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.

Sharp New Look

Yeah, I hope they still love clones!

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.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Jimmu Denshō

Jimmu Denshō
(神武伝承)

Maker: Bigclub
Release Date: 6/28/89
Price: 6700 yen
Media: HuCard (4mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 18.55 / 30.00

After its founding in 1987 and before their Genesis games began to draw overseas attention, Wolf Team’s primary business lay in the Japanese PC marketplace. There they became very much the Psygnosis of their scene — they made titles with beautiful visuals and lavish intro sequences that took up an entire disk, but boasted gameplay that was often nothing short of torture. PC gamers got repeatedly gypped this way, in an era before one-star Amazon reviews and support forums full of irate nerds, but nobody could deny that Wolf Team games were great for showing off what your fancy PC-8801 was capable of to your less wealthy friends.

Jimmu Denshō is a spin-off of Yaksa, a swords-and-samurai action RPG that was Wolf Team’s first PC release as an independent company. Yaksa is best known for a three-and-a-half-minute-long intro that knocked Japan’s collective socks off in 1987 and is still pretty nice to look at today. It’s also infamous for being a slow, sleep-inducing mess once you get around to playing it. Wolf Team couldn’t just port that junk to the PC Engine — the audience already knew the game wasn’t salvageable, and there wasn’t enough HuCard space for the intro anyway. So instead, they did the logical thing — take Iori, one of the heroes from the original, and put him into a Space Harrier clone.

A what?

No, those screenshots aren’t lying to you — Jimmu Denshō is a flat-out Space Harrier ripoff. Not at all a good one, either. Iori runs tirelessly forward through every stage, swinging his sword at ninjas and yōkai and giant spidery bosses. No, his default sword doesn’t fire shots. That would be too fair. (Hitting anything with it is a daunting task, and even when you earn shot power-ups, they go away if you’re hit too many times.)

The stages are more complex in setup than Space Harrier’s, but not in any sort of good way. Several levels repeat forever until you figure out what Iori’s supposed to do, and others constantly throw “warp back to start” traps careening forward while you’re trying to deal with the bullet-hell onscreen. Iori can run backward (i.e. toward you), which is a neat feature and theoretically a nice way to defend yourself, but it’s turned off in some stages and can’t be relied on in a pinch.

Worst of all is the inclusion of platform elements. In a Space Harrier game. One hellish stage requires you to stick to a tiny path that snakes forward and frequently makes violent turns without warning; falling off it causes damage and runs you the risk of getting thrown back to the start of the level. I’m not sure how anyone could have completed this section without cheating — the hand-eye coordination required is nothing short of superhuman.

But, like all the Wolf Team games of this era, Jimmu is saved by its looks. The game doesn’t have any fancy intro, but the audiovisual package is  top-notch and helped along immensely by the brooding, experimental soundtrack. The music was composed by Masaaki Uno, Wolf Team’s resident go-to man for sound and the guy who would give Motoi Sakuraba his first game work a few years later. His stuff is very un-PC-Engine-like and is a lot closer to the FM synthesized sound you heard in lots of Japanese computer games back then — complex, atmospheric, and not afraid to take center stage. Uno’s soundtrack is the sort that gets better with repeated listens; I couldn’t really take the Stage 2 tune at first but it’s grown on me like kudzu in a Georgia backyard.

As the video shows, the rampant slowdown that splays out across Jimmu is often the only thing that keeps Iori in one piece. It’s led me to conclude that Wolf Team may’ve been founded a bit too early — their staff was remarkably talented, but until the 16-bit platforms came along, their ideas always got bogged down in  implementation.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Cyber Cross

Cyber Cross
(サイバークロス)

Maker: Face
Release Date: 6/23/89
Price: 6300 yen
Media: HuCard (3mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 20.14 / 30.00

Between Shubibinman and Energy and all the rest, the PC Engine very quickly became the go-to console if you were a fan of tokusatsu stuff. Not if you were a child fan of the genre, mind you — more if you were the sort of “grown-up pal” who snapped pictures at shopping-mall stage shows and argued the finer points of henshin poses with your friends at McDonald’s.

I say this because while the PC Engine didn’t have too many shonen anime or tokusatsu-license games in the beginning, it did have a lot of original action games in those genres. These games often tended to be really short on gameplay, but were still well-loved by the sort of nerds that adopted the PCE early on. Why? Because they prominently featured all the stuff adults like about kids’ shows — the wild costumes, the over-the-top moves, the cheesy little details that make Super Sentai a dirty pleasure along the lines of pro wrestling and The Price is Right.

Cyber Cross borrows a little bit from all over this genre of Japanese TV, from the spandex power-ranger outfits to the cyber-enhanced superheroes seen in the Metal Hero series. (You may’ve noticed by now that Wikipedia is ridiculously detailed when it comes to this stuff. This isn’t even the Japanese-language version, either.) Your hero, wearing the unzipped letter jacket and fingerless gloves that immediately identify him as a bad-arse tokusatsu protagonist, can transform into one of three different fighters by grabbing the right power-up. These color-coded good guys each wield a different a weapon — laser sword, galactic phaser, or some sort of electrified boomerang — that can be charged up if you hold down the II button long enough.

It’s the complete tokusatsu package graphically — day-glo city backgrounds, music that changes after you transform, thousands of insect-themed bad guys to mow down, recurring villains that get replaced with other recurring villains once you kill them. It’s maybe appropriate, given how every cliche in the book is included here, that the gameplay itself is also kind of repetitive, a straight imitation of Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja that even copies your character’s slow walking speed and annoyingly imprecise range.

Face released a sequel to this game, 1990′s Cross Wiber, that’s a fair bit more well-known among PCE fans. That’s for good reason, too — Cyber Cross isn’t a terrible game, but between the repetitive action and lack of cutscenes or other distractions to spice up the proceedings, it doesn’t seem quite like a complete package.