Some tips

Work’s got me beat at the moment, so why don’t you let Donn Nauert’s smooth voice guide you through the wonderful world of NES secret tricks for the next half-hour or so instead?

Did you enjoy your adventure full of actions?

Rocket Coaster is a compilation of software packages released by Taito for their D3BOS arcade system, which Taito first introduced in 1991 despite what that previous link says. Short for “Dynamic Direct Dimension Burst Out System,” the hardware combined a fully-enclosed motion simulator, a laserdisc player, and some 68000-based hardware to allow for interactive rides and the like — a VT simulator of sorts, a genre that had a mild boom in the early ’90s with things like Virtuality and Sega’s R-360 system.

Unlike the R-360, though, Taito’s D3BOS allowed for no user input — it was just a ride, allowing punters to climb in, strap on, and enjoy getting whirled around a bit as they watched the best CGI 1991 could offer them. Titles were themed along the lines of roller coasters, dune buggies, spaceships, and even skiing. Although there was no gameplay whatsoever, the ride allowed two people to climb on at the same time, which I suppose makes it good if you’re out on a date in Odaiba or somesuch.

The system was deployed chiefly in Taito-owned arcades and Cannonball City, a small indoor theme park the company ran in Machida, Tokyo that attempted to recreate the atmosphere of an American city. The complex only lasted a year or so, and the system — which sold for around 15 to 20 million yen each — lasted about as long.

Chances are the D3BOS would be completely forgotten were it not for Taito taking some of the footage they made for it and repackaging it into Rocket Coaster, a racing game for Pioneer’s LaserActive system. A complete playthrough is above. It’s half an hour long, but if you like early CGI and background music with a lot of orchestral hits, it’s a must-watch.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Break In

Break In
(ブレイク・イン)

Maker: Naxat Soft
Release Date: 8/10/89
Price: 5500 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 19.34 / 30.00
Kōgien: “A total of six billiards games are available for play. Each one is playable in action, simulation and techique modes, letting you enjoy the experience from practice to actual play.”

When I think of pool, chiefly I think about being drunk in exciting, exotic locales. The last time I played pool was at a bar in lovely Breckenridge, Colorado, where I got involved in a game with an Englishman and an Irishman who spent the entire time whining that billiards is for addled baboons and snooker was a far superior table sport. My technique was the best out of all of us, no doubt thanks to my advantage in age and erudite dual-wield skills with a pint. These are abilities I lacked the time I played pool previous, Austin circa 2004, on an Acclaim press junket about four months before they filed for bankruptcy. It was on Fifth Street somewhere and — wahey, kind of like Break In — it wasn’t pretty.

(My paragraphs, they always wrap themselves up like a neat little package in the end. That’s the Magweasel difference.)

Billiards sims have never been common. It’s understandable. Until Jimmy White’s ‘Whirlwind’ Snooker in 1991, they all looked exactly the same — straight overhead view of the table, a bunch of little balls, nothing to stimulate you visually. They were all realtime geometry homework. After Jimmy White…well, it was the same thing, except in 3D. I never quite understood it, but in Europe, at least, they go crazy for it.

There was sort of an audience for Break In in 1989, though, enough that Famicom Tsushin actually scored the game 30 out of 40 points (at a time when this still meant something). But to modern eyes, we may as well be playing Trick Shot on the 2600. There’s no story mode, nothing to liven up the action; just a lot of little balls on the screen. (There is a 3D targeting display on the bottom, but it’s tiny and of limited use.) The audiovisual atmosphere is there, from the sepia-toned competitor portraits — most wearing the all-important white shirt and vest that apparently identifies you as a cool billiards guy — to the lounge music that tends to permeate this genre of game.

This is one of the few pool games to include a carom game — yotsudama, a Japanese varient on 4-ball pictured on the left above — but you really don’t care, trust me.

Break In would be a very obscure release were it not for its worldwide Virtual Console relaunch in 2008 as part of the Kaga Create package. It tended to score very poorly, although judging by IGN’s review (which whines about how there’s no way to determine the numbers on each ball, a feature you activate by pressing the Select button), very few outlets cared enough about virtual billiards to give the game much of a chance. And neither would I. Pool is something to play with strangers, on vacation, drinking beer. Everyone knows that.

More on Tokuma’s Mario Guide

Back on Monday I talked a bit about Tokuma Shoten’s Super Mario Bros. strategy guide, the one that sold 630,000 copies in 1985 (1.3 million overall, in the end) and became the bestselling book in Japan for two years straight. What I failed to mention — because I completely forgot — is that you can read the guide today even if you don’t know Japanese, because Nintendo of America translated it verbatim into English and sold it via the Fun Club News and early issues of Nintendo Power under the name How to win at Super Mario Bros. (This book was never sold outside of mail order and is now extremely uncommon, but .cbz scans are available on the net thanks to Retromags.)

The book was entirely written and designed in house by the editors of Tokuma’s Family Computer Magazine in Japan. The first half of the book was largely recycled from coverage originally printed in the November 1985 issue of the mag, while the writing and screenshot-snapping for World 5-1 through 8-4 was handled by Naoto Yamamoto, who was a part-time writer that mostly worked for Technopolis, Tokuma’s computer hobby mag, at the time.

Here’s a word or two on the ’80s Japan game-mag scene from Yamamoto, courtesy of his weblog:

“We had planned to launch the guide in Japan with a run of 130,000 copies, but we already had plans for subsequent printings before the book was even released. Tokuma Shoten at the time held itself up to a very refined and literary image as a publisher, so it often divided up publication into several divided releases so it could produce a large number of printings and claim that as a status symbol for the book.

Famimaga continued on with strategy guides for Pac-Land, Mach Rider, Twinbee and Spelunker, but there was no such thing as a specialist strategy guide writer at this point. They would get written by production outfits that dealt in children’s magazines, or by part-timers hired by those outfits if they had no previous game experience. I moved on to Pac-Land right from Super Mario, and I remember that the sample ROM Namco gave me to work with had a completely faceless Pac-Man in the game. They told me it was in order to keep the ROM from leaking out somewhere in the middleman process, but of course I couldn’t take any screenshots off of that thing. I wound up having my bosses go through these tense negotiations with Namco in order to get me a usable ROM, and ultimately the schedule got so tight that I had to spent four straight nights staying in the office.”

If you think spending four straight days playing the FC version of Pac-Land sounds like fun, think again.

“I wound up passing out in the office, I guess because of all the fatigue that had accumulated since that summer, and I was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The hospital was really close by, to the point that the rest of the editorial staff arrived before I did, which became a funny story at parties afterward. I received some gifts and new clothes and such, and ultimately I rested up for about four days. Thus, the release date got delayed. Afterwards — and not that I was the reason for it or anything — but subsequent guides were written by outside production firms. They still had me running around for them with the Twinbee guide, though, since they had trouble finding anyone to play through the game’s ‘second quest’ and they needed screenshots.”

How much money did Yamamoto earn for co-writing the most successful book in Japan for two years running?

“The Mario guide was done entirely in-house, so I received no royalties for it outside of my hourly salary. My writing fee, in other words, was zero. Outside of physical production, [Tokuma] spent zero yen making the guide and sold such a vast number of copies of it. I did receive royalties for the English version, though, which arrived in my bank account a long time later — a grand total of 5,555 yen [about $37 in 1987 dollars].”

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Power League II

Power League II
(パワーリーグⅡ)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 8/8/89
Price: 5200 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 22.76 / 30.00
Kōgien: “The popular previous game receives updated data and several new modes: an all-star game and a home run contest. The graphics have been extensively reworked and are much prettier.“

The first Power League, released a year and two months before this sequel, was a decent but fairly flawed attempt at presenting a realistic baseball package compared to Namco’s World Stadium. Power League II is a far more complete package, essentially ensuring the brand’s role as the PC Engine’s longest-lasting game series. (Bomberman didn’t come out for another year after this.)

Released simultaneously with Hudson’s Tennokoe 2 “memory card,” Power League II pretty much defined how Hudson’s PCE baseball games would look for the next five years. The field, displayed in an awkward direct-overhead view originally, is now shown in the standard quarter-view that was used by nearly every other 8- and 16-bit baseball sim. That’s very much to the game’s advantage — the graphics look far more realistic now, with the view making it easier for Hudson’s artists to place more detail into the players and the Hu Stadium they’re playing in.

The biggest graphical enhancement, though, lies in the home run sequence. The game decides right when you make contact with the ball whether it’s going to be a homer or not, and as you can see in the bottom of the 2nd in the video below, the view follows the ascent of the ball from behind the plate, which was a pretty impressive trick in 1989. The best part about it: as the ball flies upward, the ground below falls out of view in realistic 3D perspective, an effect that’s extremely impressive in the subtle realism it gives the whole sequence. It’s a bit of tiny detail that must’ve been a pain in the ass for whoever programmed it at Hudson, and I love it.

There is indeed an all-star game mode, not that it matters all that much at this point since Hudson wouldn’t get the license to use actual Japan Professional Baseball League players until Power League 5 in 1992. The home-run derby is also pretty bare-bones, featuring the player of your choice taking BP for anywhere between 10 and 100 pitches. The Tennokoe support allows you to save your team’s progress in Pennant mode, which culminates in a Japan-US championship game that’s featured below.

In a way you could call Power League II the zenith of the series, simply because none of the four subsequent titles changed the basic visual package or gameplay much at all beyond what we see here. It’s a shame that NEC based the TurboGrafx-16′s World Class Baseball off the first Power League and not this one, because I’ve half a mind to say this is better than anything that was on the NES as of 1989. That, and I like the “runners in scoring position” jingle a fair bit.

Mario Mania I (1985-6)

How popular did Nintendo’s Family Computer become after Super Mario Bros. was released on September 13, 1985? So popular that, as it turns out, a third-party Super Mario Bros. strategy guidebook was the top selling non-manga book in Japan for the entire year of 1985. And 1986.

Super Mario Bros.: The Complete Strategy Guide (スーパーマリオブラザーズ完全攻略本) was produced by the editors of Tokuma Shoten’s Family Computer Magazine, the highest-circ game mag in Japan until Famitsu hit it big in the late 1980s. Simultaneous day-and-date guide releases alongside games didn’t really happen until later, so this book didn’t hit shops until October 31 — and still it managed to sell 630,000 copies before the end of the year. What’s more, the 10th best-selling book of 1985 in Japan was another SMB strategy guide — Futami Shobo’s Super Mario Bros. Secret Tricks Collection (スーパーマリオブラザーズ裏ワザ大全集), shown below.

(In what was perhaps a sign of the times, the book that Tokuma’s Mario guide beat out to be #1 in 1985 was the Japanese translation of Iacocca: An Autobiography.)

Mario Mania didn’t truly take hold in Japan until 1986, though. In that year, Tokuma’s guide was again the top-selling book in the nation, with Futami’s getting bumped up to third place. What’s more, those two books were joined by five other guides in the top 25 — strategies for Twinbee, The Goonies, Spelunker, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken. In 1986, you could sell anything Famicom-related and rake in massive profits, basically — and then it happened all over again in America two years later. I knew I was born too late.

Sadly, the guidebook boom faltered in subsequent years as competition increased. From 1987 onward, the only strategy guides that made Japanese bestseller lists were Enix’s official guides for whatever Dragon Quest title they most recently released.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Tennokoe 2

Tennokoe 2
(天の声2)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 8/8/89
Price: 2600 yen

The Guinness Book of World Records claims that the NES release of The Legend of Zelda was “the first home console title to include an internal battery for saving data.” This is not actually true. Zelda came out August 1987 in the US, but in April 1987, Seta released Morita Shōgi, a Japanese chess sim that allowed you to save the status of the board and pick up a game in progress anytime you liked. (The cartridge version of Hydlide II on the MSX had battery backup even earlier in late 1986, and considering most Japanese people treated the MSX as a game console, that oughta count as well.)

The tech may not have been common until 1987, but it gained prevalence pretty quickly on the Famicom and NES, just in time for the role-playing game boom that hit around the same time. Lucky thing, too, because the alternative to battery backup on a console RPG is junk like the 52-character passwords used in the Japanese version of Dragon Quest II. The first two FC Dragon Quests had a password system that Enix called fukkatsu no jumon (復活の呪文, the “incantation of resurrection”) which made children nationwide cry because the strings of kana it spat out were almost impossible to write down and type in correctly unless you had a lot of practice. (American gamers of a similar age might remember how the font on Hudson’s Faxanadu also led to frequent incorrect passwords.)

The original PC Engine, as designed and released in 1987, had no provision for saving games without a password. It wasn’t part of the HuCard’s design spec because there just wasn’t any space for it on the card (although this changed later on). PCE games up to now all either had no save system or made you write down long, tricky passwords — Susa-no-Oh Densetsu actually had you type in your characters’ current HP, gold and other parameters alongside the password checksum. NEC Home Electronics and Hudson didn’t see this as a big deal at first, partly because they figured CD-ROM technology would advance more quickly than it ultimately did — Shinichi Nakamoto suggested in a couple game-mag interviews at the time that technology to write data onto CD-ROMs would be implemented on consoles in the near future. Thus, the PCE was without backup functionality until the CD-ROM² System came out in late 1988, and gamers unwilling to shell out for that had to wait until August 1989 for a solution that didn’t involve trying to decipher their own messily-written passwords.

For whatever reason, Hudson and NEC both developed their own HuCard backup devices — Hudson had the Tennokoe 2, and NEC had the Backup Booster, released in November 1989. Why this happened, and why NEC’s peripheral came out so long after Hudson’s, is unknown. It should also be noted that HuCards had to to have backup support specially written into the code in order to be compatible with these devices, something that largely didn’t happen until late 1989, although a few Hudson titles had Tennokoe support built in before the hardware was released.

Where did the name Tennokoe 2 (which literally means “The Voice of Heaven 2″) come from? The term is actually borrowed from Momotarō Densetsu, a 1987 Famicom RPG from Hudson set in the world of the Japanese folktale. Tennokoe was what the password system was called in the game, a similar bit of atmospheric decoration to Dragon Quest’s “incantations” but with a bit more of a Far East flair to it. As for the “2″ at the end of the accessory’s name? That, according to Hudson, is because the unit contains two kilobytes of battery-backed SRAM. This is a very weird thing to name an accessory like this, but I suppose it helped the thing stand out in the shops.

As you can see here, the Tennokoe 2 connects to the expansion port at the rear of the original PCE system. Perhaps “latches on to” is a better way of putting it, though. The thing’s huge, and heavy. The size is partly because  it doesn’t run off the PCE’s power supply — you have to load it up with two AA batteries, essentially supplying the “battery” of the battery backup yourself. A red LED on the plastic case turns on whenever the batteries are almost exhausted, and as long as you’re quick about switching in a new set, you won’t lose any data. Because the Tennokoe doesn’t have any composite video output on its rear, and because it occupies the only expansion port on the console, you can’t use it and an AV Booster simultaneously, which means you’re stuck with RF video if you wanted to save any games. (The only solution for this was to purchase a CoreGrafx or CoreGrafx II, which had separate composite outputs.)

Still, the Tennokoe has the same amount of backup SRAM as NEC-HE’s Backup Booster and cost about half the price in shops, making it by far the most popular choice among PCE gamers. Thus, for whatever reason, Hudson’s third-party accessory beat out NEC’s first-party version in userbase, a trend that was set in stone by the time the Tennokoe Bank (a far more convenient storage device in HuCard form) shipped in 1991.

2K doesn’t go very far if you have a large HuCard collection, and more than a few gamers purchased multiple Tennokoe’s around this time to avoid having to delete anything. The accessory’s portability and separation from the games themselves also give it an advantage of convenience, letting you take your in-progress data to a friend’s house or trade it with others. In a rather perverse way, then, the Tennokoe 2 was the game biz’s first memory card. I told you the PCE doesn’t get enough credit as an industry pioneer.

The Goonies (Konami, December 1985)

It doesn’t seem to be all that commonly known, but the first Konami game based on The Goonies wasn’t in arcades or on the Famicom. It was released for the MSX, a couple of months before the FC cartridge (largely coinciding with the film’s theatrical release in Japan), and it’s actually a wholly different game.

You wouldn’t know it from the graphics, perhaps, but you are controlling Sloth, the deformed Fratelli brother that winds up befriending the gang and saving their hides in the movie. There are five stages, and in each one Sloth has to rescue all seven Goonies, locked behind doors which he has to find keys for. It’s actually a pretty complex game, one with an experience-point system (fill up the gauge to regain a little vitality) and a grand total of 27 items to power-up (or power down) Sloth with.

The stages are similarly convoluted, involving warp doors and areas that take up multiple screens vertically and horizontally. In this way, it reminds me more than a little of a sort of prototypical Castlevania. The basic idea’s pretty much the same — explore creepy stages, find hidden items, defeat enemies, that sort of thing.

You can find the rest of the stages on YouTube as well. If you have the patience, stick around for the ending after Stage 5 is completed — it’s so charmingly 8-bit.

Spelunker (Irem, 12/6/85)

Spelunker is infamous (in Japan, at least) for featuring the wimpiest hero in video games, a guy who cannot survive a fall of half his body length and who blithely falls right off of ropes and ladders unless you specifically order him to jump off instead. In the hands of the right TASser, however, the dude suddenly acquires Mario-like powers.

The main trick to this updated run lies in an obscure bug involving the “drug,” the hidden bottles of red liquid that are revealed when your explorer passes through certain points in each map. Drugs double your speed for a limited time, but it turns out that if you pick up a second drug just before your current one expires, the timer will go offline and you’ll keep the speed boost for the rest of the game.

There’s a side effect to this, however: You cannot board the left-right moving boat in the third section while in double-speed mode, effectively preventing you from going any further. The workaround involves exploiting another obscure bug: If you tap A repeatedly to climb a rope or ladder quickly, the game (for whatever reason) will not reset the Y coordinate it uses to determine whether you’ve fallen to your death or not. As a result, as long as you get the A-button timing right, you can jump off the rope and fall as far as you want as long as you don’t tumble below the starting point where you first “boarded” the rope.

This TAS uses that bug to essentially force the explorer into the boat. In the process, he also shatters everything I thought I knew about the Spelunker. Maybe he deserves to be treated seriously as a video game hero after all…

Quick note

For future I ♥ The PC Engine entries, I’m going to add the capsule descriptions in Kōgien to the basic info up top. They’re a bit opinion-free, but they’re still interesting and occasionally cover something I don’t get to in the actual review.

I’ve added Kōgien descriptions to all previous PC Engine games on this site, so browse around the category a bit if you’re interested in seeing what they’re like.