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!

Gimmick! (Sunsoft, 1/31/92)

Ah, Gimmick! Tomomi Sakai’s gift to platform lovers everywhere. I’ll never forgive the Famitsu reviewer who gave it 5/10.

If you’re not familiar with the game, you may wish to view Frank Cifaldi’s annotated introduction first so you can appreciate all the things the new, improved TAS above is doing. Most notable to me was the shortcut in Stage 2 that mostly eliminates that long, boring trip to the pirate ship. Bravo!

(I’m sorry updates haven’t been more full-featured lately. Lot of personal work occupying my time.)

Captain Tsubasa II (Tecmo, 7/20/1990)

July 2, 2010. Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Japan’s national soccer team, led by astonishing ace striker Tsubasa Ohzora, has laid the rest of Group E to waste, upsetting contender Holland thanks to to their so-called “Mirage Shot,” “Slider Cannon” and “Cyclone” shooting techniques. They have now made their way to the quarterfinals, and bookmakers the world over quiver in their boots as they realize the 300-to-1 laughing stocks may actually have a chance to run away with the Cup.

Now it’s the quarterfinal round, and only one obstacle dares to stand before Ohzora and his team of spiky-haired phenoms — Brazil, winner of five World Cups and a team whose goaltender is known as the “Dark Illusion” for his dazzling defending.

The following video is exactly what it’s going to be like.

Captain Tsubasa II is an improvement over Tecmo Cup Soccer Game in so many ways that it inspired fits of jealousy in me, back in the day, that it never got an American release.

The little 20-second loops the game’s peppered with are incredibly catchy. I didn’t know until now that the “METAL YUUKI” who did the music for this sequel is the same Metal Yuki (aka Mikio Sato) who now produces the Tokimeki Memorial series for Konami. Quite a career shift there.

Mega Game 101, the Action 52 for the 21st century

The next PC Engine game on the docket is Tengai Makyō ZIRIA, which is going to take a while, so why don’t we discuss this little sucker for a bit instead? (I find that when you’re shopping for fun gadgets, Fry’s and the Apple Store have nothing on the local Vietnamese supermarket.)

After poking around the Internet for information, it turns out that the Mega Game 101 (メガゲーム百一式) has been on sale in Japan since January, mainly at discount-store chain Don Quijote, for the equivalent of about twenty bucks. It’s yet another plug-and-play game controller that runs off a standard Famicom-compatible all-in-one chip. There’s no cartridge port, and the device is meant to run on three AA batteries. (There’s a port for a standard AC adapter, but you’ll be bored of the thing long before the batteries run out, so…)

Dozens of these devices have floated around Chinatowns and Big Lots over the past decade, but this one’s unique because all 101 games are original. Not good, mind you, but at least original. Most of the games are very short, control jankily, and feature plinky out-of-tune music. Some either reset at the end or seemingly go unplayable after a couple stages, much like a lot of stuff in the infamous Action 52.

I’m a bit surprised that someone hasn’t gone and dumped the ROM on this sucker yet, but until then, someone on Nicovideo has uploaded a video digest of all 101 games. Part 1 is above. You may notice that any music that doesn’t sound China-janky was ripped from other games — WONDER RABBIT uses the bonus-stage tune from Nintendo’s Devil World, for example. The hero of DUNE WAR is one of the foot soldiers you get to run over at the very beginning of Konami’s Jackal.

I’m a big fan of the realistic graphics on the POLICE DOG LASY title screen. Stick around for MAD XMAS, too; it’s worth it.

Here’s part 2. Game 51 is an advanced lawnmower simulator, which makes me wonder if the designer is a closet fan of the ZX Spectrum.

“Can’t Wait for the Pole Vault Cartridge”

Chicago Tribune December 11, 1987 Friday, SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Copyright 1987 Chicago Tribune Company

Now you can pretend you’re Carl Lewis, and you won’t even have to get a funny haircut.

Bandai America Inc. of Allendale, N.J., has come out with “Stadium Events,” the second in a series of game cartridges in which people can participate.

The game cartridges are used in conjunction with the company’s Family Fun Fitness control mat, which hooks into a Nintendo Entertainment System, which, in turn, connects with your TV set. It’s much easier than it sounds.

Here’s how it works: The control mat is covered with large circles. You run in place on two of them. As you run, a computer-produced figure runs on the TV screen. As the little video guy approaches the hurdles on the screen, for example, you jump. The little man jumps, too. Jump late, or hit the wrong dot, and your little video man takes a dive and skins his little video legs.

“Stadium Events” features the 100-meter dash, hurdles, long jump and triple jump. You can compete alone or against a computer opponent or another person running on the control mat.

The Nintendo system is about $80. Bandai’s basic set-the control mat and a game cartridge-is $70 to $80. “Stadium Events” is about $30. It’s a small price to pay for fun, exercise and the chance to really bug the neighbors.

 
Evidently neighbor-bugging is an activity in high demand these days.
 
(Thanx to Mr. Cifaldi)
 

Terrifying NES User-Made Levels

I would not want to be friends with anyone who made levels like these.

How Knight Rider saved Activision (sort of)

A neat passage from an interview with Activision Blizzard head Bobby Kotick, printed in the February ’10 Game Informer:

We had a guy in Japan who was an intern in our Japanese office. A very aggressive guy — an American who spoke Japanese. He would sell things that we didn’t actually have the rights to. The first one he did was Knight Rider. He went to one of the Japanese licensees of Nintendo and sold them the rights to make a game based on Knight Rider. We didn’t own Knight Rider! The deal he did was “You make the game, you get to publish it in Japan, and Activision gets to publish it everywhere else.” So he calls us and says “I just sold Knight Rider” — it was to Tecmo, I think [actually Pack-in-Video]. I said “How much did you sell it for?” He said “$400,000.” I said “That’s incredible, but we don’t own Knight Rider!” So we had to go get the Knight Rider rights.

It turned out that this was going to be our little business. We’re going to sell rights of things that we could own, and the Japanese publisher will make the game, and we’ll sell it to the rest of the world. We did a lot of these. The next one he did was this old ’60s show Combat! How we got this one, I don’t know, but he got another $200,000 advance. Then, the thing that kept the company alive for the rest of the year was Shanghai. We sold Shanghai to everyone. If you had an LCD screen on your microwave at home, we sold you Shanghai! That got us through the end of 1991.

It’s a fascinating little peek into the 8-bit era of the game business — even though Kotick’s misremembering a fair bit (and GI apparently didn’t fact-check his tale). Knight Rider was actually sublicensed by Acclaim Entertainment, something that Tom Sloper (a veteran game-industry guy who worked for Activision at the time) confirmed in a GDRI interview. Maybe Kotick heard the story and confused it in his memory such that he thought he was the actual licensor; I dunno.

He is right, certainly, that Activision got heavily involved with Japanese sub-licensing in the ensuing years. But they never released a Combat! game — Kotick’s probably got that confused with Thunderbirds, a ’60s kids’ TV show and an equally oddball choice for a game license. What? There was a Combat! game? Well, set me on fire and call me Bernie! Still, that came game out in 1995, in Japan only, a fair bit after the 1991 timeframe Kotick was talking about. My apologies; I was still thinking in 8-bit terms — Thunderbirds was a 1990 game, after all.