Computer TV Game (Nintendo, April 1980)

Almost assuredly the worst-selling game console Nintendo ever made. That may perhaps be part of the reason a nearly new-in-box example recently sold for 242,000 yen on Yahoo! Auctions JP.

Computer TV Game was a home port of Computer Othello, Nintendo’s first ever fully-electronic video game for arcades. Calling it a “port” is perhaps charitable, because the innards of the home console are the exact same as the arcade cabinet — Intel 8080 processor, specialized graphics chip from Mitsubishi Electric, small program ROM, and an enormous AC adapter that weighs over four pounds. Like the title suggests, it’s a video version of Othello, with one- and two-player options and a pair of CPU difficulty levels to choose from. The arcade version (which originally came out in mid-1978) has a strict time limit of 400 seconds, but you can play as many games as you want during that time.

Video Othello was a bit novel compared to the ocean of Pong consoles on store shelves at the time, but because Nintendo simply stuffed the arcade hardware into a plastic box (a package, by the way, which was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto — he was originally hired by Nintendo as an industrial-arts guy), the thing was expensive. Really expensive. The retail price for the dedicated system was 48,000 yen, about $190 in 1980 dollars, at a time when the Atari 2600 was available across America for about half that. Even among the murky history of Nintendo’s pre-FC video games, this is one incredibly obscure device.

Here’s how Computer Othello looks in action, by the way. Sorry I can’t find a better video, but if I were you, I’d just be glad there were any extant examples left, period.

All in all, I think Epoch’s TV Baseball Game is a much better package.

Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

Pilotwings Resort is coming out pretty soon, but why not concentrate instead on the only game among the SNES launch titles that got me really, really excited? (What can I say — Mode 7 was really amazing to me, in a way that the PlayStation wasn’t somehow.)

This game, featuring music by my beloved Soyo Oka (who must have really like that “blaaa” instrument because it’s used in two tracks), is one of several to use a DSP-1 coprocessor in order to speed up the trigonometric calculations required for the quick scaling/rotation seen in-game. F-Zero does not use this coprocessor despite having even faster scaling/rotation moves. This is because — and I forget who told this to me, so I can’t give a source — something like half of the game ROM is composed solely of precalculated cosine tables, obviating the need to come up with the figures in realtime.

Japanese Wikipedia claims (unsourced) that the first shipment of Pilotwings in Japan did not include a DSP-1, something which I don’t think is actually true. What is true is that the game may have either the DSP-1, DSP-1A, or DSP-1B chip onboard. The 1A is a simple hardware revision to make the chip smaller, while the 1B is the same as the 1 except with a few bugfixes to the microcode that drives the device. You can tell which chip is inside your Pilotwings without opening up the cartridge because the 1B revision actually triggers a bug that’s easily demonstrated. Start up the game and keep it running until you get the gameplay demo with the light plane. If the plane lands correctly, the game’s running on a DSP-1 or 1A; if it crashes well in advance of the runway, you’ve got a DSP-1B.

Neat, huh? And until I started researching this, I didn’t even realize there was that “secret” side pool you could hit with that one bonus stage.

Po po po ponnn!!

Play the above video and this one around ten times in a row, and you’ve got a pretty reasonable simulation of what watching TV on non-NHK networks in Japan is like right now.

The private TV networks in the Kanto area have all shifted back to non-emergency programming at this point — in other words, they are airing advertisements again instead of providing wall-to-wall crisis coverage and updates. However, many Japanese outfits are hesitant to air pre-quake advertising for assorted reasons, and they haven’t had the time to film new ones that talk about their charity work and contributions to the recovery effort. Therefore, a lot of ad time is being filled up by public service announcements from AC Japan, the local version of the Ad Council.

This means that if you’re a bad enough dude to watch TBS or NTV or TV Tokyo at the moment, you are seeing the above spot (devoted to the importance of using proper greetings and making friends) and the other linked one (encouraging women to get screened for breast and ovarian cancer) about fifty squillion times.

This is starting to highly annoy people who don’t have anything else to worry about at the moment. “My one-year-old son has started to sing ‘A-C!’ [the jingle at the end] around the house,” says one tweet that just passed by.

AC Japan has gotten enough complaints about this that they posted an apology for it on their website, although it’s really not their fault. Blame, you know, McDonald’s and Aflac and so on for not having suitably stoic and reserved ads on call for times like these.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Final Lap Twin

Final Lap Twin
(ファイナルラップツイン)

Maker: Namco
Release Date: 7/7/89
Price: 6200 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Racing
PC Engine FAN Score: 23.04 / 30.00
Kōgien: “Three game modes are available: a single-player race against the computer, a two-player simultaneous mode, and a role-playing Quest mode.”

Namco and racing games go a long, long way back. Pole Position (1982) was far from the first behind-the-car racing game, but it was undeniably the most popular racer of the “classic” era, becoming the biggest earner in North American arcades during 1983 and spawning (among other things) a Saturday morning cartoon. 

Final Lap (1987) was largely a graphical update taking advantage of 16-bit microprocessors, but it did offer one revolutionary feature — while Pole Position was strictly one-player (the first Namco arcade ever to not have a two-player option, in fact), Final Lap allowed filthy rich operators to link up cabinets and allow for up to eight players to course through a single track simultaneously. It was also arguably the first racer to deliberately implement “rubberbanding” to ensure that less talented players were never too far behind the leader — a feature that Mario Kart would later polish to maddening, Saturday night-ruining perfection.

The game got ported first to the Famicom in August 1988, a pretty remarkable effort that included a built-in sound chip and a 2-player mode that split the screen in half, a pretty impressive feat that must’ve been murder for the programmers to get right on the platform.

Final Lap Twin on the PCE has the same functionality, as shown above, but the system’s superiority in processing speed gives the proceedings a much greater sense of speed than was possible on the ol’ FC. That, and you get a choice of F1 racers, a skill difficulty function, assorted tuning options, a career mode of sorts, and so on. In other words, it was a bit of a simulator — or, at least, as much of one as the genre was capable of handling on Japanese consoles back then. (Formula One Grand Prix, the first F1 game that we could still recognize as a real “simulator” today, came out in early 1992.)

That’s not why modern people enjoy this game so much, though. No, all the praise is reserved for the RPG mode, which — like the one in Namco’s last PCE sports game, Pro Tennis World Court — takes the cake for sheer lunacy. “Oh, a racing-themed RPG,” you might think. “Maybe it’s something like Speed Racer, where you have a little racing team with your family and you fight off masked rivals and robot drivers and so on.” Pfft. As if. Instead, it combines the world of mini 4WD cars (on the cusp of a major toy boom in Japan at the time of release) and  Star of the Giants, the most famous overwrought sports anime of all time.

“I have something important to speak to you about today, [name],” your stern, unshaven father tells you in the in the game’s intro. “I have hammered into you all the mini-4WD techniques I know, but now it is time for you to embark on a training mission of your own. [Name], my child! First you must match wits with the mini-4WD champions dotted around each region and test your skills against them. [...] You must keep your races clean, [name]! Never forget the value of friendship as you compete. …If darkness should ever cloud your heart, then you may return to your father’s side at any time. I will punish you with my family lashings, just as I did before! I will give you my 4WD machine, the “Star of the 4WD,” the very same as what I once used. It will serve you well, [name]. Now, go, [name]! Become the star of the 4WD world!”

And so it goes, really. You travel around the world map, fighting random battles against bratty kids in order to earn the cash to upgrade your little RC car. Six bosses need to be defeated, and the game’s climax takes place in a domed stadium situated on an island shut off from the rest of the world for some reason. The backdrops in this mode, as you can see, are blown up to reflect the small size of the mini-machines you’re racing here, and overall it’s a pretty bizarre world being depicted. At least the world of Pokemon kinda-sorta makes sense if you don’t squint at it that hard. This “RC car” angle was completely removed from the RPG mode of the TurboGrafx-16 version, with “turbo engines” replacing the idea of upgrading your car’s battery. The backdrops are still enormous, though, which must’ve caused some confusion among kids.

(Interesting side note, by the way: The music for Final Lap Twin is by Katsuhiro Hayashi, a widely under-appreciated composer who I last discussed when I wrote about High School! Kimengumi and Hokuto no Ken.)

This video (half of a TAS released a year or so ago) should give a basic idea of what the RPG mode’s like. You have to race a lot of “random battles” in this game to scare up the cash you need — I suppose you could call it a classic ’80s JRPG in that respect, eh?

Don’t do that

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.

Ten million points

I’d like to talk about Gradius for the next few entries.

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.

Wario’s Woods (Nintendo, 2/19/94)

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.

Do you need 100 GameCubes?

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.

Oops

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.

Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally (Nintendo/HAL Laboratory, 4/14/88)

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.