[I ♥ The PC Engine] Wai Wai Mahjong

Wai Wai Mahjong
(わいわい麻雀)

Maker: Video System Ltd.
Release Date: 6/19/89
Price: 5800 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Board
PC Engine FAN Score: 19.92 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

In a few years, I’m going to be drowning in crap PCE girl-mahjong games. I know it all too well; I’m completely aware of the inevitable perfect storm of tiles and boobies lying in ambush for me, and yet I feel powerless to stop its advance. Ohhh, if only I had paid more attention to that how-to-play-mahjong feature in the first issue of GameGO! Then I wouldn’t be faced with this catastrophe in the waiting!

Even if I were completely up on the rules of mahjong (the last time I seriously tried to play was in 2001), I would likely not be too excited by Wai Wai Mahjong, a board-game sim with very few amenities. It’s straight two-player mahjong, with a cast of weird-looking challengers and a shop offering a variety of “helper items” (i.e. ways to cheat the random tile generator), but no real story to glue it all together. From the presentation to the gameplay, everything’s pretty bland and 8-bittish.

If anything’s noteworthy about this release, it’s that Kyoto-based Video System is behind it, one of three PCE games they published. For the longest time, I thought Video System was a Korean outfit, and I really can’t explain why I labored under that misconception except that Super Volleyball looked like a B-league Asian game to me back in middle school. I’ve since fully savored the charms of what’s inarguably the best 2D volleyball sim ever made, but not even that classic was enough to save the company (an offshoot of Japanese arcade distributor Visco founded in 1984) from obscurity for its long history. If anyone in the States knows them now, it’s for the Aero Fighters series of arcade shooters — which aren’t bad, of course, but c’mon, they ain’t Super Volleyball.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Pac-Land

Pac-Land
(パックランド)

Maker: Namco
Release Date: 6/1/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 21.66 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Yoshihiro “Kissy” Kishimoto, designer/programmer for Namco from 1982 to 2001, had a bad habit in the ’80s of creating original game concepts, then having Nintendo execute them a lot better later on and take all the credit. It happened with Baraduke, a 1985 arcade title that bears a lot of resemblance to Metroid, but it also happened with Pac-Land, Kissy’s first designer credit, which hit Japanese game centers about a year and a month before Super Mario Bros.

I remember being completely amazed by SMB when I first saw it on a Vs. cabinet sometime in the mid-80s. I wasn’t alone, of course. Meanwhile, Pac-Land figures in my childhood memory only very faintly; it didn’t get much distribution where I was, and although it was quite nearly the first horizontally scrolling  jump-’n-run action game, it retained only a very low-key sort of popularity. This despite boasting a lucrative tie-in with Hanna-Barbera’s Pac-Man cartoon, which had a successful two-year run on Saturday mornings — Pac-Land’s music is largely a Namco remix of the show’s opening and incidental sound library.

Where’s the difference lie? I wonder if it has to do with SMB’s keener sense of discovery. At any given moment of Mario, you run the chance of uncovering something hidden under a block, encouraging an “adventure into the unknown” atmosphere as you tried discovering all of the secret stuff. Pac-Land is a bit simpler than that — it’s a purer arcade challenge, one where the primary aim is still to get your name on the high-score list, despite the inclusion of a real ending in the PC Engine version.

Namco may have lazed out on previous PCE arcade ports like Wonder Momo, but Pac-Land is (predictably) a lot more faithful to the original. The dual-layered scrolling is gone, many of the item pickups are in different locations, and the music sounds just a tad different, but for a port from one 8-bit platform to another, it’s about the best anyone can hope for. All of the esoteric secrets are there, from the Round 2 -> Round 12 warp to the 1UP Pac-Man you can nab for chomping down on Sue as the fifth ghost after grabbing a power pellet. It’s no wonder, I suppose, because Kissy programmed both the arcade and PCE Pac-Lands himself.

In addition to a real ending (the arcade version restarted you at Round 20 at higher speed after you beat Round 32), the PCE version also has a set of 32 “Pro” stages, unlocked after viewing the ending or entering a code. The challenge on these Pro levels are nothing short of ridiculous — ghosts riding airplanes that seem to go at 80 MPH, that sort of thing — and I’m honestly uncertain if anybody’s ever completed this second quest without cheating. Namco is so terribly mean to all of us.

Pac-Land’s affinity for 7650-point bonuses (“765″ being a goroawase pun for “Namco”) is also pretty well-known. The number shows up for doing all sorts of things in this game, from eating six ghosts with a single power pellet to catching a certain randomly-chosen balloon among the ones that pop up when you push certain objects.

You can also get it for jumping at just the right moment at the end of a round, stopping the action just before Pac-Man hits the ground. What’s not so well-known is that if you finish a stage just as you start jumping — a feat just as difficult as the 7650-point trick — you get a whopping 10 points. Both of these moves require accuracy to within 1/30 of a second. It makes me cry.

(One bug not ported to the PCE version, by the way, is a kill screen that flamboyantly crashes the arcade game if the player reaches 25,480,000 points. It’s due to another one of those 8-bit overflow bugs — that score just so happens to be the 256th time you earn a 1UP in the default settings.)

Overall, Pac-Land is a nice effort, especially compared to the horrible Famicom version Namco released in Japan. Out of Namco’s PCE ports, this one and Splatterhouse are undoubtedly my faves. It leaves me wondering, too, what would’ve happened if Kissy kept designing platform games instead of stumbling across a once-in-a-lifetime hit with Family Stadium.

Update 4/3

Hooray! I’ve updated all previous PC Engine entries with TG16 box art where it’s applicable. (I think NEC of America did Japan better only once so far, with Deep Blue. Otherwise, I’m not sure what they were thinking. Even if they didn’t want cutesy anime-style box covers, why did they redraw the box for The Legendary Axe using the same staging and art style?)

I also fixed broken Nicovideo links dating from before the site allowed embedded playback. Now you can learn how to play gateball without registering for a Nico account!

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Naxat Open

Naxat Open
(ナグザットオープン)

Maker: Naxat Soft
Release Date: 5/30/89
Price: 6300 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 18.98 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Looking back, maybe it’s a bit fortuitous that this game was released just five days after Power Golf in Japan — they each take remarkably different approaches to the game of golf, and your personal preference will probably depend on how much you care about realism.

Hudson’s Power Golf, like the Nintendo-y games it imitates, is all about pick-up-and-play arcade action. You tap the I button a few times, the ball goes in essentially the direction you meant it to go, you cheer, everybody’s happy. Naxat Open isn’t like that. It’s a bit more for actual golfers, I think, the sort of people who’d be playing Links 386 Pro (I’ve mentioned that game far too often lately) if they were PC-owning Americans.

What makes me say that? A few reasons. The game’s course is all laid out in a single overhead view which scrolls from hole to hole as necessary. This offers a lot of realism that previous PCE golf sims didn’t have — there’s more curving and variety to the course, the holes progress like they would on a real set of golf links, and it undoubtedly looks different from the rest of the pack game-wise. There’s also the gameplay, which is as harsh and unforgiving as golf itself. The system is the standard three-tap jobbie, but — again, just like in real golf, I suppose — get your aim or timing wrong, and the ball will simply bounce a few yards forward or sail effortlessly over the green and into OB territory, not a care going through its small urethane mind. (Putting out is even harder, to the point where I often found it easier to chip shots in from 15 or so years than to actually putt.)

With all this in mind, would I call Naxat Open fun? No, I wouldn’t, thank you. The gameplay’s slow-paced and frustrating, the graphics (once you get over the novelty) not all that interesting, and the sound boring and tinny. Many people in Japan, though, call this one a lost classic in the genre. Your call.

(Naxat released a sequel, Super Naxat Open, for the Super Famicom in 1994. It’s notable mainly for featuring Spike McFang as a playable character.)

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Power Golf

Power Golf
(パワーゴルフ)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 5/25/89
Price: 5800 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 20.37 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

I will admit that it’s been a while since my last visit to PCE-land. It’s partly due to work, partly due to research I’ve been doing on other old computers, but mostly because I have to write about two golf games in a row and the thought drove me to spontaneous fits of yawning.

To most people, 2D golf games are just not that interesting any longer. Neo Geo collectors pay four-figures all the time for Neo Turf Masters, yes, but those people are degenerates. The genre has moved on, more or less, and that’s largely been the case since Access Software’s Links 386 Pro achieved near-photorealism on PCs in 1992. Power Golf is no exception to this fact — just like a lot of other early Hudson releases, it’s completely unoriginal in execution, but well-made enough that you won’t feel gypped for your time.

Gameplay is Nintendo Golf in style, with the standard three-part swing and a little arrow gestating itself off your ball to help with aiming. The overhead perspective lies somewhere in between Winning Shot’s extreme close-up and Ganbare! Golf Boys’ faraway view, keeping things fast-paced while still cramming a decent chunk of the hole into the screen at once. There’s the usual stroke and match play options, the usual multiplayer support, and the usual bippy 8-bit golf soundtrack in the background.

The one new feature to PCE golf this game brings is your choice of players — an average guy, a highly accurate female, and an older dude with glasses who hits the ball like most salarymen hit the whiskey sours. Hard, that is. Even that feature, though, first hit Japanese consoles a year or so with SNK’s Fighting Golf. Hmm.

Despite my worrying inability to drum up much “care” for this game, I will grant you that Power Golf is the best PCE golf sim of 1989. It’s as generic as a can of Sam’s Cola, features very fiddly aiming, and doesn’t automatically choose clubs for you, but it’s workmanlike in design and engaging enough for what it is. It was well-liked in Japan, too, enough so that it got a Super CD-ROM² sequel a good five years later — one of the few titles on the console to sport full-motion video, at that.

(By the way, TG16 boxes included in these reviews when applicable from now on — yes, no, don’t care either way? They are never, ever better than the PCE version, but…)

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Battle Pad

Battle Pad

Maker: Nihon Soft Hanbai
Release Date: 4/28/89
Price: 2600 yen

The Battle Pad, released by NSH/Bigclub simultaneously with the Battle Tap, is one of the few licensed PC Engine joypads released by someone besides NEC Avenue in Japan. The only other official one is Sur de Wave’s PC Blaster in 1992. (Hori released a few, but never became an official NEC licensee.)

As you can tell from the photo, the Battle Pad’s got something of a unique design, from its long, thin, boomerang-ish shape to its white-and-blue color scheme. Both the control pad and the I/II buttons are concave, molded to fit right below your fingertip, assuming your fingers are a lot smaller than mine. The pad itself also has fully rounded corners, avoiding the blunt edges seen on the official Famicom and PCE pads.

You could call this a well thought-out design — or, at least, one that shows a bit more originality than NEC’s pad, which more or less apes Nintendo’s. The extra ergonomics make this pad a bit kinder to your fingers, a fact backed up by how NEC Avenue’s Fighting Pad 6 (1994) and the standard PC-FX controller both use essentially the same design concept. (The chief difference between the Fighting Pad and Battle Pad: The grip ridges on the bottom, which are absent on NSH’s controller.)

Despite the curvy design, the Battle Pad feels tacky, its plastic body noticeably thin and flexible and its response a fair bit mushier than the basic PCE pad.

I’m not exactly sure how many Battle Pads are out there, whether by itself or packed with NSH’s tap in the 4680-yen Battle Set, but it can’t be that high a number. (The cheap plastic also gets discolored over time by the oil on your fingers, making pristine examples of this pad a bit tough to find.)

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Battle Tap

Battle Tap

Maker: Nihon Soft Hanbai
Release Date: 4/28/89
Price: 2400 yen

The PC Engine, as you might know by now, had only one controller port. If playing with yourself got boring, you could buy a multitap and let the entire neighborhood block get into the game at once, making the PCE the first Japanese system to support more than two controllers. In the very beginning this meant purchasing NEC-HE’s official  five-port Multitap, but since having five people play any PCE game at once was a pretty uncommon sight, later peripherals (like the three-port Joy Tap and the two-port X-HE2) cut down the number of ports for convenience.

Within this oddly crowded market, the Battle Tap is unique — it’s got four ports, baby.

This tap was released by an outfit called Nihon Soft Hanbai, which also put out two PC Engine games in 1989 under the Bigclub banner: Jimmu Denshō YAKSA and the world-famous Rock On, renowned for its erudite and moving opening sequence across all of Internet-dom. After that, the company promptly went out of business, its final game (a port of Nichibutsu’s arcade title Armed F) getting released by Pack-In-Video in March 1990. All three titles were shooters, and none of them were anything besides pretty crap. It no longer being 1986, Bigclub sadly missed the era where publishers could release any old game and expect to make their investment back — and throwing money at the peripheral market probably didn’t help their bottom line much, either.

In addition to selling the Battle Tap by itself, Nihon Soft Hanbai release a package called the “Battle Set” that combined the tap with their Battle Pad controller. No doubt they were trying to capitalize on the multiplayer-compatible releases (like Motoroader and Dungeon Explorer) which were finally beginning to drip out here ‘n there by mid-1989. It’s a shame, then, that the company didn’t make it to Bomberman’s launch in 1990.

I kind of like the design on this sucker better than on NEC’s multitap. It’s all, you know, futuristic with those simulated LCD numbers.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Susa-no-Oh Densetsu

Susanoō Densetsu
(凄ノ王伝説)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 4/27/89
Price: 6500 yen
Media: HuCard (4 Mbit)
Genre: RPG
PC Engine FAN Score: 23.36 / 30.00
Rarity: Common

Right now, as I write this (not in 1989, when this RPG was released), there’s a major controversy brewing over the future of manga in Japan. This Thursday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly will be voting on a measure that, while lacking any direct legal penalty, defines “provocative depictions” of manga characters under 18 years old as child pornography and encourages publishers to restrict them. “Great,” you say, “the less creepy junk in manga the better, right?” Maybe, but a lot of mainstream, household-name manga authors (including people like Doraemon’s Fujiko Fujio whose work has never wandered anywhere near pornography) are protesting the statute nonetheless, concerned that it’s written too vaguely and could be a slippery slope to more restrictions on expression in the future. [UPDATE: The measure has been tabled until June at the earliest.]

One of the manga artists speaking up against the statute is Gō Nagai, a veteran whose mark on the modern scene is massive. His first big hit was Harenchi Gakuen, a school gag comic that toed the line of good taste and made Nagai the enfant terrible of the then-brand-new Shonen Jump magazine’s artist stable. His work took on a darker, more violent turn as the 70s wore on, beginning with his work on the Devilman anime and culminating with comics like Violence Jack and 1979′s Susa-no-Oh, the series that finally earned him a Kodansha Manga Award.

I’ve never read Susa-no-Oh, but Susa-no-Oh Densetsu is based on it and apparently picks up the story after Nagai’s manga first ended in 1980, famously closing with a massive cliffhanger that he never bothered resolving. (Nagai later claimed the move was deliberate and wrote more Susa-no-Oh stories later on for a variety of magazines.)

You play Shingo Susa, a kid with problems — he’s got superpowers connected to the evil deity Susa-no-Oh, who’s been unleashed and divided into three monsters by his rival Uryu when the game begins. (It’s all depicted in the lavish intro sequence below.) The world’s totally Mad Max, complete with a sub-quest where you must refine your own gasoline in order to power an airplane, and your three-person party fights with swords, machine guns, hand grenades, and a small selection of ESP powers.

To be honest, I’m not too sure why Hudson bothered licensing Nagai’s manga for this game. The designers assume knowledge of the manga, but don’t use it to craft anything besides your typical sort of 8-bit console RPG. There are a lot of neat ideas here gamewise, though; no doubt thanks to the involvement of Hiromasa Iwasaki, who worked on Ys Books I & II and Tengai Makyo II (which this game actually resembles a little bit). The world has day-night cycles (Dragon Quest III was pretty much the only JRPG to feature that up to this point); the battles are tactical in style; you can even hire mercenaries to shore up your party before you find some real allies. These are all pretty novel features for a 1989 console release, and they — combined with the challenge level and the storytelling, both decent once things get rolling — make the game engaging through to the end.

It’s a much more commendable effort than Hudson’s Jaseiken Necromancer, right down to the music, composed by ’80s game composer (and modern-day synthesizer enthusiast) Takahito Abe.

Click the above video to check out the opening few minutes. This is the second four-megabit game after Space Harrier, and you can definitely tell where Iwasaki and crew used that extra space. The game itself is standard JRPG, but at least the intro is brutally Nagai.

[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.