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.

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.)

Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

A Japanese TASser has uploaded a new runthrough of Pilotwings completed in 22 minutes and 27 seconds. He also uploaded a few videos of him screwing around which are, to be honest, a lot more fun to watch. Here’s one of them.

Back in 1991, when my 13-year-old self camped out at a friend’s house to play his shiny new SNES, we’d do a lot of the exact same things you see in this clip — right down to figuring out how spectacularly we could crash the light plane upon landing. Ah, nostalgia! (I also like the demonstrations of him missing each license by a single point. I didn’t realize that was possible.)

Super Family Gelände (Namco, February 1998)

A more well-rounded test of YouTube annotation. In a way I like YT annotations over subtitles for things like these because the annotations don’t get compressed with the video and don’t take up as much onscreen space, but the annotation-editing interface (while simple) is very time-consuming for projects like this. For that reason alone I might switch to more traditional subtitling in the future; not having to move between the mouse and keyboard all the time would save a lot of drudge work.

Super Family Gelände (スーパーファミリーゲレンデ), as you’ll probably notice in this video, is the spiritual 2D ancestor to Namco’s We Ski (2008). The story mode is but a small part of the full game, which places the main emphasis on time trials and such as you blaze the eight slopes available. Since it’s only an option and not the main thrust, I suppose the developers felt safe in making the story as silly as possible — the chapters only get more amusing as time goes on, and you’re doing something different in each one, so it never gets boring. If there’s interest, I could make this story mode the next “running series” here after I’m done with The Phantom of Akihabara.

This game bears a copyright date of 1995 but wasn’t actually released until February 1, 1998 — exclusively on the Nintendo Power service in Japan, no less. This has made it a pretty damn obscure title, which is a shame; I can’t imagine why Namco sat on it for three years. There isn’t a whole lot of depth, no, but the unique control scheme makes this game remarkably novel and oddly addictive — I’m usually not the sort of person who cares much about getting fast times in racing games, but I’ve been obsessed with time-attacking in this game ever since I discovered it in the earlier part of the decade. Give it a shot if you’ve got access to it.

(In case you’re wondering: The Japanese took the German word gelände (meaning “terrain” or “field”) and use it to mean “ski trail” for some reason.)