Atlantis no Nazo (Sunsoft, 4/17/86)

A full TAS run of the mid-’80s Famicom platform game, one that has a remarkably detailed English Wikipedia page. It’s so detailed, in fact, that I’d like to meet the guy who decided that translating all the info on the Japanese wiki-page would make for a fun afternoon. I have the impression that he (let’s just assume he’s a gentleman) and I would have a lot in common.

Atlantis no Nazo　is a famous game in Japan for a number of reasons — it’s incredibly hard; your hero controls very wonkily and his weapon is extremely difficult to control; there are warps that’re found only by deliberately committing suicide; a couple of stages flash constantly; there’s a “Black Hole!” stage that is an immediate Game Over if you are unfortunate enough to visit it; and so on. Activision contemplated releasing the game for the NES (under the title Super Pitfall II) seriously enough to create a full-on preview version that even included a few upgrades, but the game was really just too old hat for the US audience by 1989.

A “full” or “warpless” run of Atlantis no Nazo, as defined by the creator of this TAS, follows two rules:

- Do not take any doors that are not in plain sight (except for the door between 99th Stage and 100th Stage)
- Do not take any doors that bring your intrepid hero five or more stages ahead of where he previously was

Beating the game this way is pretty much impossible for a human being. I tried it back in the day (i.e. 1998), and I couldn’t no matter how much I tried. It’s not a title for weak sisters, or really for anyone besides hyperactive Japanese children, assuming it was still 1986. But nonetheless there’s a certain charm to this title, perhaps because of the hero’s proud, exaggerated marching gait.

Note that pausing and unpausing the game right after finishing the stage cuts down the length of the little inter-level display, hence the odd sound after going through a doog.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Maison Ikkoku

Maison Ikkoku
(めぞん一刻)

Maker: Micro Cabin
Release Date: 8/4/89
Price: 5900 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Adventure
PC Engine FAN Score: 17.69 / 30.00
Kōgien: “The player becomes Godai as he tries to find what Kyoko is looking for. An adventure game that pits you against the eccentric residents of the run-down Ikkokukan apartment house. As a game, it’s less of a puzzle-solving adventure and more one where you are immersed in the drama as one of the characters.“

Maison Ikkoku is Japan’s version of Three’s Company. No, really, this makes sense. Stay with me on this.

The original Ikkoku is a manga by Rumiko Takahashi that ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1980 to 1987. If you haven’t read it (shame on you), it stars Godai, an eternally broke student, as he lives an incredibly sitcom-like situation at a ramshackle boarding house straight out of the 1960s. His comic foils: an alcoholic single mother, a bar hostess who wanders around the house in lingerie all day, a creepy middle-aged man who would have been on the sex offenders’ list if such a thing existed in the early 1980s…and Kyoko, the superintendent and a total babe despite already having married and lost one husband.

The series (which has sold over 25 million volumes worldwide) grew into a sort of romantic comedy of errors over the years, with Godai and Kyoko developing a thing for each other that falls victim to a neverending cavalcade of misunderstandings and rival lovers. Before that love subplot kicks into high gear, though, the manga is nearly all about Godai’s hapless luck, his constant poverty, and the madness set off by his neighbors down the hall. So, really, Three’s Company, with  Kyoko’s domineering parents dual-playing the part of Don Knotts. Simple.

Micro Cabin, the maker of this title, has something of an odd history in the adventure genre. When Sierra released Mystery House (one of the first graphical adventures) in 1980, the Mie prefecture-based developer countered with its own game for Japanese PCs, also called Mystery House, that also featured a mansion explorer trying to find a cache of diamonds. This sort of ripoff activity was pretty rife in the early history of Japanese video games (one of Nintendo’s first CPU-based arcade game was a Space Invaders clone), and while Sierra didn’t like it very much, they had little legal recourse given Japan’s laws at the time. (Sierra’s Mystery House would finally get an official port to Japanese computers in 1984.)

Micro Cabin made two Maison Ikkoku adventures, the first of which was originally made for the PC-8801 and later ported to the 9801, X1, MSX, Famicom, and finally PC Engine. In a way, though, the game’s more like Mystery House than anything else. There’s not much of a plot (Godai learns from the rumor mill that Kyoko is hiding some kind of secret from the tenants of Ikkokukan, and he tries to find out what it is) and the gameplay mostly involves wandering aimlessly around the apartment house and surrounding neighborhood in search of stuff to do. After some experimentation, you’ll figure out that the plot advances whenever you sit down and have a conversation with Kyoko, but with all of the interference from the other tenants, getting that audience is a lot harder than simply knocking on the door.

Maison Ikkoku, despite the standard Japanese menu-based adventure interface, is not a very orthodox adventure. There’s no stepwise walkthrough you can rely on to always take you to the ending — instead, the game’s about collecting items and keeping the NPCs happy and out of your way. Each tenant has an undisplayed “mood” statistic that changes their behavior, and at times you’ll need to give them things they like (such as instant ramen or sake) for them to get out of your way. This requires money, which Godai never has enough of, so figuring out how to score some extra yen is the game’s other main “puzzle,” if you want to call it that.

The result is really just frustrating. You get the idea that Micro Cabin wanted to recreate the charm of the manga, letting you step into the story and enjoy the atmosphere, but instead it feels like you’re in this sort of cruel purgatory where you’re constantly harangued by strangers and forced to repeat previous actions multiple times to get anywhere. All this for what must be one of the most non-ending endings in the history of anime licenses.

If I paid full price for this back in the day, I’d be angry — and yet, if some enterprising 8-bit software developer had tried making a Three’s Company adventure like this, I’m sure I’d lap it up at once. Funny how that works.

While I’m working…

…why don’t you go play some L’Abbaye des Morts?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t aware of this little game until today. It was a very good use of about an hour or so, taking all the things that make 25-year-old ZX Spectrum platformers and making it smooth and modern enough for modern gamers to “get,” at least a little. The music, composed on a fantasy version of the PC speaker that features volume control, fits perfectly as well.

There’s a bit of genius to the concept, too — take the standard Spectrum look, which lends itself to starkly-colored sprites hopping around on top of dark, muted backgrounds, and craft a platformer with a stark and dark, theme to match. It’s memorable.

Argh

Sometime soon I won’t be so astoundingly busy, but until then, why not take a trip across the imaginary pipes with me?

The loons who developed arcade electromechanical games

Hisashi Suzuki was the director of Sega-AM2 (Yu Suzuki was the head of development; Hisashi was the business dude) for much of its existence before retiring in 2004. Before that, though, he spent a couple decades making arcade electromechanical games for Sega through the 1960s and 70s — in fact, he was one of Sega’s first employees, as he explained in an interview published in Famitsu magazine’s Sega Arcade History (2001):

It was a long time ago; it was 1962. That was before Akira Nagai [managing director of Sega in 2001] joined the company, even. Sega wasn’t Sega at that time; Nagai was the accounting department for Nihon Goraku Bussan, while I had joined Nihon Kikai Seizou, the company that eventually became Sega.

Why did Suzuki join Sega?

Really, it was just because they gave me a lot of off days. At the time we were looking for work, pretty much the only companies that had a five-day workweek as a rule were those funded by foreign outfits. Sega had that, and the third Friday of every month was an off day, too; it was just an unthinkable amount of holidays. The company’s work schedule had just changed when I joined in, so everybody left work at 6 pm, and people would get angry at you if you stuck around after that. There was a strict boundary between work and non-work, playaround time and so forth. On the other hand they were extremely serious about being at work on time, even if the trains were all shut down for a strike or whatever. Our salary was cut for whatever amount of time we were late. Since it was a foreign-owned firm, all of the top positions were held by foreigners and all of the internal documents and so forth were written in English. Everything was signed off with signatures instead of hanko, and that didn’t change until Sega joined the CSK family in 1984.

When I joined Nihon Kikai Seizou, I was working on slot machines and jukeboxes. I designed a lot of slot machines. Japan was not exporting a lot of things at that time yet, so we built a name for ourselves as an exporter back then. After that, we went into the amusement market — starting out, we just purchased used machines from the US and either repaired them or took them apart so we could make copies. Eventually the internals went from relays to transistors and ICs, which then led to Pong, but before then it was all electromechanical machines. It was really fun, that era. There were racing games back then as well, but this was back before there were monitors or anything, so you took a model of a car and projected its shadow on a screen. There were no sound chips, either, so we loaded in an amp, stretched out a spring, and hit with a coil, which would create an explosion sound effect. Every machine we manufactured would sound slightly different.

How were these things developed, anyway?

There were development rooms for electromechanical games as well, but the hard part about these games were taking an idea and actually implementing it. With video games, very generally speaking, you can do anything as long as you have the program for it. With electromechanical games, you have to come up with the entire structure. There were lots of things to think about, from efficiency and cost and function to ease of repair. Design and development were two different jobs back then. Development would come up with a concept; they’d just present an idea for the entire function of a machine, and then design would implement it.

It was a lot of fun, making these machines, but implementing ideas was extremely difficult, and you couldn’t afford to make anything that broke down too easily. With arcade games today, the only things that break are monitors or motherboards, and that’s really not all that often, but Sega needed an army of servicemen to take care of the electromechanical machines. We had to make sure to place all the intricate and delicate parts right nearby the small service door so they wouldn’t have so much work to get the thing apart.

Working…

Still alive! Hang on!

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Takeda Shingen

Takeda Shingen
(武田信玄)

Maker: Aicom
Release Date: 7/28/89
Price: 5600 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 17.18 / 30.00

Another one of those rare console games that the Kogien, the great phonebook (published until 2008) that attempts to list every Japanese title ever released, actively criticized in their paragraph-long capsule review. The review text, verbatim:

“The setting has Takeda Shingen delving solo into enemy territory in order to defeat his adversary Uesugi Kenshin. The large size of the characters is nice, but it’s somewhat of a shame that the controls and movements had to become so rough as a result. A side-scrolling action game.”

The very definition of damning with faint praise, isn’t it? (Side note: The box shows Shingen fighting a mounted soldier, something that never, ever, ever happens in the game.)

 
Takeda Shingen is second PCE game published by Aicom, the somewhat hapless early third party whose previous game was P-47. Three out of Aicom’s four PCE releases were ports of late-’80s arcade games from Jaleco, which — if you’re a fledgling publisher trying to establish a foothold in the console marketplace — really isn’t a great way to stand out from the pack. Jaleco games, after all, were all about finding whatever the latest trend was and copying it in as quick and budget-free a manner as possible.

In this case, the arcade Takeda Shingen was released in 1988 to capitalize upon an NHK TV show of the same name, the station’s taiga drama of 1988. The 50-episode series portrayed the warlord’s life as he rose from the also-ran leader of Kai province (modern day Yamanashi prefecture) to the man who almost beat Oda Nobunaga at his own game. It was an enormous hit, the second most-watched taiga drama ever; the entire series averaged a 39.2% share in the TV ratings, a figure that’s all but impossible to achieve these days. Such is the influence of this show that many of the warlord portraits seen in Nobunaga’s Ambition and the other Warring States Period sims Koei’s released over the years were often based off the actors that appeared in the series. (The show also inspired Hot-B to make two FC Shingen sims, one of which was released Stateside as Shingen the Ruler.)

So Jaleco cobbled together a Shingen arcade game and rushed it out while the series was still running. Aicom ported it, I guess, because they had a contract with Jaleco to port their arcade stuff and they didn’t put out anything more sellable than this for all of 1988.

 
What’s so bad about Takeda Shingen? Well, besides the fact that the main character walks like a infant (see right), the game he stars in is a poor attempt at making a sort of medieval-Japan Double Dragon with a few RPG elements. You can freely mince through all the environments — you aren’t required to beat up any of the doomed ashigaru you run into — but rushing right to the boss of each stage without building up experience and upgrading your abilities beforehand is suicide.

The gameplay itself copies the original Double Dragon in all the wrong ways. It’s slow, laggy, and there seems to be a half-second delay between button presses and Shingen doing anything onscreen. This results in the player having to very carefully toddle up to enemies from the classic 2D-brawler diagonal angle, press the II button, and largely hope for the best. Things improve once you get some useful power-ups (that sliding move you get is rad, but that doesn’t happen until near the end of the game), but whether you have the patience to make it that far or not is highly questionable.

There seem to be three main signs that the PCE title you’re playing is crap: The controls are oddly lagged (cf. Energy); the main character walks like an idiot, and the music is surprisingly good. (That’s the Level 1 theme on the PCE, but the boss tune in the arcade version, where it sounds quite a bit more epic and taiga drama-ish.)

Contra (Konami, 5/26/89)

Just a short update as I’m fighting allergies and mainly want to go to bed at the moment.

Konami is undoubtedly the most important maker who worked on the MSX. The things they did with that machine were, and are, out of this world, and the developers used their technical wizardry to craft some killer games that worked around the system’s limits. (Vampire Killer is the classic example of this.)

That’s why I’m unsure what happened with the MSX2 port of Contra Konami released in mid-1989. It’s one of the few real failures Konami released on the platform. The controls are weird, the graphics strangely undetailed, the original stages completely uninspired. The flick-screen scrolling is particularly confusing because Konami made smooth scrolling happen on the MSX2 only three months later with the baseball game Ganbare Pennant Race 2.

The game gets only two things right: the music, and the way the 3D stages feature your guy moving left/right in addition to forward after completing a room (a little detail in the arcade version that got dropped from all the other 8-bit ports).

Jungle Emperor

Since I just finished reading the comic on my iPad, I wanted to talk a little about Jungle Emperor (ジャングル大帝), aka Kimba the White Lion, originally drawn in 1950-54 by undoubtedly my favorite comic artist of all time, Osamu Tezuka. That’s him up there, 24 years old; he drew some Kimba characters around a photograph of himself with a chimpanzee for a color opener page in Manga Shōnen (漫画少年) in 1952.

Manga Shōnen, despite being published for only eight years (1947 to 1955), had an enormous influence on Japanese comics for years to come. It was founded by Kenichi Kato, who edited Kodansha’s Shōnen Club before and during WWII. Shōnen Club was where series like Norakuro began; it was one of the most popular boys’ magazines in both the pre- and post-war period. Kato was driven out of Kodansha immediately after the end of the war as the US occupational forces cracked down on pro-war publishers; he funded Manga Shōnen with his own money and named his wife president of the publishing house in order to avoid MacArthur’s censors. Artists like Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Fujiko Fujio, Kazuo Umezu, Fujio Akatsuka, Leiji Matsumoto, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi either wrote for the mag or contributed manga to the “new talent” contests Kato regularly held in the mag’s pages. (For those unfamiliar with manga, the above names are pretty much a who’s-who of brilliance that largely defined the scene’s direction from the 60s until the turn of the century.)

Kato played host to Tezuka, back then still in medical school over in Osaka, when the artist decided to pay an impromptu visit to the Manga Shōnen offices during a stint in Tokyo. Tezuka had the story in mind for Emperor at that point, but was intending to write it out as a one-off volume called Mitsurin Taitei (密林大帝). Manga, at that time, was chiefly written either in one-volume adventures published as distinct books or very small (four pages or so) regular series in boys’ magazines. Kato convinced Tezuka to take his idea for Mitsurin Taitei and flesh it out into a regular four-page series for the monthly Manga Shōnen. Tezuka agreed, and the results were so successful that Jungle Emperor expanded to ten pages in the second month of publication.

Leo the lion strikes a somewhat familiar pose as he announces
the birth of his children to his late father.

A lot has been written over the years about how much Disney’s The Lion King resembles Emperor. Frederick Schodt devotes something like seven pages to the topic in his excellent (and still relevant) 1996 book Dreamland Japan, and I don’t have much to add except that I think it’s a moot point because Bambi is plainly Tezuka’s biggest influence for this work anyway. (They’re both stories about young forest royalty adventuring with animal friends while struggling to find a way to co-exist with humans, although Emperor’s a lot more epic in scale.) He never denied the influence Walt Disney had upon his drawing style, and it’s especially plain in this early work, as a lot of the jungle animals are straight-on Disney animals, no two ways about it.

As Schodt also notes in his book, Emperor’s main fault is Tezuka’s habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into his early stories in an attempt to keep kids focused month after month. “The printed manga story,” he writes, “has gags, comedy, tragedy, allusions to ancient tectonic plates and ‘supercontinents,’ and exotic medical conditions.” (That tectonic stuff was completely speculative science when Tezuka threw it into the story, not receiving mainstream scientific backing until the ’60s.) It’s true that a modern manga artist could take all the content in Emperor and stretch it out into a 10-volume series (this one is only 3) — but on the other hand, the story’s breakneck pace is welcome compared to how badly Jump manga gets stretched out these days.

Leo loses his temper as his daughter flirts with death from a mysterious pox.
This is one of my favorite Tezuka pages ever as it demonstrates how complete
a knowledge he had of comic pacing and structure even at a point where the
whole genre was still in its infancy.

The fact I’m able to enjoy Jungle Emperor on my iPad (legally) is miraculous for a couple of reasons. For one, Tezuka lost about half of the original art in the early ’60s — he lent some of it out to the animation staff for reference as they worked on the 1965 anime version, one of them died unexpectedly in an alcohol-related incident, and the authorities cleared out his apartment before Tezuka could retrieve his art. As a result, Tezuka had to redraw approximately half of the entire series for the 1977 Complete Works edition, something he later said was extraordinarily time-consuming as he found drawing in his extremely Disney-like early-’50s style pretty difficult years after the fact. (The original Manga Shōnen pages have themselves been restored and republished, most recently in 2010.)

The other reason why I’m lucky to be reading this: Tezuka’s depiction of African natives in Jungle Emperor was also heavily inspired by how such folk would’ve been depicted in 1930s American cartoons — jet-black, enormous white lips, occasionally pinheaded. Tezuka’s natives are not caricatures personality-wise — their depiction is very human and thoughtful, although they have a yen to skewer Leo and add him to their collection of white lion skins — but the way they’re drawn certainly are. The Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks (黒人差別をなくす会), a small Osaka-based organization largely run by a single family, successfully held campaigns throughout the 1980s to remove books like Little Black Sambo and big-lipped depictions in manga like Akira Toriyama’s Dr. Slump from public view. This was a big problem for Tezuka — like any cartoon artist, he reveled in exaggeration with his art, and so his work is littered with that stuff throughout.

From December 1990 to the spring of 1992, Kodansha’s Tezuka Complete Works collection was taken off of the market while the publisher figured out what the hell to do. If Tezuka was still alive (as Dreamland Japan observed), he almost certainly would’ve revised his comics as quickly as possible, but he wasn’t. The Association to Stop Racism’s aim to remove archaic caricatures from Asian media was a noble one, but removing Tezuka from the market was a bridge too far for a vast majority of Japanese readers, then and now. In the end, Kodansha (and all other publishers doing Tezuka work) decided to include a page in every volume describing the depictions as a product of their time and emphasizing the anti-racism message prevalent in a lot of Tezuka’s work — a wise move that kept the most influential manga artist ever in print through the early-’90s controversy and allows me to still enjoy them today, pinheaded natives and all.

Is a 1950 manga worth reading today? I think so. This one is, at least — it’s an old story and one that jumps all over the place, but the ending still gets to me. Being able to access not just Emperor, but nearly all of Tezuka’s library legally for a fair price, makes me remarkably glad to be alive today.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Sidearms

The site was down for a bit today because I forgot to pay my web-hosting bill. Sorry!
Side Arms
(サイドアーム)

Maker: NEC Avenue
Release Date: 7/14/89
Price: 5400 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Shooting
PC Engine FAN Score: 20.86 / 30.00
Kōgien: “An innovative shooter that lets you attack to the left and right. A faithful port of the arcade game that features a fine-tuned balance that keeps things accessible for beginners and veterans. Collect an item power up your attack further.”

Another NEC Avenue port of a Capcom arcade game, this one a shooter that oddly never made it to any other Japanese hardware platform, only finding official home release on European computers. (EDIT: I was wrong here. Capcom USA released their own Commodore 64 port for the US market in 1987. It’s not great.)

It was never a very popular arcade game — I think I saw it only once or twice in person — but considering it came out in 1986, it was a pretty decent upgrade on what Gradius offered just a bit previous.

Two main improvements make this game different from Konami’s: the screen can scroll vertically and diagonally as well as the standard horizontal; and your robot fighter can fire left or right depending on which of the two buttons you press. The power-up system is also a little freer, letting you choose your weaponry from the pause menu as you acquire the needed items (the arcade version had a third button for changing weapons on the fly). Grabbing the α/β items lets you combine with another fighter jet and transform into a super-duper robot that fires in eight directions; this also lets you take a hit without dying, which perhaps says something about the building standards they use on robots of the future — surely my last hope of Earth, savior of the people, etc., can take more than one stinking hit at a time. Also worth noting is that you can shoot onscreen power-ups before grabbing them to transform them into something else, a system that Capcom reintroduced a year later in the much more successful 1943.

The game has no smart-bomb function, and presumably the left-right firing arrangement is meant to take its place. It becomes a bit of a moot point, though, considering that you’ve got enemies swooping upon you from both sides starting about two minutes after you press the Run button. If Gradius got a little tricky after you died and lost your weapon upgrades, this is the equivalent of challenging Darth Vader with a used Panda Express chopstick. Sure, it’s fun while you’re alive — you easily bash up swarms of enemies with your 8-way fire, and the game demands enough dodging ability from you that the pace remains engaging and fun. But lose them all, and you’re pretty much done for that go-around, especially given that Side Arms starts you right in the same place, still surrounded by all the bad guys that killed you the first time.

This may be much of the reason why Side Arms never caught on worldwide the way that Gradius and, to a lesser extent, stuff like Capcom’s own 1943 and Legendary Wings did. But the PCE port is pretty faithful, at least. Despite its two-megabit size, all 10 arcade stages are included; the graphics are varied enough (although the bosses repeat too often); and the sound’s excellent throughout. NEC Avenue would go on to release a CD-ROM version of this game that included an original “Before Christ” mode and recorded music from Capcom’s in-house studio, but I’ll get to that later on.

(Of particular interest with the HuCard version: The music was rearranged for the PCE by Takashi Tateishi, whose most famous soundtrack work in games probably still remains Mega Man 2. That title came out half a year before Side Arms in Japan, and tracks like the one above make it pretty obvious that it’s the same buy behind both scores. Tateishi still remains in games, running indie music contractor Most Company and making contributions to Dance Dance Revolution and the like.)

I can think of a lot of mid-to-late-’80s shooters that look just like this. They all seemed to get PC Engine ports, too, is the funny thing.