[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
Kōgien: “Cobra, the hero, infiltrates the Queen Love in order to steal a secret treasure, but the ship is swallowed up by a giant scow built by an ancient race to capture marauding monsters. Cobra explores the city inside as he searches for a way out.”

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
Kōgien: “Your character in this game is a submarine shaped like a fish. The enemies are also fish, and you fend them off with three different weapons, each with three power levels. Your ship’s eye color changes as you take hits, letting you know your current status.”

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
Kōgien: “An arcade port. The screen orientation has changed from vertical to horizontal, but the game is still well balanced. The smart bombs, and the trademark way the enemies take lots of hits to kill, are faithful to the original. The slow speed of your fighter makes things difficult for people who have problems dodging shots.”

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
Kōgien: “A golf game that allows up to four players via Multitap. There are three courses, whose design is loosely based on famous real-life links. Tournament, stroke and match play is available.”

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
Kōgien: “The hero, a woman, takes up a gun as she fights off grotesque monsters. You travel around a map screen gathering information, but the game shifts to an action scene when you encounter an enemy. Port of a PC game.”

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
Kōgien: “A realistic race game with some RPG elements. The view is presented from the driver’s seat as the game proceeds in nondescript fashion.”

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.

Odds, ends

The next PCE game I have to review is awful and I’m pretty drunk right now (hey, it’s Thursday, right?!), so instead of a real update, here are a couple of lovely Nico-videos:

A collection of ads from the early era of the PC Engine, circa 1988-89. You’ll notice that NEC (a) likes needless English (b) has a sense of advertising style that rivals Sony Computer Entertainment’s.

It sticks in my craw, for some reason, that Victory Run received 15/30 from PC Engine Fan readers. The game I have to review next, which (like I said) is one of the crappiest titles in the entire library, scored two points higher. This is completely unfair. Victory Run was nothing new by the time it was released, but it was solid, had peppy music, and was that perfect mix of difficult without being frustrating. Give it at least a 20, guys, good God. Check out what happens when you win the entire race in this ~20-minute video.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] P-47

P-47

Maker: Aicom
Release Date: 3/20/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Shooting
PC Engine FAN Score: 20.69 / 30.00
Kōgien: “You control a P-47, a real-life fighter plane. The game, which unfolds in nondescript fashion, is simple and easy to get to grips with. The backgrounds aren’t flashy, but are pretty in their own right.”

We last heard from Aicom about half a year ago (in PC Engine time) when they developed Makyō Densetsu for Victor. P-47 is the first title they ever published themselves; they’d go on to produce three more PCE games before getting bought by Sammy sometime in late 1990. The company was officially closed by Sammy in 1992, but a few ex-staffers created another independent outfit named Aicom soon afterward. In 1996 this new Aicom got investment money from SNK and Takara, changed their name to Yumekobo (夢工房), and became more-or-less a developing sub-contractor for SNK, similar to joints like ADK and Sacnoth. They closed in 2000 after releasing their final game, SNK Gals’ Fighters for the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

It’s appropriate, in a way, that this obscure outfit decided to kick off its game-publishing efforts by releasing an obscure port of an obscure arcade game. P-47 hit Japanese arcades in June of 1988 from Jaleco, coded by their occasional development partner NMK. It is, in short, the quintessential Jaleco game — nondescript, rundown, reminiscent of many other contemporary titles, and easily forgettable. The 2000 edition of Kougien, the phone book-sized Japanese tome that lists nearly every console game released since 1982, criticizes P-47 for its “bland proceedings” — and when Kougien actively criticizes a game in its capsule description, you know there must be some big problems with it.

It’s not without its charms, however. There’s something unique about its visual feel, for one — the plain, unadorned, almost empty graphic style, perhaps an attempt to evoke a World War II “look.” Maybe NMK’s art team was playing too much Xevious and thought it was a good shooter to take its visual cues from. Some people have good things to say about the music, but I think the PCE port dulled whatever charms (nonexistent, in my opinion) the soundtrack may’ve had in the arcades. (The two-megabit port also dropped some of the original game’s bosses, all of the cutscenes between stages, and the two-player co-op feature. One wonders, again, why Aicom bothered.)

If there’s any one point about P-47 anyone can agree upon, it’s that the game’s not too tough — especially by the standards of the era. The port, especially, is very quick to power your little bomber up and pack it to the gills with 1ups and extra continues. To prove it, click on the above to see a Nico-video documenting this port, start to end, in about 20 minutes.

Heads up

All of the fun of failing to execute Dragon Punches against jerkily-animated Americans is now available to the nation’s masses of Wii owners — Fighting Street is out now on the USA’s Virtual Console.

It costs 800 Wii Points, which not even I can recommend spending on this, and I — if you recall — ♥ the PC Engine.