PasokonDeacon
1985
Or, as my backronym addled brain would tell me: Truly Hard, Early eXceptional DOS-era Evil Robodungeon. 1 mecha, 2 transformations, 15 complex levels, and infinite loops. Better start jetting and blasting.
Thexder was to PC-88 what Super Mario Bros. was to NES. Game Arts hit the motherlode when releasing their debut, a PC-88 action dungeon-crawler modeled after Atari's vector game Major Havoc. 1985 saw a major upswing in adoption of the PC-88, then NEC's beefiest 8-bit home computer. (Hey, guess which platform isn't associated with Thexder on IGDB yet? That's right, the one it was originally made for! Go team! /seething) With a new upgraded model on the horizon, these ex-ASCII programmers formed Game Arts with hopes of making an arcade classic for the home player. Hibiki Godai and Satoshi Uesaka's final game ended up becoming the PC-88's killer app, selling the faster mkIISR models in droves.
Suffice to say, both Square and Sierra On-Line were impressed enough to make their own ports, the former to MSX and Famicom while the latter brought Thexder overseas to IBM-compatible PCs. The DOS port thankfully rebalances the often harsh difficulty of the original. You take less damage and have an easier time collecting health & power-ups, that's for sure. While Thexder '85 is quite fun and beatable, it's also as brutal as you'd expect for an early foray into multi-stage mecha action with stats and memorization. Game Arts clearly wanted their players to clear at least the first loop, but it's tough going until you know some secrets and enemy patterns. I've beaten the DOS version a couple times now, so try that first if you want a faithful but accessible experience.
The whole appeal of Thexder comes from its mech-to-plane dynamics, where you swap between forms to use either the former's auto-targeting laser or the latter's speed and smaller size. Both modes let you navigate each techno-industrial maze while eliminating hordes of varied enemies, plus nabbing repair pick-ups along the way. Early stages ease you into the mechanics about as well as Nintendo's own games from the time, all before changing scenery and heading into caves full of nastiness. I always get a palpable sense of "where the hell is this mission taking me?" the closer I get to the end, even knowing the few boss encounters due to arrive. Having to weigh tradeoffs between your forms, plus carefully proceeding through hazardous areas you may or may not know, adds a satisfying tension to Game Arts' labyrinths. It may be a ruthless one to start with, but clearing it remains fulfilling, like defeating the Tower of Druaga which players would have been familiar with at the time.
It's awesome to see how effectively the team adapted Major Havoc into a richer adventure. The evolution from 1984's few screens' worth of level design, to Thexder having 4x that amount a level on average…games were improving so damn fast in that era. What might seem quaint or downright hostile was innovative back then, and shows its cleverness even today.
With a catchy musical theme and colorful, fluid scrolling visuals at a time when the PC-88 lent itself best to static adventure and sim./strategy titles, Thexder stood out. It proved that talented developers could squeeze anything out of NEC's hobbyist system, from intense arcade-style titles like this to more elaborate sagas like Ys or Uncharted Waters. And it gave new system owners the meaty, multi-playthrough software they needed at a time when Nintendo's Famicom and the arcades were far eclipsing Japanese PC games in immediate appeal. The era of simplistic, monochrome PC-8001 games was out; the FM-synth wielding, level-scrolling PC-88 releases were coming hard and fast. Game Arts led the charge with Thexder, Cuby Panic, and Silpheed, all of which earned their classic status in the midst of the J-PC gaming golden age.
Thexder was to PC-88 what Super Mario Bros. was to NES. Game Arts hit the motherlode when releasing their debut, a PC-88 action dungeon-crawler modeled after Atari's vector game Major Havoc. 1985 saw a major upswing in adoption of the PC-88, then NEC's beefiest 8-bit home computer. (Hey, guess which platform isn't associated with Thexder on IGDB yet? That's right, the one it was originally made for! Go team! /seething) With a new upgraded model on the horizon, these ex-ASCII programmers formed Game Arts with hopes of making an arcade classic for the home player. Hibiki Godai and Satoshi Uesaka's final game ended up becoming the PC-88's killer app, selling the faster mkIISR models in droves.
Suffice to say, both Square and Sierra On-Line were impressed enough to make their own ports, the former to MSX and Famicom while the latter brought Thexder overseas to IBM-compatible PCs. The DOS port thankfully rebalances the often harsh difficulty of the original. You take less damage and have an easier time collecting health & power-ups, that's for sure. While Thexder '85 is quite fun and beatable, it's also as brutal as you'd expect for an early foray into multi-stage mecha action with stats and memorization. Game Arts clearly wanted their players to clear at least the first loop, but it's tough going until you know some secrets and enemy patterns. I've beaten the DOS version a couple times now, so try that first if you want a faithful but accessible experience.
The whole appeal of Thexder comes from its mech-to-plane dynamics, where you swap between forms to use either the former's auto-targeting laser or the latter's speed and smaller size. Both modes let you navigate each techno-industrial maze while eliminating hordes of varied enemies, plus nabbing repair pick-ups along the way. Early stages ease you into the mechanics about as well as Nintendo's own games from the time, all before changing scenery and heading into caves full of nastiness. I always get a palpable sense of "where the hell is this mission taking me?" the closer I get to the end, even knowing the few boss encounters due to arrive. Having to weigh tradeoffs between your forms, plus carefully proceeding through hazardous areas you may or may not know, adds a satisfying tension to Game Arts' labyrinths. It may be a ruthless one to start with, but clearing it remains fulfilling, like defeating the Tower of Druaga which players would have been familiar with at the time.
It's awesome to see how effectively the team adapted Major Havoc into a richer adventure. The evolution from 1984's few screens' worth of level design, to Thexder having 4x that amount a level on average…games were improving so damn fast in that era. What might seem quaint or downright hostile was innovative back then, and shows its cleverness even today.
With a catchy musical theme and colorful, fluid scrolling visuals at a time when the PC-88 lent itself best to static adventure and sim./strategy titles, Thexder stood out. It proved that talented developers could squeeze anything out of NEC's hobbyist system, from intense arcade-style titles like this to more elaborate sagas like Ys or Uncharted Waters. And it gave new system owners the meaty, multi-playthrough software they needed at a time when Nintendo's Famicom and the arcades were far eclipsing Japanese PC games in immediate appeal. The era of simplistic, monochrome PC-8001 games was out; the FM-synth wielding, level-scrolling PC-88 releases were coming hard and fast. Game Arts led the charge with Thexder, Cuby Panic, and Silpheed, all of which earned their classic status in the midst of the J-PC gaming golden age.
1979
As said by a wise old sage: "be rootin', be tootin', and by Kong be shootin'...but most of all, be kind."
Everyone remembered the OK Corral differently. The Earps and feuding families each had their self-serving accounts of the shootout. John Ford, Stuart Lake, and other myth-makers turned the participants into legends, models of masculinity, freedom-seekers, and a long-lost Old West But the truth's rarely so glamorous or controversial. Just as the OK Corral gunfight never took place in the corral itself, Nintendo's Sheriff was never just the handiwork of a newly-hired Shigeru Miyamoto. How vexing it is that the echoes of Western mythologizing reach this far!
I am exaggerating a bit with regards to how Nintendo fans & gamers at large view this game. Miyamoto's almost always discussed in relation to Sheriff as an artist & assistant designer, not the producer (that'll be Genyo Takeda, later of StarTropics fame). That's not to diminish what the famous creator did contribute. While Nintendo largely put out clones and what I'd charitably call "experiments" by this point, their '79 twin-stick shooter defies that trend. It's still a bit rough-hewn, like any old cowboy, yet very fun and replayable.
Compared to earlier efforts like Western Gun & Boot Hill, there's more creative bending of Wild West stereotypes here, to mixed results. Though not the first major arcade game with an intermission, the scenes here are cute, a sign that the Not Yet Very Big N's developers were quick to match their competition. I do take umbrage with translating Space Invaders' aliens to bandits, though. Sure, this long predates modern discussions about negative stereotyping in games media, but that hardly disqualifies it. Let's just say that this game's rather unkind to its characters, from the doofy-looking lawman to his blatant damsel-in-distress & beyond. Respect to the condor, though. That's some gumption, flying above the fray on this baleful night, just askin' fer a plummet.
The brilliant part here is giving you solid twin-stick controls for moving & shooting well ahead of Midway's Robotron 2084. The dim bit is those enemy bullets, slow as molasses and firing only in cardinal directions. Normally you or the operator could just flip a DIP switch to raise the difficulty, but those options are absent too. What results is a fun, but relatively easy take on the Invaders template, one which rewards you a bit too much prior to developing the skills encouraged in Taito's originals. For example, it's much easier to aggressively fire here than to take cover, given the easily ignorable shields & posts. Your dexterity here compared to Space Invaders, or even Galaxian, tends to outweigh your opponents, for better and worse.
A counter-example comes when a few bandits charge into the corral, able to lunge at you if you trot too close. This spike in danger is exciting, an alternative to Galaxian's waves system which similarly revolutionizes your play-space. Where once you could just snipe at leisure, now you have to keep distance or get stabbed in the back! Of course, ranged exchanges were all that happened at the OK Corral. A little artistic liberty playing up the tropes can work out after all. Perhaps our strapping Roy Rogers believes in good 'ol fashioned marksmanship; he's a fool to deny himself fisticuffs, but a brave one.
When I'm not gunning down the circle of knives or playing matador with them, I think about how simple but compelling the game's premise is. We've gone from one Wild West tropset (the Mexican standoffs seen in Gunman & its ilk) to another, more politically charged one. You may be a lone marshall, but not much more than a deputized gang shooter. The game inadvertently conveys a message of liquid morality & primacy of who's more immediately anthropomorphic—empowering the Stetson hat over the sombrero. All basic American History 101 stuff, but displayed this vividly, this blatantly in a game this early? This seems less so Miyamoto's charm, more so his accidental wit.
Life's just too easy for the Wyatt Earps of this fictionalized, simplistic world. Another round in the corral, another kiss in the saloon, rinse and repeat. Maybe I'm giving too much credit to a one-and-done go at complexifying the paradigm Taito started, but it's filling food for thought. I highly recommend at least trying Sheriff today just to experience its odd thrills & ersatz yet perceptive view of the corral shootout tradition. The Fords & Miyamotos of the world, working with film & video games in their infancy, had a knack for making the most of limited possibilities. For all my misgivings, the distorted tales of the Old West are ample fodder for a destructive ride on the joysticks. Sheriff's team would go on to make works as iconic as Donkey Kong, so why downplay their earliest attempts to work with material as iconic as this?
I'm sure Sheriff will came back 'round these parts, like a tumbleweed hops from Hollywood ghost towns to the raster screen. Don't lemme see ya causin' trouble in The Old MAME, son.
Everyone remembered the OK Corral differently. The Earps and feuding families each had their self-serving accounts of the shootout. John Ford, Stuart Lake, and other myth-makers turned the participants into legends, models of masculinity, freedom-seekers, and a long-lost Old West But the truth's rarely so glamorous or controversial. Just as the OK Corral gunfight never took place in the corral itself, Nintendo's Sheriff was never just the handiwork of a newly-hired Shigeru Miyamoto. How vexing it is that the echoes of Western mythologizing reach this far!
I am exaggerating a bit with regards to how Nintendo fans & gamers at large view this game. Miyamoto's almost always discussed in relation to Sheriff as an artist & assistant designer, not the producer (that'll be Genyo Takeda, later of StarTropics fame). That's not to diminish what the famous creator did contribute. While Nintendo largely put out clones and what I'd charitably call "experiments" by this point, their '79 twin-stick shooter defies that trend. It's still a bit rough-hewn, like any old cowboy, yet very fun and replayable.
Compared to earlier efforts like Western Gun & Boot Hill, there's more creative bending of Wild West stereotypes here, to mixed results. Though not the first major arcade game with an intermission, the scenes here are cute, a sign that the Not Yet Very Big N's developers were quick to match their competition. I do take umbrage with translating Space Invaders' aliens to bandits, though. Sure, this long predates modern discussions about negative stereotyping in games media, but that hardly disqualifies it. Let's just say that this game's rather unkind to its characters, from the doofy-looking lawman to his blatant damsel-in-distress & beyond. Respect to the condor, though. That's some gumption, flying above the fray on this baleful night, just askin' fer a plummet.
The brilliant part here is giving you solid twin-stick controls for moving & shooting well ahead of Midway's Robotron 2084. The dim bit is those enemy bullets, slow as molasses and firing only in cardinal directions. Normally you or the operator could just flip a DIP switch to raise the difficulty, but those options are absent too. What results is a fun, but relatively easy take on the Invaders template, one which rewards you a bit too much prior to developing the skills encouraged in Taito's originals. For example, it's much easier to aggressively fire here than to take cover, given the easily ignorable shields & posts. Your dexterity here compared to Space Invaders, or even Galaxian, tends to outweigh your opponents, for better and worse.
A counter-example comes when a few bandits charge into the corral, able to lunge at you if you trot too close. This spike in danger is exciting, an alternative to Galaxian's waves system which similarly revolutionizes your play-space. Where once you could just snipe at leisure, now you have to keep distance or get stabbed in the back! Of course, ranged exchanges were all that happened at the OK Corral. A little artistic liberty playing up the tropes can work out after all. Perhaps our strapping Roy Rogers believes in good 'ol fashioned marksmanship; he's a fool to deny himself fisticuffs, but a brave one.
When I'm not gunning down the circle of knives or playing matador with them, I think about how simple but compelling the game's premise is. We've gone from one Wild West tropset (the Mexican standoffs seen in Gunman & its ilk) to another, more politically charged one. You may be a lone marshall, but not much more than a deputized gang shooter. The game inadvertently conveys a message of liquid morality & primacy of who's more immediately anthropomorphic—empowering the Stetson hat over the sombrero. All basic American History 101 stuff, but displayed this vividly, this blatantly in a game this early? This seems less so Miyamoto's charm, more so his accidental wit.
Life's just too easy for the Wyatt Earps of this fictionalized, simplistic world. Another round in the corral, another kiss in the saloon, rinse and repeat. Maybe I'm giving too much credit to a one-and-done go at complexifying the paradigm Taito started, but it's filling food for thought. I highly recommend at least trying Sheriff today just to experience its odd thrills & ersatz yet perceptive view of the corral shootout tradition. The Fords & Miyamotos of the world, working with film & video games in their infancy, had a knack for making the most of limited possibilities. For all my misgivings, the distorted tales of the Old West are ample fodder for a destructive ride on the joysticks. Sheriff's team would go on to make works as iconic as Donkey Kong, so why downplay their earliest attempts to work with material as iconic as this?
I'm sure Sheriff will came back 'round these parts, like a tumbleweed hops from Hollywood ghost towns to the raster screen. Don't lemme see ya causin' trouble in The Old MAME, son.
1994
The rose campion, a perennial pink-ish carnation found throughout temperate regions, has long been the study of biologists and botanists, from Darwin to Mendel. Now called silene coronaria, it formerly bore the designation lychnis, associated with a herbivorous moth of the same name, both fragile and humble. In this sense, this duo's unlikely contributions to modern life sciences mirror that of the original Korean PC platformer sharing the moniker, itself a key release for its field. I wish I could more easily recommend Softmax's first release beyond its historic significance, as the game itself is frustratingly unpolished and shows so much missed potential. But like its namesake, one shouldn't expect too much from what's just the beginnings of these ludo-scientists' forays into genres once untenable in this realm.
Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.
Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!
Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.
Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.
However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.
Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.
What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.
I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).
Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE
Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.
Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!
Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.
Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.
However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.
Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.
What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.
I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).
Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE
2014
funny how the one MOBA I've ever played only caught my eye because the devs conceived it as a modernized Herzog Zwei, except that's something they kinda got away from over time...
I played this back during its alpha phase, before Ubisoft brought it to consoles. Nothing tells me what pushed these guys into trying silly things like a VR port when they could have changed up the core modes, or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. Granted, someone more active in the beta and release periods would know more about whether or not this ended up and remained fun to play. This was also the only time I ever played a Chrome Store game, something the IGDB/Backloggd page won't tell you about its origins. That period of web-based free-to-play games seems to have waned, or just folded into the background as everyone and their mother does that stuff via Roblox instead. Funny how these trends come and go, only as prescient or permanent as the market and its manipulators demand.
Basically, imagine the aforementioned Tecno Soft RTS for Mega Drive, just with distinct factions and heroes + the usual mess of loadout management and heavy micro associated with this genre. Something tells me that I gravitated towards AirMech to fill the Battle.net gap in my soul, not having a Windows PC good enough for StarCraft II and having no idea (at the time) how to get classic Blizzard online games going. The ease of matching with relatively equally skilled players early on helped here, as I generally won and lost games in that desirable tug-of-war pattern you'd hope for. Quickly managing unit groups, keeping up pressure in lanes and the neat lil' alleys on each map, all while doing plenty of your own shooting and distraction using the hero unit-meets-cursor...this had a lot going for it.
There's a bit of a trend with very beloved and played free-to-play classics getting, erm, "classic" fan remasters years down the line, e.g. RuneScape or Team Fortress 2. But because AirMech was always closed source and never had that level of traction (some would argue distinction in this crowded genre), there's no way for me to revisit the pre-buyout era and place my memories on trial. What I've seen from AirMech Arena, meanwhile, seems more soulless and bereft of unique or meaningful mechanics and community. It's very easy to just play Herzog Zwei online via emulators or the SEGA Ages release on Switch, too, and that's held up both in legacy and playability. So the niche this web-MOBA/-RTS experiment tried to address is now flush with alternatives, let alone the origins they all point to.
Maybe this just sounds like excuses for me not to download the damn thing and give it a whirl. All I know is this led me to playing Caveman 2 Cosmos and saving up more for my 3DS library at the time. The beta didn't exactly develop that fast, and when it did, the general concept and game loop started favoring ride-or-die players over those like me who just wanted to occasionally hop in and have a blast. Balancing for both invested regulars and casual fans is a bitch and a half, yet I also can't imagine this would have been fun if imbalanced towards skilled folks constantly redefining the meta. The extensive mod-ability and "anything goes" attitude of classic Battle.net games definitely wasn't and isn't a thing for AirMech, nor do I suspect the developers ever wanted that. If it's a focused, overly polished RTS-MOBA you're looking for, I'm sure there's worse out there, but this no longer has that scrappy, Herzog-like simplicity that I crave.
The premise still has a lot of potential, even if Carbon Games seems content with where they've brought the series so far. I'd love to have a more story-focused, singleplayer-friendly variation, something which spiritual predecessors like NetStorm surely could have used. Until then, eh. This one's just here, sitting in the back of my community college neurons, taunting me with what could have been.
I played this back during its alpha phase, before Ubisoft brought it to consoles. Nothing tells me what pushed these guys into trying silly things like a VR port when they could have changed up the core modes, or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. Granted, someone more active in the beta and release periods would know more about whether or not this ended up and remained fun to play. This was also the only time I ever played a Chrome Store game, something the IGDB/Backloggd page won't tell you about its origins. That period of web-based free-to-play games seems to have waned, or just folded into the background as everyone and their mother does that stuff via Roblox instead. Funny how these trends come and go, only as prescient or permanent as the market and its manipulators demand.
Basically, imagine the aforementioned Tecno Soft RTS for Mega Drive, just with distinct factions and heroes + the usual mess of loadout management and heavy micro associated with this genre. Something tells me that I gravitated towards AirMech to fill the Battle.net gap in my soul, not having a Windows PC good enough for StarCraft II and having no idea (at the time) how to get classic Blizzard online games going. The ease of matching with relatively equally skilled players early on helped here, as I generally won and lost games in that desirable tug-of-war pattern you'd hope for. Quickly managing unit groups, keeping up pressure in lanes and the neat lil' alleys on each map, all while doing plenty of your own shooting and distraction using the hero unit-meets-cursor...this had a lot going for it.
There's a bit of a trend with very beloved and played free-to-play classics getting, erm, "classic" fan remasters years down the line, e.g. RuneScape or Team Fortress 2. But because AirMech was always closed source and never had that level of traction (some would argue distinction in this crowded genre), there's no way for me to revisit the pre-buyout era and place my memories on trial. What I've seen from AirMech Arena, meanwhile, seems more soulless and bereft of unique or meaningful mechanics and community. It's very easy to just play Herzog Zwei online via emulators or the SEGA Ages release on Switch, too, and that's held up both in legacy and playability. So the niche this web-MOBA/-RTS experiment tried to address is now flush with alternatives, let alone the origins they all point to.
Maybe this just sounds like excuses for me not to download the damn thing and give it a whirl. All I know is this led me to playing Caveman 2 Cosmos and saving up more for my 3DS library at the time. The beta didn't exactly develop that fast, and when it did, the general concept and game loop started favoring ride-or-die players over those like me who just wanted to occasionally hop in and have a blast. Balancing for both invested regulars and casual fans is a bitch and a half, yet I also can't imagine this would have been fun if imbalanced towards skilled folks constantly redefining the meta. The extensive mod-ability and "anything goes" attitude of classic Battle.net games definitely wasn't and isn't a thing for AirMech, nor do I suspect the developers ever wanted that. If it's a focused, overly polished RTS-MOBA you're looking for, I'm sure there's worse out there, but this no longer has that scrappy, Herzog-like simplicity that I crave.
The premise still has a lot of potential, even if Carbon Games seems content with where they've brought the series so far. I'd love to have a more story-focused, singleplayer-friendly variation, something which spiritual predecessors like NetStorm surely could have used. Until then, eh. This one's just here, sitting in the back of my community college neurons, taunting me with what could have been.
1980
tim rogers voice I Was a Sierra On-Line Poser smashes keyboard on stage and plays foosball with the keycaps
Like many others who love media history but struggle to get into or make time for certain parts of it, the formative parser-driven adventure games like Wander, Colossal Cave Adventure, and Sierra On-Line's classics like Mystery House have eluded me. But I'm also guilty of just not going for them like a hunter chases flock, or a prospector dives for gold. To have this apathy, despite knowing pretty much all these games are easily playable on Internet Archive, ate at me until recently. Something's clicked—probably just the satisfaction of completing Myst last month after years of never clearing the first island. But that's enough to get me committed to trying these ramshackle first attempts at conjuring immersive worlds on the earliest home computer platforms.
Mission Asteroid had a simple, er, mission: introduce any and all possible Apple II users to the graphic text adventure. Roberta Williams knew this didn't have to be as intricate as her Agatha Christie-esque first game, nor as fanciful as The Wizard and the Princess. A solid, pulp-y "save the Earth!" story could get you used to the studio's text parser, thinking up valid verb combinations, and managing your time and patience wisely. No matter how much this game continues to age like an indescribable beverage, it still fulfills those criteria. That's a nice way of saying this 1980 release had much less bullshit puzzling and navigation than its peers.
What the Williams duo would have called "simple" or "entry-level" then is considered hard to parse today dodges tomatoes after that pun. You've got the usual N-S-E-W compass commands, sure, but also instances of having to enter door rather than just go north through it. The two-word restriction on your interactions becomes painfully clear when trying to do something as straightforward as insert a floppy disk into the mission HQ Apple II. You type take disk, carriage return, and then insert disk (repeat), only for the game to ask where you're inserting this thing. There's no death branch here if you specify the wrong target or anything, just needless busywork compounded by the parser system.
Yet, for all the grief these simplistic parsers give me, there's still the fun of tinkering with what hidden-in-plain-sight options you can type in. All the gizmos in your space rocket can either doom you or take you on a disorienting ride through Earth orbit, controlled only by your type-in commands. Wandering the asteroid itself becomes a tense adventure as you likely know from harsh experience that the air supply's time-limited. Once the game lifts its tutorializing gaze from you, Mission Asteroid feels like an organic interplay between you, the reader asking questions, and the ghost of a game master hiding in the machine. It's easier now to see how Roberta, Ken, and others who'd soon join On-Line Systems could champion this genre framework.
Obviously there's not much to look at in this now, with its rudimentary VersaWriter drawings and lack of sound design. At the end of the day, most of the puzzles are either too simple to satisfy or convoluted enough to irritate me a bit too much. But I can gladly say that Mission Asteroid's an easier way to start playing turn-of-the-'80s graphic text stories than I've been told. It gets you into the necessary frame of mind with relatively little condescending scenarios or design language. The truly brutal riddles and cat's cradles of contemporary text adventures are reduced in scope, tightening up the pace. One gets to have a just-filling-enough time with the genre here before it overstays its welcome, either by avoiding a glut of bad ends or treating the player's time with more respect. I sense and can only speculate that Roberta's need to finish this romp for the holidays, capitalizing on Mystery House's success, left less room for potentially harmful experiments or indulgence.
So it's the definition of mid, yet I can't hold that against this game in retrospect. There's much worse one could try from that era, ranging from Scott Adams' pioneering all-text enigmas to their slapdash imitators on TRS-80 or Commodore PET (take your pick of PC cheaper than the Apple ][+). Given how Mission Asteroid itself avoids some of the amateur mistakes in Mystery House I hear about, I'm not content slapping this with a 2-star and calling it there. Whether or not it's a labor of love on par with Sierra On-Line's adventures soon to come, this little ditty of a day's work blowing up an asteroid punches above its weight class where it counts. Some higher being oughta know we got more than we asked for when Michael Bay's people adapted the premise almost two decades later. Keep it simple, Sierra!
Like many others who love media history but struggle to get into or make time for certain parts of it, the formative parser-driven adventure games like Wander, Colossal Cave Adventure, and Sierra On-Line's classics like Mystery House have eluded me. But I'm also guilty of just not going for them like a hunter chases flock, or a prospector dives for gold. To have this apathy, despite knowing pretty much all these games are easily playable on Internet Archive, ate at me until recently. Something's clicked—probably just the satisfaction of completing Myst last month after years of never clearing the first island. But that's enough to get me committed to trying these ramshackle first attempts at conjuring immersive worlds on the earliest home computer platforms.
Mission Asteroid had a simple, er, mission: introduce any and all possible Apple II users to the graphic text adventure. Roberta Williams knew this didn't have to be as intricate as her Agatha Christie-esque first game, nor as fanciful as The Wizard and the Princess. A solid, pulp-y "save the Earth!" story could get you used to the studio's text parser, thinking up valid verb combinations, and managing your time and patience wisely. No matter how much this game continues to age like an indescribable beverage, it still fulfills those criteria. That's a nice way of saying this 1980 release had much less bullshit puzzling and navigation than its peers.
What the Williams duo would have called "simple" or "entry-level" then is considered hard to parse today dodges tomatoes after that pun. You've got the usual N-S-E-W compass commands, sure, but also instances of having to enter door rather than just go north through it. The two-word restriction on your interactions becomes painfully clear when trying to do something as straightforward as insert a floppy disk into the mission HQ Apple II. You type take disk, carriage return, and then insert disk (repeat), only for the game to ask where you're inserting this thing. There's no death branch here if you specify the wrong target or anything, just needless busywork compounded by the parser system.
Yet, for all the grief these simplistic parsers give me, there's still the fun of tinkering with what hidden-in-plain-sight options you can type in. All the gizmos in your space rocket can either doom you or take you on a disorienting ride through Earth orbit, controlled only by your type-in commands. Wandering the asteroid itself becomes a tense adventure as you likely know from harsh experience that the air supply's time-limited. Once the game lifts its tutorializing gaze from you, Mission Asteroid feels like an organic interplay between you, the reader asking questions, and the ghost of a game master hiding in the machine. It's easier now to see how Roberta, Ken, and others who'd soon join On-Line Systems could champion this genre framework.
Obviously there's not much to look at in this now, with its rudimentary VersaWriter drawings and lack of sound design. At the end of the day, most of the puzzles are either too simple to satisfy or convoluted enough to irritate me a bit too much. But I can gladly say that Mission Asteroid's an easier way to start playing turn-of-the-'80s graphic text stories than I've been told. It gets you into the necessary frame of mind with relatively little condescending scenarios or design language. The truly brutal riddles and cat's cradles of contemporary text adventures are reduced in scope, tightening up the pace. One gets to have a just-filling-enough time with the genre here before it overstays its welcome, either by avoiding a glut of bad ends or treating the player's time with more respect. I sense and can only speculate that Roberta's need to finish this romp for the holidays, capitalizing on Mystery House's success, left less room for potentially harmful experiments or indulgence.
So it's the definition of mid, yet I can't hold that against this game in retrospect. There's much worse one could try from that era, ranging from Scott Adams' pioneering all-text enigmas to their slapdash imitators on TRS-80 or Commodore PET (take your pick of PC cheaper than the Apple ][+). Given how Mission Asteroid itself avoids some of the amateur mistakes in Mystery House I hear about, I'm not content slapping this with a 2-star and calling it there. Whether or not it's a labor of love on par with Sierra On-Line's adventures soon to come, this little ditty of a day's work blowing up an asteroid punches above its weight class where it counts. Some higher being oughta know we got more than we asked for when Michael Bay's people adapted the premise almost two decades later. Keep it simple, Sierra!
1982
Making cartridge games in the pre-Famicom years posed a dilemma: they couldn't store much game without costing customers and manufacturers out the butt. It's no surprise that Nintendo later made their own disk add-on, among others, in order to distribute cheaper, larger software. All the excess cart inventory that flooded North American console markets, thus precipitating the region's early-'80s crash, finally got discounted to rates we'd expect today. And it's in that period of decline where something like Miner 2049er would have appealed to Atari PC owners normally priced out of cart games.
This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.
I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.
The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.
It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.
Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.
Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.
This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.
I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.
The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.
It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.
Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.
Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.
1983
Since the other reviews (so far) are only covering the very not good PC-88 & PC-98 ports, let's talk about the X1 original.
This isn't an amazing arcade shooter, at least not compared to Xevious or Star Force from the era. But it's a lot better than given credit, at least on Sharp X1 & MZ micros. I first got into playing this several years ago, each time warming up a bit more to how it plays. For comparison's sake, even the mighty Famicom wouldn't have any original STGs of this caliber & ambition until 1985 onward. Kotori Yoshimura built this turn-of-'84 tech showpiece all on her own, yet it's still fun if you like a more strategic open-range shooter. (I play this on an X1 emulator using cursor keys with no other enhancements or major changes.)
A big issue I see players having is keeping track of shots while landing your own, whether in air or on ground. Thankfully the game's soundscape, though sparse, makes enemy fire identifiable enough for quick dodging. Pay attention to the dull blips of enemy shots, and also keep a mental bead on where enemies are spawning. Certain foes will intercept you & lead shots better; they're usually a light pinkish-red in this version. I make sure to eliminate or avoid them as much as I can while bombing targets to find the real prize: the Dyradeizer bomb-ables.
It's possible to meticulously clear each stage, but the smart play for seeing more of the game (let alone clearing a loop) is to reach the stages' second phase quickly. Reaching the Dyradeizer side of each stage simplifies matters a lot since there's less dogfighting & more dodging turret fire. It's also simple to just destroy the Dyradeizer core ASAP if you're ready to proceed, rather than continuing to bomb out the rest. Getting through stages like this helps with learning movement & spawning behavior, which in turn makes playing for score much more manageable.
Enough strategy. What's the deal with Thunder Force on X1?! /seinfeld
I liken it to a long-lost pen pal of Raid on Bungeling Bay, but with more obvious Namco influences (ex. Xevious, Bosconian) and more impressive visuals. The X1 original uses the PC's built-in spriting hardware (the PCG chip) to handle stage objects & actors faster than any other PC STG of its time. This doesn't make it unplayable, but certainly zippier than you'd expect from a mid-era 8-bit micro. The simple control scheme, level progression, & enemy roster means it's easy to get started with Thunder Force. It's a very difficult game for sure, yet hardly a mystery. Maybe the enemy bullets could have been drawn more visibly, but they're readable enough after playing for 15 minutes.
The game's ports retain the solid game loop, particularly the scoring system & map/enemy variety, but massively lose out in other areas. (I'll exempt the MZ-1500 version here for being fairly close to X1 and arguably a better speed for some players who want to learn the game.) At that time, the PC-88 really couldn't handle this kind of game, even with the fastest pseudo-sprite coding in games like Kazuro Morita's Alphos. Surprisingly, even the more underpowered PC-6001 port feels better to play (and a lot more impressive) than that of its bigger cousin. And since the FM-7 release basically matches the PC-88 one, that makes for a poor but unsurprising showing. Yoshimura & her co-programmers had to make not just these ports in rapid succession, but tons of other quick ports during those pre-Mega Drive years at Tecno Soft. Rushed ports were common, and it's a travesty how many people get their first glance at this game via its less-than-representative versions.
One flaw that's always irked me is how the game handles shot collisions. You really have to commit to your own ground bombs, ex. not changing direction immediately while the shot lands, or else you risk not blowing something up. It's much less problematic with air fire thankfully, but hardly ideal. And there's the old problem of not being able to stop mid-flight, requiring you to manage your direction at all times. This leads to a lot of circular movement around parts of each stage if you're trying to destroy everything. Even I get a bit exhausted by this! But it's a matter of getting used to these weird physics & building your tactics around them. Pro tip: the game calculates enemy fire direction based on where you're flying when it's calculating their attacks. Use that to manipulate enemy fire away from you, then make your attack.
It's worth dealing with some odd collision detection & tricky enemy patterns for one of the best pick-up-and-play arcade originals defining the early J-PC software lineup. Yoshimura & her colleagues would proceed to form Arsys Soft a year or so later, where they made much better works like WiBARM & Star Cruiser. But games like Thunder Force showed her ability to evolve arcade-style play on a home platform—no mean feat at a time when Japanese PCs' hardware & developer support was more fragmented. Both as a history piece & a game today, Thunder Force on X1 is worth a shot if you like the rest of the series or want to experience how the early post-Galaga shooters began to evolve.
Also, I'm glad to say there's no quaint, irritating rendition of the William Tell Overture in this version. You can put on any music you'd like!
This isn't an amazing arcade shooter, at least not compared to Xevious or Star Force from the era. But it's a lot better than given credit, at least on Sharp X1 & MZ micros. I first got into playing this several years ago, each time warming up a bit more to how it plays. For comparison's sake, even the mighty Famicom wouldn't have any original STGs of this caliber & ambition until 1985 onward. Kotori Yoshimura built this turn-of-'84 tech showpiece all on her own, yet it's still fun if you like a more strategic open-range shooter. (I play this on an X1 emulator using cursor keys with no other enhancements or major changes.)
A big issue I see players having is keeping track of shots while landing your own, whether in air or on ground. Thankfully the game's soundscape, though sparse, makes enemy fire identifiable enough for quick dodging. Pay attention to the dull blips of enemy shots, and also keep a mental bead on where enemies are spawning. Certain foes will intercept you & lead shots better; they're usually a light pinkish-red in this version. I make sure to eliminate or avoid them as much as I can while bombing targets to find the real prize: the Dyradeizer bomb-ables.
It's possible to meticulously clear each stage, but the smart play for seeing more of the game (let alone clearing a loop) is to reach the stages' second phase quickly. Reaching the Dyradeizer side of each stage simplifies matters a lot since there's less dogfighting & more dodging turret fire. It's also simple to just destroy the Dyradeizer core ASAP if you're ready to proceed, rather than continuing to bomb out the rest. Getting through stages like this helps with learning movement & spawning behavior, which in turn makes playing for score much more manageable.
Enough strategy. What's the deal with Thunder Force on X1?! /seinfeld
I liken it to a long-lost pen pal of Raid on Bungeling Bay, but with more obvious Namco influences (ex. Xevious, Bosconian) and more impressive visuals. The X1 original uses the PC's built-in spriting hardware (the PCG chip) to handle stage objects & actors faster than any other PC STG of its time. This doesn't make it unplayable, but certainly zippier than you'd expect from a mid-era 8-bit micro. The simple control scheme, level progression, & enemy roster means it's easy to get started with Thunder Force. It's a very difficult game for sure, yet hardly a mystery. Maybe the enemy bullets could have been drawn more visibly, but they're readable enough after playing for 15 minutes.
The game's ports retain the solid game loop, particularly the scoring system & map/enemy variety, but massively lose out in other areas. (I'll exempt the MZ-1500 version here for being fairly close to X1 and arguably a better speed for some players who want to learn the game.) At that time, the PC-88 really couldn't handle this kind of game, even with the fastest pseudo-sprite coding in games like Kazuro Morita's Alphos. Surprisingly, even the more underpowered PC-6001 port feels better to play (and a lot more impressive) than that of its bigger cousin. And since the FM-7 release basically matches the PC-88 one, that makes for a poor but unsurprising showing. Yoshimura & her co-programmers had to make not just these ports in rapid succession, but tons of other quick ports during those pre-Mega Drive years at Tecno Soft. Rushed ports were common, and it's a travesty how many people get their first glance at this game via its less-than-representative versions.
One flaw that's always irked me is how the game handles shot collisions. You really have to commit to your own ground bombs, ex. not changing direction immediately while the shot lands, or else you risk not blowing something up. It's much less problematic with air fire thankfully, but hardly ideal. And there's the old problem of not being able to stop mid-flight, requiring you to manage your direction at all times. This leads to a lot of circular movement around parts of each stage if you're trying to destroy everything. Even I get a bit exhausted by this! But it's a matter of getting used to these weird physics & building your tactics around them. Pro tip: the game calculates enemy fire direction based on where you're flying when it's calculating their attacks. Use that to manipulate enemy fire away from you, then make your attack.
It's worth dealing with some odd collision detection & tricky enemy patterns for one of the best pick-up-and-play arcade originals defining the early J-PC software lineup. Yoshimura & her colleagues would proceed to form Arsys Soft a year or so later, where they made much better works like WiBARM & Star Cruiser. But games like Thunder Force showed her ability to evolve arcade-style play on a home platform—no mean feat at a time when Japanese PCs' hardware & developer support was more fragmented. Both as a history piece & a game today, Thunder Force on X1 is worth a shot if you like the rest of the series or want to experience how the early post-Galaga shooters began to evolve.
Also, I'm glad to say there's no quaint, irritating rendition of the William Tell Overture in this version. You can put on any music you'd like!
1979
The very first "realistic" arcade racing video games started off simplistic and barely evocative of what they promised players, but Speed Freak, the first example using vector graphics, does the night-racer concept best out of them all. It must have seemed like a huge leap forward upon release in 1979, three years after Atari engineer Dave Shepperd and his team used Reiner Forest's Nurburgring-1 as the basis for Night Driver (and then Midway's close competitor, 280 Zzzap). Representing the road with just scaling road markers zooming by, in and out of the vanishing point, was impressive enough in the late-'70s, yet Vectorbeam saw the potential for this concept if brought into wireframe 3D. Without changing the simple and immediate goal of driving as fast, far, and crash-less as possible, the company made what I'd tentatively call the best commercial driving sim of the decade, albeit without the fancy skeuomorphic cabinets of something like Fire Truck.
One coin nets players two minutes total of driving, dodging, shifting, and hopefully some high scorin'. Like its stylistic predecessors, the cabinet features a wheel and gated stick shift, giving you something tactile to steer and manage speed with other than the pedals. And that vector display! This expensive but awe-inspiring video tech debuted in arcade format back in '77 when Larry Rosenthal from MIT debuted a fast yet affordable Spacewar! recreation using these new screen drawing methods. Whereas Dr. Forest's early '76 German racing sim drew a basic road surface and lit up bulbs placed towards the glass to fake road edges, Atari and Midway used very early microprocessors and video ROM chips to render rasterized equivalents. Here, though, vivid scanlines of light emanated from the screen at a human-readable refresh rate, with far more on-road and off-road detail than before. Clever scaling of wiry objects on screen gives the impression of 3D perspective, and crashing leads to a broken windshield effect! All these features would have made this feel more comprehensive and immersive for arcade-goers than its peers, even compared to the most luxurious of electromechanical racing installations.
Speed Freak itself, though, isn't a big leap in complexity and depth of play, nor does it use the extended-time mechanic found in 280 Zzzap. You just have to reach and maintain max speed without crashing either off the course or into oncoming objects, like other cars or signposts. It's all about speeding down the darkness with reckless abandon, nabbing those top scores over drivers who keep bailing within this strict time limit. Momentum's a little funky at first, but no more unlifelike or difficult to work with than in Night Driver and its direct precursor. The game does let you know if you're in danger of an accident by sounding a tire squeal, among other small details that build an illusion of world-building here. I wish there was not just a way to extend play, but also see recommended cornering speeds for upcoming turns, rather than having to guess at a glance how far to brake and/or shift. That's one aspect 280 Zzzap has over this and the Atari game, for what it's worth.
Vector-based 3D driving faire like this had a brief heyday in '79 and the following year, but it wouldn't be long until both SEGA and Namco fought back. Their jaw-dropping third-person racers Turbo and Pole Position proved that colorful, "super-scaling" raster graphics were just as much a match for the relatively spartan but flexible vector stuff. In fact, more players cottoned on to these Japanese competitors, both for the added skill ceiling and game loop variety which developers at neither Cinematronic nor Vectorbeam could match. Still, despite how much more I love those Golden Age 2D and pseudo-3D skidfests from the industry titans, I think there was a lot of potential explored in Speed Freak, something more akin to military simulators but for the masses. Affordable home computers and their game creators wouldn't touch this genre for years to come, and the closest you could get on VCS and competing any-game consoles never stood a chance at reproducing this experience. Rosenthal's brief stint running Vectorbeam, a bright light of innovation and visual achievement in the industry, ended the same year this came out, all because Barrer bombed and its manufacturing costs fatally wounded the company. If they had found more market success and iterated on vector tech as fast as he'd introduced it, who knows if the Vectrex and similar projects might have fared better?
Today you can only play Speed Freak on a properly maintained real-life board or, thankfully, through MAME. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, easy to rebind for controllers and a neat subject for screenshots. Maybe the likes of Digital Eclipse, Night Dive, or another prestigious studio could figure out the licensing situation for these formative vector games and get all the experts in one room to make an Atari 50-caliber collection one day. Or maybe that window's passed, given how many industry people from the time have passed on or simply become unavailable. Give this a try regardless! It's simultaneously the start and end of an era, hiding in plain sight among its own kind.
One coin nets players two minutes total of driving, dodging, shifting, and hopefully some high scorin'. Like its stylistic predecessors, the cabinet features a wheel and gated stick shift, giving you something tactile to steer and manage speed with other than the pedals. And that vector display! This expensive but awe-inspiring video tech debuted in arcade format back in '77 when Larry Rosenthal from MIT debuted a fast yet affordable Spacewar! recreation using these new screen drawing methods. Whereas Dr. Forest's early '76 German racing sim drew a basic road surface and lit up bulbs placed towards the glass to fake road edges, Atari and Midway used very early microprocessors and video ROM chips to render rasterized equivalents. Here, though, vivid scanlines of light emanated from the screen at a human-readable refresh rate, with far more on-road and off-road detail than before. Clever scaling of wiry objects on screen gives the impression of 3D perspective, and crashing leads to a broken windshield effect! All these features would have made this feel more comprehensive and immersive for arcade-goers than its peers, even compared to the most luxurious of electromechanical racing installations.
Speed Freak itself, though, isn't a big leap in complexity and depth of play, nor does it use the extended-time mechanic found in 280 Zzzap. You just have to reach and maintain max speed without crashing either off the course or into oncoming objects, like other cars or signposts. It's all about speeding down the darkness with reckless abandon, nabbing those top scores over drivers who keep bailing within this strict time limit. Momentum's a little funky at first, but no more unlifelike or difficult to work with than in Night Driver and its direct precursor. The game does let you know if you're in danger of an accident by sounding a tire squeal, among other small details that build an illusion of world-building here. I wish there was not just a way to extend play, but also see recommended cornering speeds for upcoming turns, rather than having to guess at a glance how far to brake and/or shift. That's one aspect 280 Zzzap has over this and the Atari game, for what it's worth.
Vector-based 3D driving faire like this had a brief heyday in '79 and the following year, but it wouldn't be long until both SEGA and Namco fought back. Their jaw-dropping third-person racers Turbo and Pole Position proved that colorful, "super-scaling" raster graphics were just as much a match for the relatively spartan but flexible vector stuff. In fact, more players cottoned on to these Japanese competitors, both for the added skill ceiling and game loop variety which developers at neither Cinematronic nor Vectorbeam could match. Still, despite how much more I love those Golden Age 2D and pseudo-3D skidfests from the industry titans, I think there was a lot of potential explored in Speed Freak, something more akin to military simulators but for the masses. Affordable home computers and their game creators wouldn't touch this genre for years to come, and the closest you could get on VCS and competing any-game consoles never stood a chance at reproducing this experience. Rosenthal's brief stint running Vectorbeam, a bright light of innovation and visual achievement in the industry, ended the same year this came out, all because Barrer bombed and its manufacturing costs fatally wounded the company. If they had found more market success and iterated on vector tech as fast as he'd introduced it, who knows if the Vectrex and similar projects might have fared better?
Today you can only play Speed Freak on a properly maintained real-life board or, thankfully, through MAME. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, easy to rebind for controllers and a neat subject for screenshots. Maybe the likes of Digital Eclipse, Night Dive, or another prestigious studio could figure out the licensing situation for these formative vector games and get all the experts in one room to make an Atari 50-caliber collection one day. Or maybe that window's passed, given how many industry people from the time have passed on or simply become unavailable. Give this a try regardless! It's simultaneously the start and end of an era, hiding in plain sight among its own kind.
2005
The hell's a "narbacular", anyway? It's very rare to find a word this unique which hasn't received some definition in Urban Dictionary or somewhere else. Even more bizarre since we're talking about one of the most important 2000s indie titles. Project co-lead Jeep Barnett says they invented the term to improve SEO and online virality, which is good enough for me. One wonders if "Portacular Drop" would have been more appropriate in hindsight. As the tech demo for the seminal puzzler Portal, which this team later made at Valve, Narbacular Drop mostly gets written off as an unfinished curiosity. I think it's got a bit more going on, though, once you figure community levels into the picture. This had a small but active fanbase prior to the funny fake cake game obsoleting it, which counts for something. You can still play this (and other notables borne from the DigiPen Institute's student body) for free today, albeit with some troubleshooting.
Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.
Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.
This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.
…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.
Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.
As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.
Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.
Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.
This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.
…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.
Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.
As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.
1989
Kuso gamer! You've save-stated so much in the Mesen scene; oh, what's becoming of me…~ Like 'ol R-Type, you can feel Irem's getting really mean. Why is this game such a fiend? It's not unbeatable, theoretically—just a very frustrating feat to accomplish without save states. I wouldn't have beaten this in under a month otherwise, and part of me wonders if the final 1/3 was ever fully tested, start to finish, under normal play conditions. Something of a circular debate looms around Holy Diver today, where some about how hardcore it is while others lament its impenetrable difficulty. Slot me into the camp that laments all the potential squandered in this title, a casualty of the developer's focus on similarly brutal (but more fair) arcade releases.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023
Let's start with how this game ostensibly recreates Dio's famous album in action game form. I wish it had, but we're stuck with a lightly dressed-up imitation of better-known games, from Castlevania to Mega Man and beyond. Recontextualizing this non-committal attempt to iterate on other, better Famicom staples via a heavy metal coat of paint isn't the worst idea. Too bad this just doesn't evoke anything specifically like the musical influences it takes from. Where are the tigers?! The rainbows in the dark? Or anything beyond what the opening crawl exposits? I love the idea of saving the King Crimson family name just as much as anyone should, but here they've just slapped these references atop an otherwise workmanlike dark fantasy side-scroller. Compare this with the studio's old arcade dev chief, Tetsuo Nakano, asserting how you shouldn't "just set out to imitate someone else, for instance, you’ll always be behind the times".
I'll be fair and also criticize SEGA's Jewel Master for appropriating progressive rock and metal inspirations around the same time. There's a key difference, however: the Mega Drive game actually has a fitting prog soundtrack. Rarely do I start digging into a non-rhythm game via its music, but that's what separates something like Jewel Master from countless other throwaway action-platformers of the era. Holy Diver (the game, not the timeless work of Ronnie James Dio & co.) has a solid musical score from Irem soundsmith Masahiko Ishida, but I wouldn't call it one of his best. There's a few driving baroque gallops to enjoy here, a departure from his more avant-garde arcade work; shame the final stage and boss tracks are so irritating. Dissonance can work well for a game like this, just not when it accentuates the feeling that you, the player, aren't meant to have made it this far.
Nothing in this bastardization of the term "holy diver" feels player-friendly. It's one thing to be "hardcore" and another to just grind you down without any purpose beyond disincentivizing game rentals. The game loop starts out barbed and eventually becomes relentlessly lethal, going from tricky but learnable enemy patterns to minibosses every other screen with plenty of backup. Sure, I could viably learn and route the first half before this club week's end, but certainly not the latter portion. Irem's console developers decided to center most of the fatal encounters around rapid enemy spawns, which combine with pathetically short I-frames when hit to keep you on the backfoot. Now let's couple this with inexplicable, inconsistent input delays for essentials like crouching and jumping! It seems like they knew the game engine and physics have these issues, thus compensating via conspicuously fluid air control. (Diagonal attack aiming would have been nice…) From the very beginning, your reliable mobility and attack options aren't adequate for handling even the most basic foes with comfort. So here I am, stuck fighting basic right-to-left mooks I'd down quick in any other game like this, just with an unsatisfying handicap.
I've got not real investment in the story or in my conventional character advancement progression, either. What few new spells and items you get are necessary, but less than satisfying to use for the most part. You're often so deprived of magic points that using the more advanced offensive spells (Breaker and Thunder) gives diminishing returns. (Shoutouts to the former in stage 5, though, as its boss only seems possible with it.) On the other hand, Blizzard and Overdrive are practically required no matter your resources, whether for freezing lava & weaker enemies or to traverse later levels and survive their trap fights. Your basic pea-shooter attack loses its utility around mid-game except for saving mana, so the game revolves around mastering and carefully timing your spells. In my experience, this meant so many more retries than felt right for the scale of combat/puzzle complexity on offer. None of the lava sections are interesting by themselves, and the sheer repetition & re-skinning of enemy types left me wanting for any new interactions with my action verbs.
My time playing through to the end saw maybe hundreds of save states and reloads, enough to make me feel like Dio in the recording studio. I'm giving this software way too much credit with such a metaphor, but that's maybe the most relevant connection between it and those musical touchstones. Not that Holy Diver has any monopoly on the state-or-suffer experience among other kusoge or ball-busting challenges from this period. I'm just trying to process how a game can be this fascinatingly bad at delivering its purported narrative. Infinite continues mean little to me when that entails starting Kaizo-like levels over and over again, with not much gratification for learning the exact timing and enemy management between rooms. Our hero comes across less like a powerful, destined knight defeating evil, more like a renn-faire weekend warrior bumbling into the actual hell fathomed in medieval times. The best part of this game involves nothing about him—rather, I actually had a lot of fun using his dragon form to play a janky, all too short but empowering side-scrolling shooter.
So little about Holy Diver's sekaikan connects together, another symptom of rushed development. Take for instance any play on the titular song's lyrical depth vs. what one could charitably discern from the game. I'm not saving the people of the land from vice, temptations, or lack of faith; the only inhabitants in this world are monsters already. There's no higher justification of the protagonist's self-sacrificial fight against the Black Slayer, only a royalist desire to vanquish evil for his family's sake. Where even the hardest 'Vania faire in '89 gave you a fighting chance via wall-meat and other playground secrets, there's strikingly few optional risky rewards to find, just an unending torrent of trouble. Above all, this game can't decide if it's a prototype rushed to market, a failure of Nintendo's product testing system, or a loving fuck-you to Famicom gamers asking Irem for a taste of their arcade titles' famous difficulty walls. Also imagine if you were one of those highly-skilled players encountering the first half's bosses, all of whom are much easier than the levels before them for no good reason. Outdated stage design resembling Dragon Buster + inconsistent challenge and telegraphing to players = a weird 'ol time.
You know what this reminds me of? Psycho World for MSX2 and Master System, also released the same year. Hertz' sci-fantasy take on this combo of action-adventuring tropes pioneered by Konami, Capcom, etc. has an actual difficulty curve. It's got better visuals, a more pleasant soundtrack, and similar but far better mechanics + implementation in every way. The idea of tying your combat options into world progression exists in both games, but I'd much rather learn the ins and outs of the latter. Holy Diver constantly feels like a C-team effort finishing the work started by Irem's B-team, hence the gulf in quality between its nice visuals and shoddy backbone. Hell, the huge amount of slowdown throughout suggests unmet ambitions, and a commensurate lack of testing to account for enemy projectiles hiding in plain sight during the lag. I died so much just because I literally couldn't see bullets heading where I was—normally I love it when that happens in a classic arcade shooter! But we're nowhere near the harsh but fair likes of R-Type or Image Fight…just this ramshackle attempt to ride off other games' laurels.
What's baffling to me is how Irem/Tamtex's other '89 Famicom exclusive of note, a delightful riff on Rally-X called Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, feels more complete and supportive of its players but gets less attention overseas. This likely boils down to the haha-funny-lol rock references and familiar aesthetic of Holy Diver, but the difference in notability vs. quality really gets on my nerves. More aptly, it's that contrast between the hares and tortoises of the cult game sphere which stands out. Why play a solid, plainly iterative, score-focused arcade-y romp when this shambling but somehow appealing mess of an adventure beckons you? Playing through Holy Diver with 1989 skills, knowledge, and help from a talented friend or two (plus not knowing anything better to play) would have sweetened the deal. Today, though, I'm just glad this wasn't the best Irem had to offer for its Famicom audience. Metal Storm proved a year later how they could transfer their arcade greatness to the home with nary a compromise, too.
In summary, play Holy Diver if you're hankering for the '80s heavy metal garage band mixtape that sorely needed rehearsals and an original song or two. You might have to scrub or rewind a lot to reach the good moments, and there's plenty of studio-grade material from that milieu hitting the same vibes but with less pain. Just know that you'll either love this game's recalcitrance and irreverent attitude towards its cultural imprints, or you'll sigh and move on from this jalopy. I think it's worth a try for reasons beyond the kusoge reputation, mainly as an example of what Irem's console teams would avoid going forward. But I also had hopes that it'd hook me and having more staying power, even as a nigh unplayable crawl through chaos. The best I'll say is it often has pretty backgrounds & music, just nothing exemplary enough to transcend the game around them. Between my velvet cries, there's a truth that's hard as steel. You might even say ambition never dies; crimes against players are real~~~~~~
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023
Let's start with how this game ostensibly recreates Dio's famous album in action game form. I wish it had, but we're stuck with a lightly dressed-up imitation of better-known games, from Castlevania to Mega Man and beyond. Recontextualizing this non-committal attempt to iterate on other, better Famicom staples via a heavy metal coat of paint isn't the worst idea. Too bad this just doesn't evoke anything specifically like the musical influences it takes from. Where are the tigers?! The rainbows in the dark? Or anything beyond what the opening crawl exposits? I love the idea of saving the King Crimson family name just as much as anyone should, but here they've just slapped these references atop an otherwise workmanlike dark fantasy side-scroller. Compare this with the studio's old arcade dev chief, Tetsuo Nakano, asserting how you shouldn't "just set out to imitate someone else, for instance, you’ll always be behind the times".
I'll be fair and also criticize SEGA's Jewel Master for appropriating progressive rock and metal inspirations around the same time. There's a key difference, however: the Mega Drive game actually has a fitting prog soundtrack. Rarely do I start digging into a non-rhythm game via its music, but that's what separates something like Jewel Master from countless other throwaway action-platformers of the era. Holy Diver (the game, not the timeless work of Ronnie James Dio & co.) has a solid musical score from Irem soundsmith Masahiko Ishida, but I wouldn't call it one of his best. There's a few driving baroque gallops to enjoy here, a departure from his more avant-garde arcade work; shame the final stage and boss tracks are so irritating. Dissonance can work well for a game like this, just not when it accentuates the feeling that you, the player, aren't meant to have made it this far.
Nothing in this bastardization of the term "holy diver" feels player-friendly. It's one thing to be "hardcore" and another to just grind you down without any purpose beyond disincentivizing game rentals. The game loop starts out barbed and eventually becomes relentlessly lethal, going from tricky but learnable enemy patterns to minibosses every other screen with plenty of backup. Sure, I could viably learn and route the first half before this club week's end, but certainly not the latter portion. Irem's console developers decided to center most of the fatal encounters around rapid enemy spawns, which combine with pathetically short I-frames when hit to keep you on the backfoot. Now let's couple this with inexplicable, inconsistent input delays for essentials like crouching and jumping! It seems like they knew the game engine and physics have these issues, thus compensating via conspicuously fluid air control. (Diagonal attack aiming would have been nice…) From the very beginning, your reliable mobility and attack options aren't adequate for handling even the most basic foes with comfort. So here I am, stuck fighting basic right-to-left mooks I'd down quick in any other game like this, just with an unsatisfying handicap.
I've got not real investment in the story or in my conventional character advancement progression, either. What few new spells and items you get are necessary, but less than satisfying to use for the most part. You're often so deprived of magic points that using the more advanced offensive spells (Breaker and Thunder) gives diminishing returns. (Shoutouts to the former in stage 5, though, as its boss only seems possible with it.) On the other hand, Blizzard and Overdrive are practically required no matter your resources, whether for freezing lava & weaker enemies or to traverse later levels and survive their trap fights. Your basic pea-shooter attack loses its utility around mid-game except for saving mana, so the game revolves around mastering and carefully timing your spells. In my experience, this meant so many more retries than felt right for the scale of combat/puzzle complexity on offer. None of the lava sections are interesting by themselves, and the sheer repetition & re-skinning of enemy types left me wanting for any new interactions with my action verbs.
My time playing through to the end saw maybe hundreds of save states and reloads, enough to make me feel like Dio in the recording studio. I'm giving this software way too much credit with such a metaphor, but that's maybe the most relevant connection between it and those musical touchstones. Not that Holy Diver has any monopoly on the state-or-suffer experience among other kusoge or ball-busting challenges from this period. I'm just trying to process how a game can be this fascinatingly bad at delivering its purported narrative. Infinite continues mean little to me when that entails starting Kaizo-like levels over and over again, with not much gratification for learning the exact timing and enemy management between rooms. Our hero comes across less like a powerful, destined knight defeating evil, more like a renn-faire weekend warrior bumbling into the actual hell fathomed in medieval times. The best part of this game involves nothing about him—rather, I actually had a lot of fun using his dragon form to play a janky, all too short but empowering side-scrolling shooter.
So little about Holy Diver's sekaikan connects together, another symptom of rushed development. Take for instance any play on the titular song's lyrical depth vs. what one could charitably discern from the game. I'm not saving the people of the land from vice, temptations, or lack of faith; the only inhabitants in this world are monsters already. There's no higher justification of the protagonist's self-sacrificial fight against the Black Slayer, only a royalist desire to vanquish evil for his family's sake. Where even the hardest 'Vania faire in '89 gave you a fighting chance via wall-meat and other playground secrets, there's strikingly few optional risky rewards to find, just an unending torrent of trouble. Above all, this game can't decide if it's a prototype rushed to market, a failure of Nintendo's product testing system, or a loving fuck-you to Famicom gamers asking Irem for a taste of their arcade titles' famous difficulty walls. Also imagine if you were one of those highly-skilled players encountering the first half's bosses, all of whom are much easier than the levels before them for no good reason. Outdated stage design resembling Dragon Buster + inconsistent challenge and telegraphing to players = a weird 'ol time.
You know what this reminds me of? Psycho World for MSX2 and Master System, also released the same year. Hertz' sci-fantasy take on this combo of action-adventuring tropes pioneered by Konami, Capcom, etc. has an actual difficulty curve. It's got better visuals, a more pleasant soundtrack, and similar but far better mechanics + implementation in every way. The idea of tying your combat options into world progression exists in both games, but I'd much rather learn the ins and outs of the latter. Holy Diver constantly feels like a C-team effort finishing the work started by Irem's B-team, hence the gulf in quality between its nice visuals and shoddy backbone. Hell, the huge amount of slowdown throughout suggests unmet ambitions, and a commensurate lack of testing to account for enemy projectiles hiding in plain sight during the lag. I died so much just because I literally couldn't see bullets heading where I was—normally I love it when that happens in a classic arcade shooter! But we're nowhere near the harsh but fair likes of R-Type or Image Fight…just this ramshackle attempt to ride off other games' laurels.
What's baffling to me is how Irem/Tamtex's other '89 Famicom exclusive of note, a delightful riff on Rally-X called Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, feels more complete and supportive of its players but gets less attention overseas. This likely boils down to the haha-funny-lol rock references and familiar aesthetic of Holy Diver, but the difference in notability vs. quality really gets on my nerves. More aptly, it's that contrast between the hares and tortoises of the cult game sphere which stands out. Why play a solid, plainly iterative, score-focused arcade-y romp when this shambling but somehow appealing mess of an adventure beckons you? Playing through Holy Diver with 1989 skills, knowledge, and help from a talented friend or two (plus not knowing anything better to play) would have sweetened the deal. Today, though, I'm just glad this wasn't the best Irem had to offer for its Famicom audience. Metal Storm proved a year later how they could transfer their arcade greatness to the home with nary a compromise, too.
In summary, play Holy Diver if you're hankering for the '80s heavy metal garage band mixtape that sorely needed rehearsals and an original song or two. You might have to scrub or rewind a lot to reach the good moments, and there's plenty of studio-grade material from that milieu hitting the same vibes but with less pain. Just know that you'll either love this game's recalcitrance and irreverent attitude towards its cultural imprints, or you'll sigh and move on from this jalopy. I think it's worth a try for reasons beyond the kusoge reputation, mainly as an example of what Irem's console teams would avoid going forward. But I also had hopes that it'd hook me and having more staying power, even as a nigh unplayable crawl through chaos. The best I'll say is it often has pretty backgrounds & music, just nothing exemplary enough to transcend the game around them. Between my velvet cries, there's a truth that's hard as steel. You might even say ambition never dies; crimes against players are real
1979
Apply directly to the forehead! Wait, that's a joystick in your hand, not some placebo wax scam. (It's disgraceful how antique software like this never got on my local station's Jeopardy block while that snake oil did.) Now there's a car rolling right towards you in this garish maze, and you're weaving in and out of lanes. This isn't Pac-Man, but it's the beginnings of that formula, with dots to grab and Game Over-s to avoid. Sega-Gremlin had pioneered today's Snake clones with 1976's Blockade; Head On did much the same for maze games before the decade's end.
When this first released in Japan's arcades and adjacent venues, Space Invaders had spent a good half of a year dominating players' attention and wallets. Both games took some time to achieve their breakout sales, but Sega's success with this innovative, US-developed microprocessor board showed the industry that neither Atari's Pong nor Taito's alien shooter were fads. Genre variety was steadily creeping into game centers the world over, and Head On itself was one of the first hybrid titles moving past a ball-and-paddle model. In a sea of sit-down Breakout clones and taikan racers emphasizing the wheel and cabinet, Gremlin's new versus screen-clearing duel of wits must have seemed oddly esoteric.
It's very simple to us today, of course. You drive one car, the AI another, circling a single-screen maze of corridors filled with collectibles. The goal: grab every ball to get that score bonus, all while avoiding a direct collision! But it's easier said than done. Head On's secret sauce is the computer player's tenacity to run you down, driving faster and faster the more pellets you snag. Rather than accelerating in the same lane, you can move up and down to exit and enter the nearest two paths, which works to throw off the AI. The player's only got so much time before the other racer's just too fast to dodge, though, so slam that pedal and finish the course before then!
No extends, a barebones high scoring system, and limited variation across loops means this symmetrical battle of wits gets old fast. There's a bit of strategy to waiting for the AI driver to pass over dots and turn them red, which you can then grab for more points than before. By and large, though, this is as simple as the classic lives-based maze experience gets. I heartily recommend the sequel from that same year, which uses a more complex maze and a second AI racer to keep you invested for much longer. Even so, the original Head On more than earned its popularity. It improved and codified a genre merely toyed with earlier that decade. Gotcha and The Amazing Maze look like prototypes compared to this, something designer Lane Hauck probably knew at the time. Contemporary challengers from later that year, like Taito's Space Chaser or Exidy's Side Trak, each tried new gimmicks to stand out, but the Gremlin originals are frankly more polished and intuitive to play.
While Gremlin never again made such an impact on the Golden Age arcade game milieu, this formed part of Sega's big break into a market then led by Atari, Taito, and Midway. Monaco GP that same year kept up this momentum, as did Head On 2, and many clones spawned in the years to come. Namco 's own Rally-X iterates directly on this premise, though most know a certain pizza-shaped fellow's 1980 maze game better. Gremlin Industries arguably became more important as Sega's vector developer and U.S. board distributor going forward, but none of that would have happened if these early creations never went into production.
Anyone can give this a try nowadays on MAME or the Internet Archive. I'll also mention the various Sega Ages ports via the Memorial Collection discs for Saturn and PS2. This never got a more in-depth remake a la Monaco GP, and that's a shame given Head On's historic significance.
When this first released in Japan's arcades and adjacent venues, Space Invaders had spent a good half of a year dominating players' attention and wallets. Both games took some time to achieve their breakout sales, but Sega's success with this innovative, US-developed microprocessor board showed the industry that neither Atari's Pong nor Taito's alien shooter were fads. Genre variety was steadily creeping into game centers the world over, and Head On itself was one of the first hybrid titles moving past a ball-and-paddle model. In a sea of sit-down Breakout clones and taikan racers emphasizing the wheel and cabinet, Gremlin's new versus screen-clearing duel of wits must have seemed oddly esoteric.
It's very simple to us today, of course. You drive one car, the AI another, circling a single-screen maze of corridors filled with collectibles. The goal: grab every ball to get that score bonus, all while avoiding a direct collision! But it's easier said than done. Head On's secret sauce is the computer player's tenacity to run you down, driving faster and faster the more pellets you snag. Rather than accelerating in the same lane, you can move up and down to exit and enter the nearest two paths, which works to throw off the AI. The player's only got so much time before the other racer's just too fast to dodge, though, so slam that pedal and finish the course before then!
No extends, a barebones high scoring system, and limited variation across loops means this symmetrical battle of wits gets old fast. There's a bit of strategy to waiting for the AI driver to pass over dots and turn them red, which you can then grab for more points than before. By and large, though, this is as simple as the classic lives-based maze experience gets. I heartily recommend the sequel from that same year, which uses a more complex maze and a second AI racer to keep you invested for much longer. Even so, the original Head On more than earned its popularity. It improved and codified a genre merely toyed with earlier that decade. Gotcha and The Amazing Maze look like prototypes compared to this, something designer Lane Hauck probably knew at the time. Contemporary challengers from later that year, like Taito's Space Chaser or Exidy's Side Trak, each tried new gimmicks to stand out, but the Gremlin originals are frankly more polished and intuitive to play.
While Gremlin never again made such an impact on the Golden Age arcade game milieu, this formed part of Sega's big break into a market then led by Atari, Taito, and Midway. Monaco GP that same year kept up this momentum, as did Head On 2, and many clones spawned in the years to come. Namco 's own Rally-X iterates directly on this premise, though most know a certain pizza-shaped fellow's 1980 maze game better. Gremlin Industries arguably became more important as Sega's vector developer and U.S. board distributor going forward, but none of that would have happened if these early creations never went into production.
Anyone can give this a try nowadays on MAME or the Internet Archive. I'll also mention the various Sega Ages ports via the Memorial Collection discs for Saturn and PS2. This never got a more in-depth remake a la Monaco GP, and that's a shame given Head On's historic significance.
1980
The only wizarding Legacy I've been playing this year, and a much better use of coin than a certain transphobic, anti-Semitic dumpster fire released today.
1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.
Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.
While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.
Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.
1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.
Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.
While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.
Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.
1985
"The Great Escape" has inspired quite a lot of prison-break games, or even just sequences of that sort across the medium. Who doesn't have fond stories of humiliating those Nazis just to get some fresh air outside Castle Wolfenstein? How can I forget Codemasters' own Prisoners of War, a game all about playing a chronic escapee? Just as interesting are the more arcade-y translations of this premise, from Silas Warner's genre codifier to SNK's P.O.W.. Conveying the gravity of this scenario while still entertaining players is no small feat. I wish I could say Carry Lab's Daidassou was more successful at that, but it remains one of the best early puzzle action games for FM-7, PC-88, and similar Japanese PCs. It eschews realism in favor of fun farce, giving players just enough means to dash in, liberate each camp, and shoot or explode guards along the way.
Rather than playing a POW ready to break out, you're an outside operative instead, trotting into each stage with a pistol, scarce ammunition and grenades, and just a few lives. The game loop's simple: dodge or remove German troops on their patrols, nab their keys and other collectibles (either ammo or score items), and unlock cell doors to gather up GIs. Then you've got to escort one or more trails of POWs back to the starting point—think Flicky and other maze games of that vintage. Every level tries its best to iterate on this simple premise, with layouts becoming increasingly Escher-like and full of surprises. The isometric perspective both adds useful depth to the mazes and works against players in a frustrating but meaningful way. Just having the top-down view would equate this to Wolfenstein and other game center faire; this skewed angle instead makes you work to decipher these layouts, planning and improvising the further in you go.
Carry Lab usually wasn't the type to develop distinctly Golden Age-like arcade games for PC users. At most, they'd done third-person racing titles like F2 Grand Prix, or technically impressive pseudo-sprite scaling stuff a la SEGA's Buck Rogers. Nonetheless, I think Daidassou became a cult classic for good reason. It handles its fake sprites very well, with nary any slowdown nor worsening input delay. Controls are as clunky to learn and master as you'd expect from a mid-'80s numpad-based game, but the measured pace of play, and emphasis on routing to avoid enemies when reasonable, makes this easier to overlook. Whoever coded and/or designed these stages and systems had a grasp on what keeps players like me coming back. One's never powerful enough to just gun all the Nazis down, but on the flipside, a little bit of ingenuity and stealthy action goes a long way here.
This odd mashup of genres can lead to some fun scenarios. For example, the worst thing that can happen is when a guard recaptures one of The Boys you've just saved. Usually they just get thrown back in their initial quarters, but sometimes the enemy will instead place them inside a pink-doored cell which one can't just unlock. Now you gotta blow it open with a grenade you might not even have! Chasing those high scores (of which the default is already substantial) means using resources wisely and anticipating the worst, be it German reinforcements or snagging on corners long enough for them to catch you. Waves upon waves of mazes, soldiers, and wild goose chases start to blur together—the banality of war seeps into even a supposedly heroic effort. Should you finally fall in the line of duty, all one gets is a spot on the score table, nothing like a Purple Heart or Medal of Honor. But then again, it's the journey that counts, and Daidassou does well with its fundamentals no matter how slight it is elsewhere.
Many won't even touch this game once they see its art style, a garish blend of tans, browns, greens, and pinks befitting the 8-color high resolution video mode. And there's no cute, memorable audio to speak of, just tinny foot-taps, gunfire, and beeper jingles. I can describe Daidassou's aesthetic in one word: spartan. What's here is a no-frills, inglorious trudge through castles of combat and collect-a-Joe, with only these silly deformed caricatures of U.S. and German soldiers exuding any charm. The aforementioned depth-bending level designs also lend identity, but aren't as impressive as the game's pre-Cannon Fodder irreverence towards the Great War era. I can't accuse Carry Lab's product of lacking in content, as there's a huge amount of levels to complete, but I won't blame others for bouncing off once the repetition sets in. PC players back in the day got their money's worth here, assuming they weren't spending their days editing levels in Sokoban or Lode Runner, or just trying to solve the ordeals of xRPGs like Xanadu. This kind of anti-Great Escape must have seemed odd then, let alone now, yet it found an audience back when weird but compelling premises like this were commercially viable.
I'd ultimately love to say Daidassou got a worthwhile console or arcade port. Sadly it remained exclusive to these 8-bit J-PCs, with no follow-up titles to speak of. Carry Lab themselves got involved with Famicom development via their Disk System releases under Square's Disk Original Group (DOG) label, but they still didn't make a sequel while they had the chance. Like many once notable self-publishing developers of the early J-PC days, this company lasted up till the end of the '80s before financial woes led them to bankruptcy. (Entering a legal fight with dB-SOFT over plagiarizing their JET dictionary products for word processing didn't help, nor did a staff exodus around '87.) The game's designers at tabletop company Ad Technos are even more anonymous, much to my dismay. It's funny how the slow fade-out of Carry Lab and its classic games led to the founding of Alfa System, well known today for so many JRPGs, ADVs, etc. Still, I recommend this '85 prison action ditty despite getting lost in the shuffle of its creators' history and the more impressive games releasing around that time.
Rather than playing a POW ready to break out, you're an outside operative instead, trotting into each stage with a pistol, scarce ammunition and grenades, and just a few lives. The game loop's simple: dodge or remove German troops on their patrols, nab their keys and other collectibles (either ammo or score items), and unlock cell doors to gather up GIs. Then you've got to escort one or more trails of POWs back to the starting point—think Flicky and other maze games of that vintage. Every level tries its best to iterate on this simple premise, with layouts becoming increasingly Escher-like and full of surprises. The isometric perspective both adds useful depth to the mazes and works against players in a frustrating but meaningful way. Just having the top-down view would equate this to Wolfenstein and other game center faire; this skewed angle instead makes you work to decipher these layouts, planning and improvising the further in you go.
Carry Lab usually wasn't the type to develop distinctly Golden Age-like arcade games for PC users. At most, they'd done third-person racing titles like F2 Grand Prix, or technically impressive pseudo-sprite scaling stuff a la SEGA's Buck Rogers. Nonetheless, I think Daidassou became a cult classic for good reason. It handles its fake sprites very well, with nary any slowdown nor worsening input delay. Controls are as clunky to learn and master as you'd expect from a mid-'80s numpad-based game, but the measured pace of play, and emphasis on routing to avoid enemies when reasonable, makes this easier to overlook. Whoever coded and/or designed these stages and systems had a grasp on what keeps players like me coming back. One's never powerful enough to just gun all the Nazis down, but on the flipside, a little bit of ingenuity and stealthy action goes a long way here.
This odd mashup of genres can lead to some fun scenarios. For example, the worst thing that can happen is when a guard recaptures one of The Boys you've just saved. Usually they just get thrown back in their initial quarters, but sometimes the enemy will instead place them inside a pink-doored cell which one can't just unlock. Now you gotta blow it open with a grenade you might not even have! Chasing those high scores (of which the default is already substantial) means using resources wisely and anticipating the worst, be it German reinforcements or snagging on corners long enough for them to catch you. Waves upon waves of mazes, soldiers, and wild goose chases start to blur together—the banality of war seeps into even a supposedly heroic effort. Should you finally fall in the line of duty, all one gets is a spot on the score table, nothing like a Purple Heart or Medal of Honor. But then again, it's the journey that counts, and Daidassou does well with its fundamentals no matter how slight it is elsewhere.
Many won't even touch this game once they see its art style, a garish blend of tans, browns, greens, and pinks befitting the 8-color high resolution video mode. And there's no cute, memorable audio to speak of, just tinny foot-taps, gunfire, and beeper jingles. I can describe Daidassou's aesthetic in one word: spartan. What's here is a no-frills, inglorious trudge through castles of combat and collect-a-Joe, with only these silly deformed caricatures of U.S. and German soldiers exuding any charm. The aforementioned depth-bending level designs also lend identity, but aren't as impressive as the game's pre-Cannon Fodder irreverence towards the Great War era. I can't accuse Carry Lab's product of lacking in content, as there's a huge amount of levels to complete, but I won't blame others for bouncing off once the repetition sets in. PC players back in the day got their money's worth here, assuming they weren't spending their days editing levels in Sokoban or Lode Runner, or just trying to solve the ordeals of xRPGs like Xanadu. This kind of anti-Great Escape must have seemed odd then, let alone now, yet it found an audience back when weird but compelling premises like this were commercially viable.
I'd ultimately love to say Daidassou got a worthwhile console or arcade port. Sadly it remained exclusive to these 8-bit J-PCs, with no follow-up titles to speak of. Carry Lab themselves got involved with Famicom development via their Disk System releases under Square's Disk Original Group (DOG) label, but they still didn't make a sequel while they had the chance. Like many once notable self-publishing developers of the early J-PC days, this company lasted up till the end of the '80s before financial woes led them to bankruptcy. (Entering a legal fight with dB-SOFT over plagiarizing their JET dictionary products for word processing didn't help, nor did a staff exodus around '87.) The game's designers at tabletop company Ad Technos are even more anonymous, much to my dismay. It's funny how the slow fade-out of Carry Lab and its classic games led to the founding of Alfa System, well known today for so many JRPGs, ADVs, etc. Still, I recommend this '85 prison action ditty despite getting lost in the shuffle of its creators' history and the more impressive games releasing around that time.
Proof of what? The most charming, accessible yet busted, facile and creatively compromised Link to the Past ROM-hack you've ever imagined? That's Gunple and then some. If there's ever an iceberg meme for "seemingly innocuous but critically bizarre video games", this will rest near the bottom.
There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.
Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.
The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)
Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.
You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!
It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.
Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.
Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.
Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.
What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.
Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.
You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.
This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.
Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.
(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)
The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.
Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.
Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.
For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.
But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!
And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.
Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.
The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)
Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.
You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!
It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.
Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.
Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.
Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.
What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.
Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.
You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.
This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.
Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.
(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)
The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.
Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.
Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.
For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.
But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!
And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
2000
You know not a lick of FOMO until you peer into the Library of Babel that is original The Sims modding homepages. I ended up spending so much time modding this game that I realized I'd be better off messing around with the official expansions instead. And then I remembered that The Sims 2 effectively carries over all the original game's charm, and then some. Then again, I think the Second Life community inherited more of the "casual fever dream" creative aspirations that had been possessing social games like this since the days of MUDs (let alone worlds.com).
As something I played all the way back in kindergarten, not understanding an iota of the classic Maxis humor & sim details, The Sims has maintained its mystique well into modern day. From impromptu fires to questionable adulting skills, there's just a lot to take in whenever you start playing a new family. I learned how to play rotationally here before moving on to the sequels, knowing those would be even more intimidating. Consider this the training grounds for getting the most out of the series proper, perhaps.
One thing The Sims 2, 3, and definitely 4 are lacking in is Jerry Martin. His iteration on the long-form improvisations of virtuosos like Keith Jarrett & George Winston always puts a smile on my face, even knowing how simple, even workmanlike the chord cycles are. And the eclectic mix of big band, latin, & fusion jazz elsewhere sets this well apart from the more hyperactive, genre-agnostic work Mark Mothersbaugh excels at in the sequels. All in all, the audio direction is so damn focused.
Even if you skip this for more moddable, sophisticated series entries, it's both a fun nostalgia trip & one of the not-so-secretly best sim game soundtracks ever. The Sims remains very accessible today thanks to new installers & quality-of-life mods, plus a clean user interface enabling you in all the key areas. This was the Little Computer People of the Internet, even more than early MMOs like Ultima Online hinted at. A timeline w/o Maxis' quintessential suburban simulator would look unrecognizable, and I'm not sure I'd want it any other way.
As something I played all the way back in kindergarten, not understanding an iota of the classic Maxis humor & sim details, The Sims has maintained its mystique well into modern day. From impromptu fires to questionable adulting skills, there's just a lot to take in whenever you start playing a new family. I learned how to play rotationally here before moving on to the sequels, knowing those would be even more intimidating. Consider this the training grounds for getting the most out of the series proper, perhaps.
One thing The Sims 2, 3, and definitely 4 are lacking in is Jerry Martin. His iteration on the long-form improvisations of virtuosos like Keith Jarrett & George Winston always puts a smile on my face, even knowing how simple, even workmanlike the chord cycles are. And the eclectic mix of big band, latin, & fusion jazz elsewhere sets this well apart from the more hyperactive, genre-agnostic work Mark Mothersbaugh excels at in the sequels. All in all, the audio direction is so damn focused.
Even if you skip this for more moddable, sophisticated series entries, it's both a fun nostalgia trip & one of the not-so-secretly best sim game soundtracks ever. The Sims remains very accessible today thanks to new installers & quality-of-life mods, plus a clean user interface enabling you in all the key areas. This was the Little Computer People of the Internet, even more than early MMOs like Ultima Online hinted at. A timeline w/o Maxis' quintessential suburban simulator would look unrecognizable, and I'm not sure I'd want it any other way.