystal-clear view of just how Mystery Science Theater-like this title is. Imagine the silliest episode of whatever Power Rangers season was on when you were eight years old, and that’s the plot of Energy. Three fellow “Demon-Busting Squad” members have gone MIA in Tokyo, and they rejoin you in ghost form for the final battle after a very silly telepathy-enhanced cutscene. Everyone calls you a “defender of justice” (正義の味方) in the dialogue, which sounds just as stilted in Japanese as it does in English. Some NPCs advertise Masaya’s other games instead of offer you valuable advice. There’s a cute idol-singer sequence halfway through for no reason.

It’s pure camp, in other words, and gamers in tune with that sort of vibe will dig Energy immensely for the hour-ish it takes to complete. It’s the Earth Defense Force 2017 of its era, is the most succinct way to put it.

Despite all that, Energy has really good music. (This stirring tune plays while you are riding on the back of some hideous, badly-drawn sea creature across two screens of instant-death water — fast-forward to around 5:15 in the above video to witness this triumphant scene.)

It always seems like the worst kusoge have the most memorable soundtracks. The music in NCS’s PCE games is really identifiable, by the way, isn’t it? Just like how you can immediately tell a Konami or Capcom NES title by sound alone.

Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

A Japanese TASser has uploaded a new runthrough of Pilotwings completed in 22 minutes and 27 seconds. He also uploaded a few videos of him screwing around which are, to be honest, a lot more fun to watch. Here’s one of them.

Back in 1991, when my 13-year-old self camped out at a friend’s house to play his shiny new SNES, we’d do a lot of the exact same things you see in this clip — right down to figuring out how spectacularly we could crash the light plane upon landing. Ah, nostalgia! (I also like the demonstrations of him missing each license by a single point. I didn’t realize that was possible.)

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Makai Hakkenden Shada

Makai Hakkenden Shada
(魔界八犬伝SHADA)

Maker: Data East
Release Date: 4/1/89
Price: 5500 yen
Media: HuCard (2mb)
Genre: RPG
PC Engine FAN Score: 19.64 / 30.00
Rarity: Common (I purchased this complete for 200 yen in 2008)

Everyone reading this is familiar with Ys Book I & II. I’m reasonably sure of that. It, along with Akumajo Dracula X, is the release that largely defines the TG16’s place in gaming history. What’s a bit less known is that even before Ys received a PC Engine port, it was already getting cloned on the platform. Cloned very badly.

Data East’s second RPG ever (the first being the original Glory of Heracles for the Famicom) is very loosely based on Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, an early 19th-century Japanese novel inspired by the Chinese classic The Water Margin. The novel featured eight samurai joining together and going on assorted exciting and manly exploits; in this game you’re one of the reincarnated hakkenshi and you must track down the other seven and seal away the evil witch Tamazusa.

The gameplay is Ys, pure and simple. You bash against enemies to attack them, striking from the side or just off-center to keep your hero from taking damage — although the manual doesn’t explain any of this, perhaps expecting you to figure it out for yourself after several futile attempts at making the I or II buttons do something constructive. Nor does it mention that you can refill your energy by standing still Ys-style, a bit of a handy fact considering that you get very few chances to refill your energy otherwise.

Two things stand out as you spend time with Shada. One, the programmers were probably too busy playing Ys on the PC-8801 to bother debugging their clone job. As you can see in the above video, dodgy collision detection often means that you take multiple hits from enemies and die when your sprites overlap in the wrong way — Ys had characters get knocked back after a successful attack in order to avoid this exact problem. It also makes conversing with villagers puzzlingly difficult, as you either run right over NPCs or wind up having to read their lines two or three times.

Two, the game is as poorly written as it is designed. The seven fighters you work with never actually fight with your hero, the way they did in the novel — they just sort of disappear and/or help you open doors and such. Three of them don’t even carry the divine jewels (or shada) their characters are supposed to have from the original story. A Zelda Lost Woods-like section half an hour into the game will cause you to be stuck for days without external help. Enemies that you are completely incapable of damaging become pussycats after you gain a single level. A woman, apparently meant to be the heroine (you have long flashbacks about her in the ending), dies literally two minutes after you meet her. And so on, and so forth, and so on.

Sadly, we’re still at the point where two megabits is the standard size for HuCard games, and in Shada’s case, Data East compensated for the small capacity by making the story very short and the puzzle aspects ridiculously unfair, hoping you’d feel satisfied with being really stuck instead of advancing the plot along. Considering that Ys is beatable by average people without relying on FAQs (at least, I did it back then), it seems unlikely that Japanese gamers at the time agreed.

Like I’ve stated in the past, it was slim pickings RPG-wise for the PCE until about mid-1989. Real slim pickings. There’s a couple nice tracks tucked in here, though.