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.

Chō Makaimura (Capcom, 10/4/91)

It’s easy to spot an early-era SNES game. There’s slowdown in places where you wouldn’t expect any slowdown. The Mode 7 effects are a bit janky and look a lot better in screenshots than live. The music is really tinny throughout — an issue Capcom seemed to struggle with all through the console’s life, come to think of it.

Nevertheless, Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a decent platformer, just as hard as any other in the series, and this TAS attempts to get through the game while defeating the absolute bare minimum of enemies — the bosses, and a set of cockatrice heads that must be killed in order to remove a wall blocking your way. The results are pretty spine-tingling, and even though this is a TAS and you know Knight Arthur is never going to die, it’s still thrilling to watch him take this leisurely stroll through the demon world.

Note that this video begins with the final boss of the first playthrough to save time, since (like with most Ghosts ‘n Goblins titles) you must beat the game twice in a row to get the real ending. Stick around for that ending and you’ll also get to see an interesting bug that was fixed for the SNES release. In the Super Famicom Chō Makaimura, if you reconfigure the button assignments in option mode and then finish the game, Arthur’s movements in the ending will grow more and more haywire, until he finally dies in one part of it. If you beat the game with 0 lives left, the ending is then halted by a Game Over and you have to “continue” to see the rest of it. (Doing this kills the ending music, and the credits roll at the very end is completely silent as a result, which is why it was cut out of this video.)

More on Saturn Waterworld

A bit ago I wrote about Ocean’s big push for Waterworld, the last major movie license the British publisher was involved with. In it I suggested that the Saturn port (which wasn’t shown around much) was likely not near completion — but it turns out I was pretty wrong on that front.

Bardamu left a comment on that piece referring to an interview on Planet Virtual Boy with Steve Woita, main designer on the Virtual Boy/Saturn Waterworld and a guy whose career in games dates back to the Atari 2600.

“We had nothing to do with the SNES version. We only did the VB and Saturn versions. The Saturn version was really a great version of what we wanted to do. We had smart bombs floating in the water that you’d use at the right time and take out as many enemies that were visible out in the world. The water was the best water I’d ever seen in a game at that time, Jason Plumb nailed that down. We also had a weapon that shot saw blades out onto the water, and the blades would skim 5 or 6 times before you couldn’t see them anymore. We had a bunch of very cool weapons in the game. The Saturn version was completely finished and then Infograms took us over and decided not to release the game. I’d have to say, that even by today’s standards, it was one of the best playing and looking games around. [...] The Saturn version is a very, very good playing game and I wish I could get that game out there right now.”

Bardamu also referred me to the above image, showing some better screenshots of the Saturn version in action. It does look pretty decent, admittedly, especially by 1996-era 3D graphical standards.

Xanadu Scenario II (Nihon Falcom, 10/1/86)

Xanadu, put out in late 1985 and therefore predating Dragon Quest, is a historical landmark in Japan’s video-game history. The English Wikipedia article on it is remarkably well-written and concise, more so than even the Japanese one right now, but neglects to mention why the game was such a hit in the first place — basically, it’s the first truly great (and truly original) made-in-Japan RPG, one that didn’t simply rip off Wizardry or Ultima wholesale.

You’ll see a bit of that old-school Ultima atmosphere in the battle scenes and the “Karma” parameter that goes up as you defeat monsters defined as “good” by the programming. (The virtue system from Ultima IV, which came out just before Xanadu, was undoubtedly an influence.) Western gamers will also notice parallels with Legacy of the Wizard, the NES game, which shares Xanadu’s side-view exploration, abstract architecture, and basic premise of collecting crowns and tracking down the legendary Dragon Slayer sword. This graphic style was also inherited by Faxanadu, although Falcom didn’t develop that one.

I’m linking to a speedy walkthrough video of the 1986 Xanadu Scenario II add-on pack, identical in gameplay to the original, mainly because it has better music. Soundtrack duties in Scenario II were handled by Takahito Abe (who I last mentioned in my Susa-no-Oh Densetsu article) and an 18-year-old Yuzo Koshiro, his first professional credit. To be precise, Koshiro didn’t compose music for this game — Falcom simply bought the rights to the PC-8801 music he had on his demo tape and threw it in. The Scenario II opening, dungeon levels 7, 9 and 11, and most of the boss music is his work. (Abe’s stuff shouldn’t be sniffed at, though, especially the two ending tracks.)

The opening few minutes will be a bit confusing if you aren’t familiar with Xanadu previously. In order to play Scenario II, one first had to boot up the original Xanadu disk and start up a new game. You begin in an ersatz castle town, where you visit the king to name your hero and then enter a series of training houses to define your starting parameters. Maxing out your charisma at the very beginning (as seen here) unlocks access to a secret underground shop where you can more fully prepare yourself for the coming expedition, buying potions and level-skipping talismans and such.

Once you enter the dungeon at the bottom of the tunnel network under the town, you’re prompted to switch disks. At this point you can perform a couple of tricks (again, demonstrated here) that let your character weasel out of the disk-switch prompt and access an Easter-egg battle that nets you the Vorpal Weapon, the most powerful sword outside of the Dragon Slayer. After that, you switch disks and Scenario II begins proper.

The aim of Scenario II is to defeat bosses, gather crowns, and defeat the King Dragon. The 11 levels of the dungeon can largely be explored in any order; you’re only limited by your current strength and stats. To beat the game the most quickly, a blitzkrieg approach is best — storming up the dungeon levels, nabbing all the top armor and equipment first, then going back down and taking out all the bosses. Your dexterity is so low at the start of the game that you can’t hit the broad side of a barn with your Vorpal Weapon, but with your trusty Large Shield +7 covering your hide, you can afford to be patient.

By the way, the NEC PC-8801mk2 that Xanadu was developed for uses the Yamaha YM2203 sound chip, with three FM channels and three SSG channels — basically, a standard AY-3-8910 with a bit of FM functionality tacked on. Most of the music uses only the three FM channels, which lend it a barren but oddly charming feel that would influence Falcom’s “house sound” for the next decade.

Memorial Day

…held on May 31 this year, is a chance for Americans to commemorate those who gave up their lives to defend their country.

But we’re Americans, right? We don’t like to think about dead soldiers; we like to think about victories. And fireworks.

Along those lines, I present you a video of the home-run sequences from about 30 Famicom games. Because God dammit, we’re Americans. (And the games are Japanese. But ignore that.)

High School! Kimengumi (Sega, 12/15/86)

I’m in the midst of recording more chip music into MP3 format for my portable player, and I finally remembered this time around to snag the main tracks from this Japan-exclusive Master System release, an adventure game based on a quintessentially ’80s Japanese gag manga/anime.

There isn’t much to say about the game itself, which can be beaten in five minutes and completed with a maximum score like the above video in under ten. Pony Canyon ported this game to the MSX2 platform in 1987, which strikes me as ranking up there with Mathias Rust’s plane trip as the most foolhardy endeavor of that year.

I like the music nonetheless, some fine stuff from Katsuhiro Hayashi (a.k.a. FUNKY K.H.). Hayashi joined Sega in 1984 at the age of 18 and stayed on for four years, creating such memorable Sega soundtracks as Super Hang-On, Galaxy Force, and the SMS titles Rambo and Black Belt. You can tell his Sega 8-bit output immediately thanks to that “dit-dah dit-dit-dah” drumline that he uses in what seems like every single track.

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.

TV Baseball Game (Epoch, August 1978)

Japan has a history of dedicated single-game systems (a.k.a. Pong consoles) that extends almost as far back as America’s. Chief among the later-era ones is this TV Baseball Game (テレビ野球ゲーム), a system from early home-game pioneer Epoch that I’m a little ashamed to admit came out the year I was born. The price: 13,400 yen, a number set in order to compete with Nintendo’s 12,500-yen Racing 112 (which I bet most readers have played in its Wario Ware, Inc guest appearance).

Using technology developed by NEC that would later form the core of 1981′s Cassette Vision console, TV Baseball Game plays a simple little pastime that is more-or-less recognizable as baseball. It came out the same year as Atari’s Home Run for the 2600, and it’s amusing to debate over which is the better simulation. Epoch boasts a complete side of nine players in the field (we’ll just pretend the catcher is somewhere below the TV screen), but frankly I think Atari’s version has better gameplay. I’m a little biased, though, perhaps — during grade-school summer vacations in upstate New York, my 6-year-old self’s idea of a great way to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon was to plug in Home Run and try scoring 100 runs in a single inning against the computer. It’s very zen, once you get into it.

Here’s a video of some hot TV Baseball Game action recorded off a real console. This looks a lot more challenging than Home Run, I’ll give it that. What kind of baseball sim only allows realistic pitches that don’t snake to and fro as you waggle the joystick around? Come on!

Despite this fault, Epoch’s console was reportedly popular enough to sell 230,000 units — a pretty decent feat considering the Cassette Vision itself only did about 300k. Epoch later released an improved version of this game for the CV; it was called New Baseball and added a computer opponent for single-player.

Planet of Death (Artic Computing, 1981)

The Sinclair ZX81 (a.k.a. Timex Sinclair 1000) could be the most underpowered personal computer in history that boasted a very active commercial games scene. It produced a strictly black-and-white display and had no sound hardware. It shipped with a whopping 1K of memory, about 672 bytes of which was usable as program space. You could expand this with a 16K RAM upgrade that didn’t attach firmly to the ZX81 and therefore crashed the computer frequently. Since there was no dedicated video chip, the CPU had to spend nearly three-quarters of its time drawing the TV image on the fly, in an arrangement sort of like what Atari 2600 programmers had to deal with. The BASIC language included was pretty powerful, but had assorted bugs — the first version of it thought the square root of 0.25 was 1.3591409. Graphics were limited to the system’s built-in character set, which included letters, numbers, a handful of symbols, but no apostrophe (though people found workarounds for this later on).

But that didn’t deter British coders. One of them produced a full chess game in 1K — a very bad chess game, but one that’s astonishing simply because it works at all. 16K quickly became a base requirement for ZX81 gaming, though, and developers across England released action games, sports management sims, really rudimentary 3D titles, and so on. The aptly-named zx81stuff.co.uk has archived a fair bit of these releases, but many are still missing in action, advertised in magazines but not known to exist anywhere at this point. Shame.

I waned to show off Planet of Death because it so egregiously shows another challenge ZX81 coders faced. Since the computer’s video signal was generated by the Z80 processor, whenever you overtaxed the system with too resource-intensive a program, you ran the risk of having the screen go all wonky and flickery. Programmers had the option of turning off video output entirely to let the CPU devote all its time to running code instead, which is what Artic Computing seems to have done for this adventure game. A lot. After every single keypress, in fact. The resulting mess is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there’s no way you could touch-type on the ZX81′s membrane keyboard, so you couldn’t type faster than what’s shown in the video anyway.

The game, the first of eight adventures Artic produced for the ZX machines, reminds me a lot of Mystery House and the other super-simple games Ken and Roberta Williams got their start with. Like those adventures, Planet of Death has no real plot development and is basically a series of item-ferrying puzzles with an arbitrary maze stuck in the middle. Enjoy the flicker, nonetheless.

Rick Dangerous (Microprose/Core Design, June 1989)

Among the many reasons I love the 8- and 16-bit European game industry: British Telecom owned a game publisher for four years — and a pretty good one, too.

Said publisher was purchased by Microprose in 1988, delaying the release of Rick Dangerous by about half a year while everything was being figured out post-sale. This gave the developers at Core Design time to port this game to six different computer systems, every major one of the day — PC, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. It’s a testament to Core’s skill that every one of them control so well and “feel” the same despite the radically different hardware involved. (This was Core’s first game chronologically; Rick co-designer Simon Phipps went on to spend five years designing Harry Potter games for EA.)

It’s hard to say why I like Rick so much. It’s a very formulaic platformer, and one that relies a lot more on memorizing stage layouts than having serious action-game skill. Rick dies all the time from unseen traps or unnoticed blowdart turrets, and the only way to see the ending is by trial and error, memorizing each stage until you can pull off every jump and crawl and ladder-grab perfectly. Zzap!64 and Amiga Power both slammed the game for this in their reviews, and I can’t blame them.

But there’s something else Rick has, something difficult to lay one’s finger upon. I’d pin it down to “console-style response,” I think. It controls great on every platform, with none of the odd little unfair delays that were sort of part and parcel of computer games back then. It’s not that other 8-bit titles didn’t have responsive controls and quick gameplay, but something about Rick makes it feel far more console-y than a lot of other European computer releases of the time. Try it for yourself — any platform will do — and see if you agree with me.

And if you’re going to try it out, why not use Rick Dangerous 128+, a brand-new version released last Christmas for the Amstrad? The French coders behind it claim it’s the best 8-bit version of Rick ever released, and I’ll have to agree — it’s got all the extra content from the Amiga and ST versions (about a third of the game was cut to fit into the 8-bitters), it’s quick and colorful, and the enemies make the cutest shriek of horror when you fill them full of lead. You’ll want to use the WinAPE emulator to play it.