Don’t do that

Sorry I haven’t updated much. I’ve had a lot of work lately. That and I had to beat La-Mulana, because my friend did and I have to prove that I’m still better than him.

I do want to continue with the Gradius hijinx, though, and so here’s a video of a bug from the original Bubble System version. Essentially, if you defeat the boss of stage 6 before the scrolling stops, the game moves on to stage 7 while retaining the enemy data from the old level. This leads to assorted strange things. The bug was fixed for the later ROM-based releases.

Ten million points

I’d like to talk about Gradius for the next few entries.

The original Gradius arcade game, officially released May 29, 1985 to arcades, is a milestone to both the genre and the industry at large. Outside of Japan, though, I think a lot of people are more likely familiar with the NES port, which is frankly not all that great when compared to the other ones that hit Japan home systems — the MSX version is wonderful, for example, but I’ll get to that later.

Gradius is also the sort of game where nothing random ever occurs, and you can therefore put together patterns to get your ship through the entire game without going anywhere near danger. You can see the basic pattern for the first loop through the game in the video above, a simple “I busted out my PCB for the first time in a while” job that thankfully includes the entire “Morning Music” startup sequence.

In the mid-80s, achieving a score of 10,000,000 points in Gradius was seen as something of a status symbol. The feat takes about 7-8 hours of straight playing and requires you to beat the game and loop through the stages 20 to 21 times, depending on how diligent you are with padding your score when possible.

Wario’s Woods (Nintendo, 2/19/94)

The only NES game (at the time of release) to sport an ESRB rating, Wario’s Woods was always sort of doomed to a minor presence in the litany of Nintendo puzzle games put out over the years. I guess it can’t be helped, given that it’s sort of like Puyo Puyo except rather slow-paced and about a hundred times more difficult.

Regardless, seeing it played well is still a sight, and so here’s a guy playing in Endless Mode and finding out what happens once you roll over the stage count at 256. The video starts at Round 240.

Only wimps take the coins.

Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally (Nintendo/HAL Laboratory, 4/14/88)

Nintendo’s shot at copying Out Run…or perhaps Victory Run, more accurately speaking. Japan was going through something of a rally fad during the late ’80s, mainly because on-board rally computers got cheap and kei cars became powerful enough to be useful for racing under rally conditions. Nintendo also did a reasonable job simulating hills and winding roads with the engine behind this game, better than Yuji Naka managed with the Master System port of Out Run, although it’s still a little jerky.

This game isn’t exactly a simulator — you can choose from one of three cars at the start, and picking up enough ! marks on the road lets you unleash the “Hot Dash” turbo mode. Hot Dash keeps your car from slowing down in snow or desert stages, which is important because the sports car (the fastest in the game) performs pretty poorly in these conditions.

3D Hot Rally also marks the game debut of Soyo Oka, a female musician (there were a surprisingly large of these in the Japan industry from the very beginning) who worked at Nintendo from 1987 to 1994. Her contributions to Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart and so on are probably better known, but the little ditty that plays during the races here is remarkably catchy as well.

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (Technos Japan, 4/25/89)

There’s been a lot of activity in TASsing the Japanese version of River City Ransom lately. The current top TAS for the US port beats the game in six minutes, 53 seconds, but for Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, that time’s gone down to 5:53:32, just over a minute quicker.

A few of the tricks you’ll see in the video above:

- Riki (aka RYAN) is picked instead of Kunio (aka ALEX) because that makes the conversation with the girl on the bridge go quicker, to the tune of about 8 seconds.

- Previous TAS runs involved Riki earning enough cash to buy Stone Hands, which lets him rapid-fire punches — a good, relatively cheap way to power up your character. This time, though, Riki instead purchases the Isis Scroll from the hidden shop in the tunnel. This bargain-basement ($20) item upgrades how much damage you cause when you throw objects at people.

- Pressing left and right at the same time causes your character to do crazy things in this game, usually resulting in him falling off the screen and dying. This TAS uses that to kill off Riki after buying the Isis Scroll; this puts him back at the last mall visited, which is faster than actually running back there.

- It turns out that your throwing stat is used to determine damage not only when you throw a weapon or item, but when you kick it as well. To be more exact, when you kick an item and it strikes an enemy, it causes the same amount of damage as the last time you threw an item and struck an enemy. Therefore, you can do a jumping-dash-throw weapon at an enemy for max damage, and then spend the rest of the game kicking garbage cans at guys and one-hit killing everyone except for bosses…which, wahey, is exactly what happens here!

I hereby rename this game The Adventures of Ricky Rude and His Magical Garbage Can.

Fujiya Thinking Games v1.0

I thought that The Gentle Physics and Science of Hazardous Materials is about as obscure as off-market Famicom releases got, but I was wrong!

Not much of anything is known about Fujiya and the (apparent) series of unlicensed Famicom games they released in 1987. The cartridge here is Fujiya Famikase Series 3: Shikou Game Shu (Fujiya Famicom Cassette Series 3: Thought Games Collection), and despite being number 3 of a series, the other two have yet to be heard from.

Shikou Game Shu is a collection of four games, basically: checkers, concentration, poker, and Othello. The Othello game has an option where you can define whether the player with the most pieces on the board at the end wins or loses…and that’s about all that’s unique about the game itself. You can see more screenshots on this page.

Fujiya, consisting of two men named Maeda who listed their address and phone number on the title screen, also released a Famicom Disk System disk copier circa 1987. This copier program included a couple of card games as well.

I came across this release while doing some research into Hacker International, the company that was a thorn on Nintendo’s side for much of the late 1980s in Japan, after CRV linked to an interview with its president. I’ll tackle that interview in a later post, but for now — hey, guess what, collectors, I just found another game you need to complete your collection!

Another reason why the Satellaview was really awesome

Microsoft got a lot of positive press for its Live implementation of 1 vs. 100 last year, with critics calling it an innovative example of socially-oriented online gaming. It turns out that Nintendo did nearly the same thing about 12 years previous.

I’ve been going through a lot of Satellaview videos on Nico lately; there’s a ton of them, taped by forward-thinking Japanese gamers back during the service’s salad days of 1995-98. It’s given me a newfound appreciation of just how ahead of its time the thing was. That holds especially true for the SoundLink-compatible titles, which combined video games running on the SNES hardware with audio voiceovers from the digital-radio bit of the BS-X cartridge.

The above video, a broadcast of Satella-Q from March 1997, shows how the two forms of media worked together. You had a couple of radio hosts serving as MCs of the quiz, moving the game along from their end, and you inputted answers to the questions whenever the hosts prompted you to. (Whoever taped this show just let it run without actually playing, which is why he gets all the answers wrong.)

Maybe it’s not quite as straight-on interactive as 1 vs. 100 (scores were kept on the client side only), but it’s plainly working along the same lines.

Between this and all the fusion radio drama-style stuff Nintendo and St. GIGA (the world’s first satellite radio company) were experimenting with, the Satellaview was one of the very few examples in game history of Nintendo being too far ahead of the technical curve for its own good.

FFVII CG doesn’t look thaaaaaaaat old

A bunch of old press assets for Final Fantasy VII has showed up on the torrents lately; a 12mb .zip file that contains a lot of the concept renders and such that we all saw in EGM and GameFan in 1996.

Seeing the files in their pixel-perfect glory rather than through the lens of a print magazine makes a lot of difference.

It reminds me, in particular, of how instrumental FFVII was both to the PlayStation and to the entire JRPG genre. The game, alongside Super Mario 64, is what sold the “next generation” of consoles to the largest amount of gamers worldwide, and you can see why — maybe it’s crude 3D, but at its best, it’s incredibly colorful and inviting to the observer, something you had never seen before in video games. That, and whether you disagree with the direction it took the series or not, FFVII was far more massive in scale than anything Square had attempted previously — a harbinger, if you will, of the way the whole industry was going as its games grew a third dimension.

Also, looking at this stuff, I didn’t realize Square put so much care into FFVII‘s vehicles. They came up with a complete description and design history for the Hardy-Daytona, the motorcycle that Cloud rides on his way out of Shinra HQ, for example. This sort of minute (almost obsessive) world-setting stuff is a hallmark of a lot of Japanese creative media.

Bomber Man (Hudson Soft, July 1983)

“You play a man who is trapped inside a maze. Place your time bombs wisely to defeat the balloon monsters. If the balloon monsters get caught up in an exploding time bomb, they will pop and disappear. Defeat all the monsters on the screen to proceed to the next stage. You can break down weaker walls with your time bombs. These walls can hide treasures and exit doors. Pick up treasure to receive bonus points. Go through an exit to proceed to the next stage. If you accidentally blow up a treasure or exit, four monsters will come out and attack (only once per stage). Move up, down, left and right with the cursor keys and press Space to set a bomb.”

So go the Japanese instructions for Bomber Man (爆弾男) — not the PC Engine or Super NES version, not even the 1986 NES classic, but the very first Bomber Man (two words), released on cassette tape for the NEC PC-8801 in mid-1983.

While not a massive sensation — the Japanese PC community was pretty small back then, after all — it was successful enough to get ported to nearly every other computer format in Japan the following year. Hudson also signed a deal with Sinclair Research to release a port for the ZX Spectrum in Europe titled Eric and the Floaters — technically, the first overseas Bomberman release.

The above video shows off the 1984 MSX port, as well as a 3D version released by Hudson not long thereafter. The 3D game is, frankly, terrifying. Resident Evil could stand to learn a thing or two from it. I think I’m going to have nightmares.

Hokuto no Ken / Black Belt (Sega, ’86)

Many retro-fans know that the Sega Master System release Black Belt is a heavily revamped version of a Sega Mark III action game based on the Hokuto no Ken anime/manga property. A smaller minority would also know that both games were programmed by Yuji Naka, part of his rather prolific Sega 8-bit years (Girl’s Garden, Penguin Land, Great Baseball, the SMS port of Spy vs. Spy, OutRun, Space Harrier and Phantasy Star).

Only a very tiny subset of that group, I’m sure, knows that the soundtrack for these two titles was handled by Katsuhiro Hayashi, a name I last mentioned a couple weeks back when I discussed High School! Kimengumi. You can pick up his distinctive drums throughout. Both music sets are nice, but if forced into a corner on the issue, I would take Black Belt’s songs, which sound more Hokuto-y than Hokuto’s own music.

Here’s a video of Hokuto in action. This version had a secret warp where if you can defeat a boss without getting hit, you can execute a high jump at the start of the following stage to go right to the boss again.

And now for Black Belt. Note how the bosses run on largely the same patterns, despite the completely revamped graphics.