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.

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.

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.

Or 40 Famicoms? Or 20 Nintendo 64′s? 100 N64 controllers, maybe? Or how about 100 Super Famicoms, with 400 controllers and a random selection of 2000 loose SFC carts to go with it? (Presumably there are a lot of Romancing SaGas and Super Mario Worlds in that pile.)

All this and more is up on Yahoo! Auctions over in Japan at the moment from a seller based in Osaka, presumably either the owner of a used-game shop that went out of business or the repo man who wound up inheriting all of his inventory.

There was a time when the seller’s collection of 20 Famicom network adapters was worth its weight in gold in the Japanese collectors’ market, but a combination of warehouse finds and a general price depression in 8-bit games has lowered the price a great deal. It’s sort of like how the NES market is right now — a few titles are worth tons, but the majority is no more than a few hundred yen or so each.

Amusingly, he has only eight Mega Drives available in his vast flog-off, and there’s no Saturn or Dreamcast stuff whatsoever. Nintendo stuff has a tendency to clog up used-game shop shelves, I suppose.

You know what the Flicky means! I’m real busy with real work and need to break from here for a little bit. Be back shortly.

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.

Gunhed
(ガンヘッド)
(Blazing Lazers)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 7/7/89
Price: 5800 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Shooting
PC Engine FAN Score: 24.10 / 30.00

Gunhed, the 1989 Japanese live-action SF flick, is not very good. You can tell it’s trying very hard, but it can never quite shake the fact that it’s, well, a low-budget ’80s SF flick, one that wouldn’t be out of a place in a late-season episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I like the film for those qualities, but many don’t. Heaven knows director Masato Harada didn’t like the English VHS release I saw back in the early ’90s, one that was extensively edited to remove most of the very Japanese bits; that’s why that version is directed by “Alan Smithee” instead. (ADV, my former bosses, released a much better DVD in 2004.)

Hudson and Compile’s video-game version of Gunhed has absolutely nothing to do with the film — you’re piloting a spaceship, for one, while the Gunhed shown in the movie is a robotic tank — and it’s far, far better off for it.

It’d be fair to say that Gunhed helped shift a lot of PC Engines in the summer of 1989, and not simply because it was the competition game for the Summer Caravan that year. It’s also one of Compile’s best releases ever, packed with everything that makes a Compile shooter so good: a numerical power-up system, changes to upgrade weaponry at regular intervals, and really fast vertical scrolling. It’s also one of the longest shooters they’ve ever made, with a full run taking around an hour to complete assuming you don’t continue. (It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that stages 5 and 8 — both very slow-scrolling levels — are also the most boring and frustrating to me.)

You’ve got four main weapons to choose from: the standard Star Soldier five-way beam, a half-moon rapid-fire beam which later got lifted wholesale for Donpachi, an undulating lightning shot that I remember thinking was totally “next generation” back in the time, and some useless orbs that fly around your ship. You’ve also got Gradius-style options called “multibodies” (or, as the in-game voice calls them, “Mmrnh Bnhh”), optional shields, and upgradeable homing missiles. These missiles are secretly the best weapon in the game, because they home in on enemy bosses even before the hit detection kicks in — they make things so much easier, and once they’re fully upgraded, it’s like you can beat the game blindfolded. Sort of. Not really.

Gunhed is a product of the age, and as such, it’s kill-or-be-killed. None of this “only the center dot of your ship has hit detection” stuff — your entire spacecraft explodes if anything overlaps with it, and that’s that. On the other hand, you’re never asked to perform a lot of fancy bullet dodging in this game, not even in the later stages. It’s a careful balance Compile has pulled off here, and it results in an exhilarating shooting gallery, especially in the high-speed stages 3 and 4. (It’s no accident that the Caravan competition version started in stage 3, probably because of all the destructible blocks and things. Competition HuCards were given out to Caravan champions as prizes, and like the Nintendo World Championships cart, they’re now pricey collector’s items.)

Really, this is one of those very few PC Engine games that’s so universally praised worldwide that I don’t have much to say which hasn’t already been written elsewhere. The graphics are great, the music’s thumpy and catchy, and it’s just a perfect game to turn your brain off and blast away with. Man, the summer of ’89 was an awesome time to be a PCE owner, wasn’t it?

I wanted to write about Gunhed (aka Blazing Lazers) next, but since Gunhed was the official game of the 1989 Hudson Nationwide Caravan (ハドソン全国キャラバン), I probably better explain that first. The video above recaps the first 9 years of the event, winding up with some rare footage of the HDTV version of Bomberman Hudson worked with NHK to unveil at the 1993 show.

For a generation of Japanese dorks my age, summertime essentially meant the Caravan — watching it, participating in it, buying the official game of the event so you could get as much practice in beforehand as possible. The first installment of Hudson’s all-Japan competition/tour was held in 1985; Star Force was the official game of the event. That was followed by Star Soldier and Starship Hector in the next two years, but Hudson switched formats to the PC Engine from 1988 onward. The game they chose for the ’88 Caravan: Power League — apparently not a tremendously popular decision, so they went right back to shooters starting in ’89.

The format of the tournament was single-elimination, with the first few qualifying rounds played with a two-minute time limit and the quarterfinals onward played with a five-minute time limit. Gunhed, while a great game in its own right, was a bit of an unpopular choice because you couldn’t play the game in the time-limit Caravan mode on the standard home version. That was fixed with Super Star Soldier, the Kaneko-developed 1990 game.

In 1991 Naxat decided to hold their own multi-location tournament, the Summer Carnival, to compete with Hudson’s Caravan. The ’91 Caravan had Final Soldier (a brill game) and the Carnival had Compile’s PCE Spriggan (a similarly brill game). 1992 was a similarly bountiful summer, with Naxat’s ridiculous FC game Recca (and the terrible PCE game Alzadick) and Hudson’s Soldier Blade.

The Summer Carnival ended in 1993 with Kaneko’s NEXZR, and after that point, shooters began to lose their spot as the #1 genre in the mind of console-game kids. Subsequent Caravans used whatever the latest Bomberman game was for their competitions, except for three years’ worth of trading-card game events and one very odd year where they used Tengai Makyo ZERO for some reason. The Caravan breathed its last in 2000, by which time its position as a dominant game event in Japan was long gone;  another Caravan was held in 2006 to celebrate Bomberman coming to the DS.

Considering how hot it gets in most of Japan during the summer, I can find no better way to pass the time than holding vast shoot-em-up high score competitions. It beats lying in front of the fan in your underwear all day.

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.

As promised yesterday, more about Hacker International, the Japanese bad boy of 8-bit consoledom.

I (like a lot of NES fans, I suppose) first heard about Hacker from David Sheff’s book Game Over, where he mentions that the company attempted to defy Nintendo’s third-party licensee system for the Famicom, was sued, and went out of business shortly thereafter. The only factual part of that synopsis is that Nintendo sued Hacker, but it wasn’t for anything related to publishing unlicensed FC porn games and it was settled out of court before a verdict was reached. What’s more, Hacker had a very long history — long enough to result in 16 Famicom games, 22 Famicom Disk System titles (more than most legitimate FDS licensees), 13 PC Engine games (seven on CD-ROM), 15 licensed PlayStation releases under the name Map Japan, and even a handful of Windows titles. That’s not bad for a company so associated with 8-bit pornography, as laid out in this screenshot gallery of their FDS stuff (link very not safe for work).

Hacker was founded and led by Satoru Hagiwara, an entrepreneur and former music producer who thought he’d cash in on the personal-computer boom when it hit Japan in the mid-1980s. Their first product was a monthly PC magazine titled Hacker (above), as he explained in a 2005 issue of Game Labo:

“PCs were hitting it big at the time and tons of PC magazines were getting launched all over the place, so I asked a friend of mine who ran a publishing business if he was interested in putting one out. I figured that once we started releasing a magazine, the writers and know-how would come naturally. That’s how ‘Hacker’ got started — it’s a bit of an embarrassing name, but since we were launching after the pack, I went with something that had impact.”

So Hacker International wasn’t meant to be an “underground” outfit in the beginning?

“Not at all. But people who were into that sort of thing were attracted to the name, and they came to us. A lot of our writers were into games, and they came up with a lot of ideas for offbeat and fun products. I created Hacker International to help put those ideas out on sale. At around that time, I had a lot of negative emotions toward the collusion and under-the-table agreements [console game] publishers had with each other. Even so, none of the products we made broke any laws. The music industry ran under a set of well-defined laws, so perhaps that experience affected me a little too, but either way, I didn’t think to myself that we wanted to break the law with our products.”

Following the magazine, Hacker launched a product called the Hacker Junior, an upgrade to FC consoles that added composite-video output and new controllers with turbo functionality. You could buy the upgrade parts yourself, or send an FC to Hacker’s offices and they’d perform the upgrade for you. Nintendo sued to get the product off the market, claiming copyright infringement.

“That was an incredibly gray-market product. I’m not allowed to discuss the terms of it, but we did enter a full settlement with Nintendo. The lawsuit took place long after we stopped producing the Hacker Junior anyway — it took a lot of work to produce for not very much profit.”

Hagiwara was obviously having fun tweaking Nintendo on their home turf, though so his company followed up soon after with the Disk Hacker, a Disk System utility disk that let you break the protection on FDS disks and copy as many games as you wanted, all without any special hardware. The Disk Hacker went through several versions.

“While we were doing the Hacker Junior, we’d have technically-gifted people bring us software. The first Disk Hacker came from that. Our distributors and other people all told us that there was a demand for a backup tool.”

From that came original games, mostly made by amateur hobbyists who reverse-engineered the Famicom in their bedrooms and brought the results to the Hacker offices. Given that most of these amateur hackers were otaku nerds, the great majority of the games they made were adult in nature.

“We had no documentation, so none of the games were all that interesting content-wise. Because they were weak games, a lot of them went down the adult track — we called them ‘semi-adult.’”

The original Disk System games were popular enough that Hacker moved on to FC cartridge releases, many developed by assorted companies in Asia and the US. When the PC Engine was released, Hacker established the Games Express brand to support the console, again in a totally unlicensed manner.

“We established the Games Express brand near the start of the PC Engine’s life. I liked the Hacker brand because it had sort of a bad-boy image, but by that time it was starting to get too associated with criminal behavior, so I felt like it needed to change. Hacker earned a lot of its fans during the PCE days and we sold a surprisingly large amount of games. Although they didn’t do so directly, we did receive thanks from NEC for our games, because they helped them sell hardware.”

Given the PCE’s software lineup in the later years, it’s little surprise that Games Express’s adult releases proved to be such great system sellers. But how did Hacker get away with making unlicensed porn games for consoles all those years? Part of it was that Hacker was extremely careful when it came to tiptoeing around the law, making their cartridges in a way that didn’t break Nintendo’s patents. Another reason: The third-party licensee system Nintendo pioneered was untested at the time, and apparently they weren’t as willing to test out its legality in courts as their American branch was when Tengen broke their NES licensee agreement. Hagiwara brings up another fact, though:

Things changed with the PlayStation, which Hagiwara decided to become a legitimate licensee for. Why the change of heart?

“The biggest reason was that I liked how Sony was doing things. The PlayStation basically destroyed the game distribution scheme that was in place when it launched; they had a stated goal of creating a completely new type of game business, and I was really impressed by that. Once we started developing games, though, other makers got into the scene, you started to see 2800-yen rereleases, and worst of all, I stopped being interested in games. So that’s why we quit the business — I wanted to wrap that up while we could still do so and try something new.”

Hacker and Map Japan closed up shop in 2001, with Hagiwara moving on to other businesses. They leave behind a legacy of…well, porn, yes, but also of thumbing their noses at authority and being the sort of freewheeling, independent geek entrepreneurs that Akihabara was known for all through the ’80s and ’90s. I have to give them a round of applause for that, at least.