[I ♥ The PC Engine] Gunhed

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
Kōgien: “A standard vertical shooter, much like the other shooting games used in the Caravan. Based off the film of the same name, although none of the movie’s elements are used in the game. An exhilaratingly powered up shooter.”

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?

Caravan / Summer Carnival

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.

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (Technos Japan, 4/25/89)

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.

Hacker International’s head speaks

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Fujiya Thinking Games v1.0

I thought that The Gentle Physics and Science of Hazardous Materials is about as obscure as off-market Famicom releases got, but I was wrong!

Not much of anything is known about Fujiya and the (apparent) series of unlicensed Famicom games they released in 1987. The cartridge here is Fujiya Famikase Series 3: Shikou Game Shu (Fujiya Famicom Cassette Series 3: Thought Games Collection), and despite being number 3 of a series, the other two have yet to be heard from.

Shikou Game Shu is a collection of four games, basically: checkers, concentration, poker, and Othello. The Othello game has an option where you can define whether the player with the most pieces on the board at the end wins or loses…and that’s about all that’s unique about the game itself. You can see more screenshots on this page.

Fujiya, consisting of two men named Maeda who listed their address and phone number on the title screen, also released a Famicom Disk System disk copier circa 1987. This copier program included a couple of card games as well.

I came across this release while doing some research into Hacker International, the company that was a thorn on Nintendo’s side for much of the late 1980s in Japan, after CRV linked to an interview with its president. I’ll tackle that interview in a later post, but for now — hey, guess what, collectors, I just found another game you need to complete your collection!

[I ♥ The PC Engine] The Ninja Warriors

The Ninja Warriors
(ニンジャウォーリアーズ)

Maker: Taito
Release Date: 6/30/89
Price: 6200 yen
Media: HuCard (3 Mbit)
Genre: Action
PC Engine FAN Score: 21.94 / 30.00
Kōgien: “A side-scrollingg action game in the same style as the arcade original, but the characters are smaller and the graphics overall more plain. The player can choose between a male or female ninja, both of which can attack with a kunai (dagger) or a limited number of shurikens.”

In 1989, worldwide, children were infatuated with ninjas. It was just, like, ninja ninja ninja, all the time. Our parents played cowboys and Indians in the back alley; we played ninjas and some other ninjas in the cul-de-sac. You had to be there to fully understand it, trust me. The Official Ninja Homepage is hardly an over-the-top parody — it would’ve been treated at total face value by my 11-year-old, Ninja Turtle-lovin’ arse at this point in time.

All this was true despite the fact that, even if they weren’t 80-percent myth in the first place, real ninjas would not go around wearing flashy red outfits and walking down the street in broad daylight. There’s nothing even remotely “shadow arts” about that nonsense. We didn’t care. We preferred them that way, in fact.

The Ninja Warriors marks both the height of this slightly skewed ninja sensation and the apex of Taito’s technical achievements of the late ’80s. The 1987 arcade version was the second game after Darius to use a three-monitor setup for a wide-screen effect that completely wowed me at the time but must have cost a fortune for the operator in electric bills alone. The screens were filled with huge characters that animated with astonishing smoothness. The music, sampled shamisen and all, was spectacular; it took other arcade devs a good couple of years to catch up with Taito in sound hardware expertise. The game itself was…hard, yes, but a mixture of pattern management and a bit of help from the control system (things get a lot easier once you realize that your ninja’s invincible during a flip) allowed you to get pretty far on a single credit once you picked up the basic skills. (Not even that could get you through the last level, though, a stage that combines a fiendish time limit with your ninja’s worrisome lack of urgency climbing up and down stairwells.)

The PC Engine port scored high enough in the PCE Fan rankings, but frankly it doesn’t stand the test of time the way the earlier Kyūkyoku Tiger has. The music’s super sparse — something that can’t be helped, given the difference in sound tech, but surely Taito could’ve managed a better job than this. The graphics are okay, with a surprising amount of animation intact, but most of the little details from the arcade version’s backgrounds are gone. Few, if any, of the strategies from the arcade game can be applied here, something that always annoyed hardcore gamers during this era. Worst of all, there’s no tank in stages 2 and 4 — one of the most jaw-dropping bits of the original when you had to fight it, and an enemy that made it into both the 1993 Mega CD version and the 8-bit computer ports released by Virgin in Europe. Given the PCE’s powerful sprite capabilities, there’s no excuse, just like there’s no excuse for the flicker that plagues the game whenever four or so characters are onscreen.

Still, Taito got the most important thing right with this port — the atmosphere. The world of The Ninja Warriors is desolate, oppressive, and brutally fatal. You are a merciless murder machine in a bedsheet, and you have to be, or else you’ll explode spectacularly at the hands of 150 knife-wielding African-American soldiers. For the consummate ninja junkie of the late 1980s, few other games slaked your thirst in such a comprehensive manner.

Another reason why the Satellaview was really awesome

Microsoft got a lot of positive press for its Live implementation of 1 vs. 100 last year, with critics calling it an innovative example of socially-oriented online gaming. It turns out that Nintendo did nearly the same thing about 12 years previous.

I’ve been going through a lot of Satellaview videos on Nico lately; there’s a ton of them, taped by forward-thinking Japanese gamers back during the service’s salad days of 1995-98. It’s given me a newfound appreciation of just how ahead of its time the thing was. That holds especially true for the SoundLink-compatible titles, which combined video games running on the SNES hardware with audio voiceovers from the digital-radio bit of the BS-X cartridge.

The above video, a broadcast of Satella-Q from March 1997, shows how the two forms of media worked together. You had a couple of radio hosts serving as MCs of the quiz, moving the game along from their end, and you inputted answers to the questions whenever the hosts prompted you to. (Whoever taped this show just let it run without actually playing, which is why he gets all the answers wrong.)

Maybe it’s not quite as straight-on interactive as 1 vs. 100 (scores were kept on the client side only), but it’s plainly working along the same lines.

Between this and all the fusion radio drama-style stuff Nintendo and St. GIGA (the world’s first satellite radio company) were experimenting with, the Satellaview was one of the very few examples in game history of Nintendo being too far ahead of the technical curve for its own good.

FFVII CG doesn’t look thaaaaaaaat old

A bunch of old press assets for Final Fantasy VII has showed up on the torrents lately; a 12mb .zip file that contains a lot of the concept renders and such that we all saw in EGM and GameFan in 1996.

Seeing the files in their pixel-perfect glory rather than through the lens of a print magazine makes a lot of difference.

It reminds me, in particular, of how instrumental FFVII was both to the PlayStation and to the entire JRPG genre. The game, alongside Super Mario 64, is what sold the “next generation” of consoles to the largest amount of gamers worldwide, and you can see why — maybe it’s crude 3D, but at its best, it’s incredibly colorful and inviting to the observer, something you had never seen before in video games. That, and whether you disagree with the direction it took the series or not, FFVII was far more massive in scale than anything Square had attempted previously — a harbinger, if you will, of the way the whole industry was going as its games grew a third dimension.

Also, looking at this stuff, I didn’t realize Square put so much care into FFVII‘s vehicles. They came up with a complete description and design history for the Hardy-Daytona, the motorcycle that Cloud rides on his way out of Shinra HQ, for example. This sort of minute (almost obsessive) world-setting stuff is a hallmark of a lot of Japanese creative media.

This is what really good Puyo Puyo looks like

I wrote a couple articles today for 1UP about famous gamers in Japan, from Daigo Umehara (who needs no introduction if you’ve seen that SFIII 3rd Strike video — you know, that one) to Tomoki Maeda, a guy who’s won tournaments for both FIFA and Pro Evo Soccer. I didn’t get around to another interview printed in last week’s issue of Famitsu where they talked with Takashi Hattori, a guy who’s really, really, really good at competitive Puyo Puyo.

You can see lots of Puyo tournament footage on Nicovideo; the above video’s an example from 2007. The preferred knockout format is for two competitors to play each other repeatedly until one side reaches 100 victories, which (even if you play as fast as these guys) is at least two hours of nonstop blob toppling. Hattori is the player on the right in this video, and I’ll let it speak for itself. Good Puyo is fun to watch because it’s a constant game of back-and-forth, with one player setting off a massive chain and the other setting off his own chain, the one he’s been preparing for just that moment, offsetting the attack and putting the first player on the defensive. Even if I can’t possibly fathom the strategy involved, it’s great entertainment.

Hattori kicked off his Famitsu interview by revealing how he got into this odd Compile game:

Bomber Man (Hudson Soft, July 1983)

“You play a man who is trapped inside a maze. Place your time bombs wisely to defeat the balloon monsters. If the balloon monsters get caught up in an exploding time bomb, they will pop and disappear. Defeat all the monsters on the screen to proceed to the next stage. You can break down weaker walls with your time bombs. These walls can hide treasures and exit doors. Pick up treasure to receive bonus points. Go through an exit to proceed to the next stage. If you accidentally blow up a treasure or exit, four monsters will come out and attack (only once per stage). Move up, down, left and right with the cursor keys and press Space to set a bomb.”

So go the Japanese instructions for Bomber Man (爆弾男) — not the PC Engine or Super NES version, not even the 1986 NES classic, but the very first Bomber Man (two words), released on cassette tape for the NEC PC-8801 in mid-1983.

While not a massive sensation — the Japanese PC community was pretty small back then, after all — it was successful enough to get ported to nearly every other computer format in Japan the following year. Hudson also signed a deal with Sinclair Research to release a port for the ZX Spectrum in Europe titled Eric and the Floaters — technically, the first overseas Bomberman release.

The above video shows off the 1984 MSX port, as well as a 3D version released by Hudson not long thereafter. The 3D game is, frankly, terrifying. Resident Evil could stand to learn a thing or two from it. I think I’m going to have nightmares.