[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.

[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.

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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.

[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.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Cobra: Kokuryuoh no Densetsu

Cobra: Kokuryūō no Densetsu
(コブラ　黒竜王の伝説)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 3/31/89
Price: 5980 yen
Media: CD-ROM (78.12MB + 9 tracks)
Genre: Adventure
PC Engine FAN Score: 24.90 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Buichi Terasawa is one of the few Japanese comic artists that you can say “moved the medium forward” and have evidence to back that statement up which doesn’t involve boobs or panty shots — although he’s drawn his quota of both.

After getting his start assisting in Osamu Tezuka’s manga department during the mid-’70s, he debuted in the pages of Shonen Jump with Space Adventure Cobra, a series that’s continued on-and-off to this day in comic and anime form. (The official English name of the series changed to Cobra the Space Pirate once Terasawa switched publishers in 2008.) He was one of the first mainstream Japanese artists to bring computer graphics into manga, producing his first full-color digital comic in 1995, and he was also one of the first (in 2001) to distribute his work online. Rare among manga artists, he also participated actively in the development of both PC Engine games based on his work: this one, and Cobra II: Densetsu no Otoko, ported to the Sega CD and released in America under the name The Space Adventure in 1995.

This video has both captions and annotations. Make sure they’re both on!

All that makes it a bit surprising to discover that Cobra is classic macho-man adventure that’d be right at home in a Depression-era pulp magazine. Cobra is every bit the Golden Age space superhero, right down to that skin-tight outfit with the boots and everything. He constantly smokes a cigar (even in zero-G), he’s got a super-powerful laser gun inside his left arm, and if all his high-tech gadgetry fails him, then — oh, yeah — he’s still got enough brute strength to break out of metal restraints, all Superman-style.

Terasawa’s genius lies in the way he took this very traditional all-American superhero, ready to be packaged into an issue of Detective Comics alongside The Bat-Man and Crimson Avenger, and basically threw him into the movie Barbarella. Things like skirts and mink coats don’t exist in the Cobra universe; women are uniformly long-haired, decked out in bikini-inspired spacewear, and aching to get into Cobra’s pants as soon as possible. Considering Cobra came out during (and was heavily buoyed by) the Star Wars craze, it’s fascinating how Terasawa didn’t draw much direct inspiration from that film at all. His take on science fiction involves zero highbrow morality nor religious symbolism. It’s based around two core tenets: scoring hot chicks, and kicking ass — and in that way, it’s even more successful at providing silly escapist fantasy for men than George Lucas at his best.

Kokuryūō no Densetsu (“Legend of the Black Dragon King”) is a pretty faithful retelling of a story arc that originally ran throughout 1981 in the Shonen Jump manga. Cobra’s hitched a ride on the tourist cruise ship Queen Love at the behest of his partner, Lady Armaroid, in order to steal a ring from an ancient civilization. Along the way he gets swallowed into an enormous, self-contained garbage ship, so big that an entire human civilization exists inside; you spend most of the game trying to find a way out.

The game itself is a pretty standard menu-based adventure, one geared more toward telling a story than posing a challenge. It’s a marked improvement over No-Ri-Ko in that respect, providing a solid weekend’s worth of entertainment. The art, which Terasawa provided much of the design for himself, is pretty brilliant throughout, but the real highlight here is the voice acting. Cobra is the first game (I think) to have real actors provide voices for a video game, and the titular character is handled by the biggest of them all — the late Yasuo Yamada, the original Lupin III and essentially the guy who invented the idea of “voice actor” as a profession in Japan. Yamada voiced Cobra at Terasawa’s request in this game and its sequel, and he provides a memorable performance, delivering that perfect mix of bravado and gravel that Harrison Ford nailed for his own Star Wars scoundrel role.

Chronologically, Cobra is the first CD-ROM² System game I’d actually feel confident in recommending to others. It’s more a “digital comic” than a game (the sequel was a great deal more challenging), but it’s still a pioneering experience and a harbinger of assorted amazing things to come for the medium. It’s made me want to read a great deal more of the manga, too, and that’s a lot more than most Japanese licenses do for me these days.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Deep Blue

Deep Blue: Kaitei Shinwa
(ディープブルー・海底神話)

Maker: Pack-In-Video
Release Date: 3/31/89
Price: 5300 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Shooting
PC Engine FAN Score: n/a
Rarity: Common

Pack-In-Video’s second PCE game is a hell of a lot better than F-1 Pilot was, although I’m not sure by how much. It’s a game that generated a lot of divergent opinion among hardcore folks of the time. Magazines rated it very low — I don’t have PCE FAN’s score at hand, but Shogakukan’s PC Engine Hyper Catalog gave it two out of five stars, a rating reserved for the major stinkers in the library (only a very few titles got one star). In a way, it’s a very early example of how the media can rate a game far differently from gamers themselves.

The gimmick in Deep Blue is that both the player and all the enemies are aquatic creatures — not in the Darius space-monster manner, but living, breathing fish. Since fish aren’t known for firing bullets, every enemy in the game attacks by bashing into you. Your craft moves pretty slowly (in classic ’80s shooter style), so knowing when to shoot and when to dodge is the key to survival here.

A lot of the negative press this game got is all a misunderstanding. This is not some sort of Endless Ocean, or even Ecco the Dolphin, new-age undersea voyage (though it sounds like it sometimes). The first time you play, you’ll get hit dozens of times by the waves of creatures (their patterns reminiscent of Activision’s Megamania in my mind) and die before you know what happens. This is exacerbated by how durable all the enemies are, many taking multiple hits with the default weapon. If I can chop them up with a fork on the dinner table, then why are they causing my cyber-aquacraft so much trouble?

What most people don’t realize (unless they paid the full 5300 yen for the game and felt obligated to stick with it) is that Pack-In-Video didn’t intend for you to shoot everything. That’s why your ship gradually refills energy as long as you don’t shoot — a detail not especially obvious unless you read the manual. This means that finishing the game and getting a high score are almost mutually exclusive goals, because survival is all about keeping your energy high and avoiding getting hit too often instead of getting hit period. Once you realize this, mastering the game isn’t terribly difficult.

It’s an interesting shooter mechanic, really, and it’s a shame Deep Blue was so misunderstood in its time. (Not that I’d rate it high, either — there’s only four stages and no real ending.)

Here’s a basic runthrough of the game that employs a mix of shooting and dodging. It’s funny to note that the bosses are easier to dispatch than some of the enemy swarms that precede them.

PC Engine rarities

I’ve started adding “Rarity” ratings to PCE games. This is based chiefly off Akihabara prices and the experiences of the assorted collectors I know over in Japan. It’s not meant to be fabulously scientific, but I think it’s interesting to see nonetheless and could generate some discussion.

My definition of “rarity” is simply how hard a game is to obtain. I don’t factor anything like print runs or how hot or sought-after a title is. My ratings:
“Common” — You shouldn’t have to pay more than 500 yen for a complete example, if that.
“Uncommon” — Still cheap but you may have to hunt a little. Expect to pay 1000 yen and up in the collector circuit.
“Rare” — It’s a good day if you get one of these. Generally expect to pay 4000-5000 yen and up in the collector circuit.
“Extremely Rare” — Public release games that are impressive finds in the wild and regularly go for over 10,000 yen among collectors.
“Unbelievably Rare” — Contest prizes or other extremely low-run releases. Japanese collectors need these to complete their libraries and therefore run prices up to the moon and beyond.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Kyūkyoku Tiger

Kyūkyoku Tiger
(究極タイガー)

Maker: Taito
Release Date: 3/31/89
Price: 5500 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Shooting
PC Engine FAN Score: 24.37 / 30.00

You can tell a Toaplan (東亜プラン)-developed shooter pretty quickly. It doesn’t require a particularly well-trained eye. All you need to look for are slowly-scrolling military landscapes, an enormous, pokey-moving aircraft at your command, and enemies that seem adept at placing bullets exactly where you don’t want them.

Kyūkyoku Tiger, alongside Flying Shark (both released 1987 in arcades), was the game that put the tiny Tokyo-based developer on the map. Both titles established the direction Japanese shooters would take in the years and decades to come, mixing a robust color-coded powerup system with a worrying large number of enemies flinging themselves upon you every millisecond. Toaplan was a pioneer, for better or for worse, when it came to giving shooters a reputation for being fiendishly difficult — even the aircraft that drop power-ups can be extremely tough to kill, especially when you’ve just died.

Romstar distributed the arcade original under the name Twin Cobra, and the US version had a few key differences:

• Two-player simultaneous play instead of turn-taking; another player can join at any time
• After death, you restart right where you died instead of at an earlier checkpoint (if you and a boss finish each other off simultaneously, you continue straight to the next level, skipping the landing sequence)
• Your ship’s a little quicker, but you can have only three shots on screen at once (four in the Japanese original)

These additions largely serve to make the game easier, and Taito’s PCE port of Kyūkyoku Tiger goes a step further by including a few secret codes — you can optionally score guided missiles with the yellow power-up, and if you go to the lower left corner immediately after game start and fire a bomb, you’re rewarded with three extra lives.

In terms of faithfulness, Taito did an incredible job with this port, easily outclassing the job Namco managed with Dragon Spirit a little while back. There’s next to nothing substantial lost in this port, despite fitting in only two megabits, and the music (ported by Tsukasa Masuko, who we last saw in Dungeon Explorer) actually sounds a little better and less oldschool-FM “tinny” to my ears.

It’s hard, though. Very hard. There’s a total of ten levels, and I don’t have any hope at all of conquering them. Few shooters demand your constant, unwavering attention as much as Toaplan’s did, and that bit was ported all too well, you know?

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Ganbare! Golf Boys

Ganbare! Golf Boys
(がんばれ！ゴルフボーイズ)

Maker: NCS (Masaya)
Release Date: 3/28/89
Price: 5300 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 18.59 / 30.00

The second PCE golf title after Winning Shot, and another brick in the wall for NCS in their early quest to dominate the system’s third-party library. (Seriously, it’s already seemed like a year or so of real-time since I last reviewed a Hudson title here.)

The only real selling point Masaya could scare up for Ganbare! Golf Boys’ cover is that it’s compatible with the Multitap, so up to four people can play without having to share controllers/germs/fingernail grease/whatever. Otherwise, this is extremely standard 8-bit golf. The emphasis is on “realism,” as far as the bar went in the late 1980s with this genre — there are two courses, you’ve got a caddy who gives you advice, and you can define where on the ball you want your club face to hit.

However, the presentation makes this game seem more bland than it actually is. Every hole tends to look the same, and unlike Winning Shot’s up-close perspective, you get a really, really wide-angle overhead view of the course. This makes the golf ball look extremely tiny, and while all the shot ranges are in proportion to the hole, it doesn’t seem like you’re ever hitting it very far, even with a perfect 1-wood shot off the tee. There’s a lack of exhilaration, as Famitsu reviewers would put it.

There’s a bit of an unexpected treat here, however, tucked within what’s otherwise a bog-standard sports game. The music is by Atsuhiro Motoyama, his debut effort in video games, and it’s oddly endearing — there’s something very strangely melancholy and longing about the soundtrack, even though golf is supposed to be, you know, exciting and fun.

Motoyama has bounced in and out of the industry over the years; while his most well-known effort is probably Umihawa Kawase (SFC), my favorite work of his is undoubtedly Kuru Kuru Kururin (GBA), still one of the top GBA soundtracks ever created in my opinion.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Shiryō Sensen

Shiryō Sensen: War of the Dead
(死霊戦線)

Maker: Victor Musical Industries
Release Date: 3/24/89
Price: 5500 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: RPG
PC Engine FAN Score: 19.66 / 30.00

Definitely something of a cult title in Japan, Shiryō Sensen was originally released by Victor for the MSX2 in 1987 — a good couple years before Sweet Home, the Famicom release that people often call the first “true” survival horror title. I would say Shiryō Sensen has a far more valid claim to that prize, and it was popular enough in Japan that it was ported to both the PCE and NEC’s PC-88 computers in early ‘89.

Katsuya Iwamoto, producer and designer on the game, told GameSide in 2008 that the project, like so many of the time, got its start from Dragon Quest. “I got a job as a game designer and they told me to come up with something, so I wrote the basic idea in two or three sheets of notebook paper,” he said. “There weren’t any horror games back then, really, so I wanted to make one. Dragon Quest taught me how I could tell a story through video games, so I wanted Shiryō Sensen to move along like that, too.” The game he came up with, especially in its PC Engine incarnation, certainly betrays Iwamoto’s inspiration; it plays much like a modern-day Dragon Quest but with Zelda II-like battles, because Iwamoto thought turn-based fighting with guns and grenade launchers would be weird.

Set in the small town of Chaney’s Hill, the game stars Lila, a member of the US Army’s S-S.W.A.T. team of paranormal investigators. She’s sent to the area after all communications are cut off and an entire company of Marines disappears without a trace. The plot (involving a portal to another world and the family that’s secretly protected it for generations) is a little bit Escape from New York and a little bit Stephen King’s The Mist, both of which Iwamoto claims as inspirations — in fact, nearly the entire cast besides Lila sports names borrowed off one horror film or another.

When you kick off, you’re about as lost as you would’ve been if you ever played the first Dragon Warrior without a strategy guide (be honest here). Considering people call it a “town,” Chaney’s Hill is vastly spread out — the drugstore’s only accessible by boat. The church you start nearby is a safe zone, but you have no map and no real mission apart from “find survivors and bring them into the church,” even though you have no idea where the buildings even are in this town. This makes for a lot of wandering and hoping for something interesting to happen at first, and it doesn’t help that Lila’s just as hopelessly underequipped as every 8-bit RPG hero at the start — one-hit kills are a serious concern for the first hour or so.

Get used to gameplay, though, and you begin to see Shiryō Sensen’s charms. The atmosphere is Iwamoto’s biggest success here, definitely — the game’s dark and creepy, although not outright terrifying, and the music (an exclusive addition to the PCE port) is a heavy contributor to this. The battles get easier once Lila powers up a little, and eventually the game opens itself up pretty freely to the player, letting you explore town fully and get to the bottom of the twisty story on your own terms.

In a way, this is the sort of PCE game that’s really taken this whole 20 years to be recognized for its merits. The PCE FAN score is not high, thanks to a ridiculous 54-character password system and some very famous glitches, including an outlandish overflow bug that resets Lila to level 1 if you grind past the maximum of 9999 experience points. Emulator save states makes the passwords obsolete, of course, and if you’re aware of the bugs, you can avoid them easily enough. Then you can just enjoy Shiryō Sensen for what it did right — and that’s pioneer Japanese storytelling in games, right up there with how 1987’s Metal Gear managed it.

Here’s a vid of the opening and the final chapter of the game. Looking back at it, Shiryō definitely suffers graphically from its 2mbit size. Sadly, it’s not the first nor the last PCE game to fall victim to manufacturing budgets…

[I ♥ The PC Engine] F-1 Pilot

F-1 Pilot

Maker: Pack-In-Video
Release Date: 3/23/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 17.04 / 30.00

Among the many great things that happened around the time of the PC Engine (Tokyo Disneyland, HDTV, the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds being worth more than all the real estate in California), there was also the so-called “F1 boom.” From 1989 to around 1992, Japan was crazy for Formula 1, falling in love with Ayrton Senna and cursing Alain Prost’s name every time it came up during the prime-time race broadcasts. All kinds of magazines (including Famicom Tsushin) launched F1 columns, and a comic starring Senna even ran in Weekly Shonen Jump for a while. When Senna died on the track in 1994, it was a “where were you when you heard that…” moment for an entire generation of Japanese teens.

F-1 Pilot is the first PC Engine F1 sim out of the block, produced by Pack-In-Video (a division of the Tokyo Broadcasting System I’ll talk more about later) as their maiden PCE effort. It’s also among the worst PCE games ever made. The review response at the time weren’t terrible, as you can tell from the PCE FAN score above (one of Marukatsu PC Engine’s reviewers gave the game a 7/10, even), but I’m willing to believe any goodwill earned was because F1 sims were still a novelty back then.

Simply booting up F-1 Pilot is a saddening experience. Turn on the power, and you’re treated to a blocky F1 car sprite jerking its away across what looks like a desert landscape, a 15-second-long loop of depressing music in the background. There’s no demo or intro or anything; just you staring at this overscaled sprite, listening to depressing calliope music, until death gracefully intervenes. Five seconds in, and you already get the impression that the coders were more interested in getting this thing out before the first-quarter deadline than taking advantage of the PCE’s power.

The basic game system isn’t too far off the standard of the time, with one difference: instead of showing the action behind your car (like in Namco’s comparatively fantastic Final Lap Twin, which hit PCEs later in ‘89), you view the race from within the driver’s seat, feeling the cyber-wind against your virtual eyes as you go from zero to 320km/h in a couple of seconds. In a possibly major blow to aerodynamics, your machine sports enormous rear-view mirrors displaying the rival cars behind you. There’s no real car-tuning functionality; instead you choose a racing team at the beginning, each with their own tire, engine and pit-crew ratings.

Start a race, and…well. Your car has only automatic transmission, making acceleration easy, but the problem is you get no warning whatsoever that a curve’s coming — nor do you have any idea where you are on the track at any given time. The game comes with a pretty thick manual outlining all of the courses included in laudable detail, and I guess the idea’s to study this before challenging them in the game, but you’d think they’d at least include some of those large “Right turn coming up”-style billboards you see in every other ’80s racing title. As a result of this omission, you run off the course at pretty much every curve, and you can’t break this habit without essentially memorizing every turn on every course.

Everything about the experience here shouts “I don’t feel like debugging this.” For sound, you have your choice of grating engine sound or one of two depressing, short musical loops — not both. Cars jump in and out behind you, and there’s just a tiny “bonk” sound when you collide with one; forget about any fancy crash handling. Most humorously of all, there’s a bug where, if a rival car is in your rear-view mirror, he’ll almost never try to pass by you, even if you literally stop right in the middle of the racetrack. (This makes me wonder why the ‘ell my car has those school bus-sized mirrors in the first place — it’s not like I have to worry about cars threatening me from the rear.)

The result of all this: F-1 Pilot is the only console title I can think of offhand where more thought was applied to the instruction manual than the game itself. Bravo. Pack-In-Video put out 22 PCE titles and only five of them scored above 20 in the PCE FAN rankings. I think I can tell why already.