PasokonDeacon
Shelley Day, Ron Gilbert & co. making a cute 'lil kids adventure dominoes falling Humungous Entertainment co-founder convicted of defrauding bank to buy a dream home next door to Paul Allen
Oh, there's an actual game to talk about here, not just the sad irony of Humungous' downfall. It's just a rather simplistic experience aside from its then innovative take on the edutainment adventure. Most PC DOS & Mac software oriented towards this demographic at the time talked down to kids, rather than taking their wants and fears seriously. No more forced, obviously pedantic lessons you'd snooze through in the computer lab—Putt-Putt has an actual story to tell. And you're right in it with him, from proving your civic responsibility to homing a stray dog. It's a bit problematic in the sense that our purple funky four-wheeler mainly does this to, well, Join the Parade and all, but engaging and meaningful enough for almost any kindergartener. Just ignore how he could be saving lost puppies for its own sake. I got my start with Putt-Putt starting from the lunar sequel, but this felt oh so cozy and familiar in similar ways.
Gilbert's goals of empowering young players and avoiding condescension already show results here. The game opens with an effortless "tutorial" where Putt-Putt awakens at home and gets to toy around in the garage. It's here where you first encounter the studio's famous "click points", where seemingly mundane set dressing comes to life as you click around. Even the diegetic HUD, Putt-Putt's dashboard, has its own easter eggs, encouraging you to try interacting with anything on screen. From simple animations to complex multi-step interactions, these click points evolved from similar examples in earlier LucasArts and Cyan Worlds adventures, now used to intuitively advance the player's story by giving them a toybox of sorts.
That's really what saves this from a lower rating, as the plot is as basic and A-to-B as a Junior Adventure gets. Mowing lawns makes up the bulk of any challenge you'll find, and the puzzles couldn't be more elementary if they tried. Figuring out where to go and how to get the needed key items takes no time at all, for better or worse. This makes it a nice one-sitting game for its age group, no doubt. But the sequels add more interesting questing, click points, story sequences, etc. that Joins the Parade sorely lacks. It's the blueprint they'd all quickly surpass. I can't really poo-poo this adventure as such, nor can I rate it higher.
Can we at least talk about how uncanny Putt-Putt and his world looks in these first two MS-DOS entries? Pixel-era Humungous games had a lot of art jank, especially when characters look at the camera. Putt-Putt's proportions and facial expressions run the gamut from mildly off-model to humorously off-putting (pun intended). Some like to joke about him making a serial killer face here and in Goes to the Moon—I can totally see it. But that's also a charming reminder of the studio's beginnings, a bit before they moved to high-quality art and animation with Freddi Fish and their Windows 9x-era Junior Adventures.
What Myst did for the adult multimedia games market, Putt-Putt achieved for multimedia kids' games. This was an important step into the public eye for similar works like The Manhole, and a masterfully dialed-down, less lethal take on the point-and-click adventure during the genre's heyday. I just wish I could get more out of it nowadays, but that's what happens when you're used to the excellence of Pajama Sam or Spy Fox. Things only got more ambitious for the Junior Adventures in a short span of time, and it wasn't long before the parade left Putt-Putt's original story far behind.
Oh, there's an actual game to talk about here, not just the sad irony of Humungous' downfall. It's just a rather simplistic experience aside from its then innovative take on the edutainment adventure. Most PC DOS & Mac software oriented towards this demographic at the time talked down to kids, rather than taking their wants and fears seriously. No more forced, obviously pedantic lessons you'd snooze through in the computer lab—Putt-Putt has an actual story to tell. And you're right in it with him, from proving your civic responsibility to homing a stray dog. It's a bit problematic in the sense that our purple funky four-wheeler mainly does this to, well, Join the Parade and all, but engaging and meaningful enough for almost any kindergartener. Just ignore how he could be saving lost puppies for its own sake. I got my start with Putt-Putt starting from the lunar sequel, but this felt oh so cozy and familiar in similar ways.
Gilbert's goals of empowering young players and avoiding condescension already show results here. The game opens with an effortless "tutorial" where Putt-Putt awakens at home and gets to toy around in the garage. It's here where you first encounter the studio's famous "click points", where seemingly mundane set dressing comes to life as you click around. Even the diegetic HUD, Putt-Putt's dashboard, has its own easter eggs, encouraging you to try interacting with anything on screen. From simple animations to complex multi-step interactions, these click points evolved from similar examples in earlier LucasArts and Cyan Worlds adventures, now used to intuitively advance the player's story by giving them a toybox of sorts.
That's really what saves this from a lower rating, as the plot is as basic and A-to-B as a Junior Adventure gets. Mowing lawns makes up the bulk of any challenge you'll find, and the puzzles couldn't be more elementary if they tried. Figuring out where to go and how to get the needed key items takes no time at all, for better or worse. This makes it a nice one-sitting game for its age group, no doubt. But the sequels add more interesting questing, click points, story sequences, etc. that Joins the Parade sorely lacks. It's the blueprint they'd all quickly surpass. I can't really poo-poo this adventure as such, nor can I rate it higher.
Can we at least talk about how uncanny Putt-Putt and his world looks in these first two MS-DOS entries? Pixel-era Humungous games had a lot of art jank, especially when characters look at the camera. Putt-Putt's proportions and facial expressions run the gamut from mildly off-model to humorously off-putting (pun intended). Some like to joke about him making a serial killer face here and in Goes to the Moon—I can totally see it. But that's also a charming reminder of the studio's beginnings, a bit before they moved to high-quality art and animation with Freddi Fish and their Windows 9x-era Junior Adventures.
What Myst did for the adult multimedia games market, Putt-Putt achieved for multimedia kids' games. This was an important step into the public eye for similar works like The Manhole, and a masterfully dialed-down, less lethal take on the point-and-click adventure during the genre's heyday. I just wish I could get more out of it nowadays, but that's what happens when you're used to the excellence of Pajama Sam or Spy Fox. Things only got more ambitious for the Junior Adventures in a short span of time, and it wasn't long before the parade left Putt-Putt's original story far behind.
Love Is... conceiving your son Milo Casali by artificial insemination, to the chagrin of the Vatican, and announcing this proudly in your comic strip. Love Is... the Casali sons making their own staple of pop media in a similarly simple but unexpected way.
Love Is... the Plutonia Experiment, if I might be so bold. There's nothing but love throughout this entire mapset, a perennial standout among the classic Doom games for reasons debated to this day. For 1996, the mapping designs and concepts employed in PLUTONIA.WAD were avant-garde, yet seem very obvious and simple to modern Doom players. The Casali brothers were done playing by the rules and conventions fellow fan creators were bound to, from overt attempts at realism ("DoomCute" in today's parlage) to prizing adventuring and cheap thrills over exacting endurance tests of skill. For Dario & Milo, it was now or never to challenge, even brutalize their community. A kind of tough love, perhaps.
As a fanmade map pack turned second half of Final Doom, Plutonia serves as a necessary foil to TNT: Evilution's excesses and concessions. The Casalis bros. knew their community maps well, and had already been pushing the possibilities of the pre-source port Doom engine with solo releases like PUNISHER.WAD and BUTCHER.WAD. After id software witnessed their contributions to TNT.WAD—two of the most polished maps in that whole set, Dario's "Pharaoh" and Milo's "Heck"—they met and discussed making a whole new expansion pack to feature in Final Doom. The early maps they showed American McGee quickly became the start for Plutonia, which Dario & Milo had much less time to work on than TeamTNT had for their own mapset.
I could go further into The Plutonia Experiment's history, but Doomworld and Dario's own contributions paint more of the picture already. What you should know on a first playthrough is that one cannot just like this WAD. Nearly everyone I know in the Doom fandom either loves or hates this monument to mid-'90s FPS experimentation. It's more than reasonable to run through Plutonia on a lower difficulty since the maps are well-designed to retain their intensity and skill demands on Hurt Me Plenty at least. But the Casalis built this game as the kind of Japanese game show obstacle course any Doom player in '96 would approach with caution, if not trepidation. There's no remorse, little reprieve, and relatively few dull moments anywhere throughout Plutonia's alienating, jungle-laden mess of arenas, gauntlets, and set-pieces. Tough love indeed.
Not every level hits these marks. I can list some of my own pet-hate experiences, from the very poorly telegraphed "Indiana Jones" invisible bridge in MAP02: Well of Souls, to the cramped teleporting Archvile trap wrecking first-time players in MAP12: Speed. A couple of maps utterly put me off even now, mainly MAP20: The Death Domain (too many gotchas, not enough chances to take cover) or MAP30: Gateway to Hell (another needless tradition, the Icon of Sin finale). Otherwise, that leaves us with thirty difficult but rewarding maps combining Doom II's masterful combat design with more streamlined, less noodly levels to navigate. I think it's a winning combination, even if some 1996 contemporaries like the Memento Mori II mapset showcase prettier or more conceptually ambitious works.
One thing that absolutely works in Plutonia's favor is its difficult but fair approach to most combat scenarios. This is not anything like a Mario kaizo hack or masocore gaming in general. But you'll have every reason to approach fights strategically, using the right weapons and movement at the right time to survive. Both of the brothers prefer small but uniquely lethal combinations of monsters to the giant hordes you see in many popular maps today. Economy of design defines this set in contrast to not just Evilution, but other community-made packs from the time like Memento Mori. A single archvile, a couple revenants, and some cannon fodder imps...put them in a non-trivial space to travel around and you'll have one hell of a battle!
To this end, most maps shower you in higher-tier ammo for those upper-level weapons. Expect to learn the ins and outs of rocket launcher splash damage, or how to efficiently wield the BFG's invisible tracer spread fire. Practice hard enough and you'll get a feel for how to conserve super shotgun ammo as you mow down pinkies, or the basics of redirecting skeleton fireballs into other foes to get them infighting. The Casalis weren't making hard-ass shit for the sake of being hardasses. At a time when speedrunning demos were gaining popularity and the Doom community's skills and metagame were evolving, these two just wanted to gift everyone a bloody chocolate box for Valentine's. True love waits.
Funny thing is, these maps aren't as bizarre or off-putting as one might think, at least when you realize they're clever remixes of id's own levels! It makes sense how, with only several weeks to build and test their vanilla-compatible maps largely by themselves, the Casalis would chop up useful bits from Doom I & II for their own purposes. Milo's MAP21: Slayer is an obvious riff on 'O' of Destruction and other Romero levels, for instance, while Dario's works like MAP08: Realm liberally borrow ideas from Sandy Petersen's oft-maligned creations. This does mean the set can't be as revelatory or unique as it could have, despite some memorable new ideas like the iconic archvile maze in MAP11. Still, there's plenty of clever trope reuse all throughout Plutonia that had few if any contenders in the community back then. We're a decade-and-a-half off from projects like Doom the Way id Did, after all, and these time-saving homages to the original games came in clutch for the project.
Some make this more obvious than others, like the utterly chaotic, classic slaughtermap remix of MAP01: Entryway from Doom II. This new creation, Go 2 It, even seems at odds with the spare monster placement and emphasis on precision attrition Plutonia's advocated for up until now. Hundreds of baddies swarm the bones of an opening stage best known then as the main multiplayer 1v1 map. Yet applying your newfound reflexes and reactions to enemy attacks makes the original slaughter experience not just viable, but fucking brilliant to play. All these funny lil' guys on screen are just going to kill each other anyway if you can juke them into hitting one another. Simple strategies lead to satisfying successes. It's more than just "git gud", as some will profess—more so getting flexible and adapting to scary but beatable challenges as you go.
Without Plutonia, I'm not sure I'd have ever gotten into Doom mapping, let alone a ton of newer fan creations both easier and harder than Final Doom. This feels like a necessary leap in complexity and player demands, one that's often a bit too harsh and formulaic yet well-meaning with how it challenges you. If Doom II proved that id's template was no fluke, and community efforts like Evilution and Memento Mori II showcased the story-/adventure-driven possibilities of new maps, then Plutonia's a necessary course correction for its time. The Casalis loved not just how they could push the engine to its theorized limits, but how they could maximize Romero & Petersen's game design for all its worth. What others see as unfair (which I occasionally agree with), I see as ascetic and utterly focused on avoiding downtime. There's just enough negative space in these maps between encounters to give you a breather, but never too much to bore.
Love Is... a compelling mixture, a chemical reaction that keeps you invested. It might get ugly and wear you down at times, yet it keeps you coming back. Sure it can be painful, as much as life ought not to. But if it helps you grow stronger, more understanding and empathetic, is that such a bad trade? I've had a healthy relationship with The Plutonia Experiment for years now, one which taught me make simple but effective moves in combat, or fun maps for my friends to play. This kind of appreciation takes time and effort; I won't fault anyone if they can't commit to it, and I recognize the privileges one might need to get this far. In the end, I like to think it's all been worth the patience. True love waits.
Love Is... the Plutonia Experiment, if I might be so bold. There's nothing but love throughout this entire mapset, a perennial standout among the classic Doom games for reasons debated to this day. For 1996, the mapping designs and concepts employed in PLUTONIA.WAD were avant-garde, yet seem very obvious and simple to modern Doom players. The Casali brothers were done playing by the rules and conventions fellow fan creators were bound to, from overt attempts at realism ("DoomCute" in today's parlage) to prizing adventuring and cheap thrills over exacting endurance tests of skill. For Dario & Milo, it was now or never to challenge, even brutalize their community. A kind of tough love, perhaps.
As a fanmade map pack turned second half of Final Doom, Plutonia serves as a necessary foil to TNT: Evilution's excesses and concessions. The Casalis bros. knew their community maps well, and had already been pushing the possibilities of the pre-source port Doom engine with solo releases like PUNISHER.WAD and BUTCHER.WAD. After id software witnessed their contributions to TNT.WAD—two of the most polished maps in that whole set, Dario's "Pharaoh" and Milo's "Heck"—they met and discussed making a whole new expansion pack to feature in Final Doom. The early maps they showed American McGee quickly became the start for Plutonia, which Dario & Milo had much less time to work on than TeamTNT had for their own mapset.
I could go further into The Plutonia Experiment's history, but Doomworld and Dario's own contributions paint more of the picture already. What you should know on a first playthrough is that one cannot just like this WAD. Nearly everyone I know in the Doom fandom either loves or hates this monument to mid-'90s FPS experimentation. It's more than reasonable to run through Plutonia on a lower difficulty since the maps are well-designed to retain their intensity and skill demands on Hurt Me Plenty at least. But the Casalis built this game as the kind of Japanese game show obstacle course any Doom player in '96 would approach with caution, if not trepidation. There's no remorse, little reprieve, and relatively few dull moments anywhere throughout Plutonia's alienating, jungle-laden mess of arenas, gauntlets, and set-pieces. Tough love indeed.
Not every level hits these marks. I can list some of my own pet-hate experiences, from the very poorly telegraphed "Indiana Jones" invisible bridge in MAP02: Well of Souls, to the cramped teleporting Archvile trap wrecking first-time players in MAP12: Speed. A couple of maps utterly put me off even now, mainly MAP20: The Death Domain (too many gotchas, not enough chances to take cover) or MAP30: Gateway to Hell (another needless tradition, the Icon of Sin finale). Otherwise, that leaves us with thirty difficult but rewarding maps combining Doom II's masterful combat design with more streamlined, less noodly levels to navigate. I think it's a winning combination, even if some 1996 contemporaries like the Memento Mori II mapset showcase prettier or more conceptually ambitious works.
One thing that absolutely works in Plutonia's favor is its difficult but fair approach to most combat scenarios. This is not anything like a Mario kaizo hack or masocore gaming in general. But you'll have every reason to approach fights strategically, using the right weapons and movement at the right time to survive. Both of the brothers prefer small but uniquely lethal combinations of monsters to the giant hordes you see in many popular maps today. Economy of design defines this set in contrast to not just Evilution, but other community-made packs from the time like Memento Mori. A single archvile, a couple revenants, and some cannon fodder imps...put them in a non-trivial space to travel around and you'll have one hell of a battle!
To this end, most maps shower you in higher-tier ammo for those upper-level weapons. Expect to learn the ins and outs of rocket launcher splash damage, or how to efficiently wield the BFG's invisible tracer spread fire. Practice hard enough and you'll get a feel for how to conserve super shotgun ammo as you mow down pinkies, or the basics of redirecting skeleton fireballs into other foes to get them infighting. The Casalis weren't making hard-ass shit for the sake of being hardasses. At a time when speedrunning demos were gaining popularity and the Doom community's skills and metagame were evolving, these two just wanted to gift everyone a bloody chocolate box for Valentine's. True love waits.
Funny thing is, these maps aren't as bizarre or off-putting as one might think, at least when you realize they're clever remixes of id's own levels! It makes sense how, with only several weeks to build and test their vanilla-compatible maps largely by themselves, the Casalis would chop up useful bits from Doom I & II for their own purposes. Milo's MAP21: Slayer is an obvious riff on 'O' of Destruction and other Romero levels, for instance, while Dario's works like MAP08: Realm liberally borrow ideas from Sandy Petersen's oft-maligned creations. This does mean the set can't be as revelatory or unique as it could have, despite some memorable new ideas like the iconic archvile maze in MAP11. Still, there's plenty of clever trope reuse all throughout Plutonia that had few if any contenders in the community back then. We're a decade-and-a-half off from projects like Doom the Way id Did, after all, and these time-saving homages to the original games came in clutch for the project.
Some make this more obvious than others, like the utterly chaotic, classic slaughtermap remix of MAP01: Entryway from Doom II. This new creation, Go 2 It, even seems at odds with the spare monster placement and emphasis on precision attrition Plutonia's advocated for up until now. Hundreds of baddies swarm the bones of an opening stage best known then as the main multiplayer 1v1 map. Yet applying your newfound reflexes and reactions to enemy attacks makes the original slaughter experience not just viable, but fucking brilliant to play. All these funny lil' guys on screen are just going to kill each other anyway if you can juke them into hitting one another. Simple strategies lead to satisfying successes. It's more than just "git gud", as some will profess—more so getting flexible and adapting to scary but beatable challenges as you go.
Without Plutonia, I'm not sure I'd have ever gotten into Doom mapping, let alone a ton of newer fan creations both easier and harder than Final Doom. This feels like a necessary leap in complexity and player demands, one that's often a bit too harsh and formulaic yet well-meaning with how it challenges you. If Doom II proved that id's template was no fluke, and community efforts like Evilution and Memento Mori II showcased the story-/adventure-driven possibilities of new maps, then Plutonia's a necessary course correction for its time. The Casalis loved not just how they could push the engine to its theorized limits, but how they could maximize Romero & Petersen's game design for all its worth. What others see as unfair (which I occasionally agree with), I see as ascetic and utterly focused on avoiding downtime. There's just enough negative space in these maps between encounters to give you a breather, but never too much to bore.
Love Is... a compelling mixture, a chemical reaction that keeps you invested. It might get ugly and wear you down at times, yet it keeps you coming back. Sure it can be painful, as much as life ought not to. But if it helps you grow stronger, more understanding and empathetic, is that such a bad trade? I've had a healthy relationship with The Plutonia Experiment for years now, one which taught me make simple but effective moves in combat, or fun maps for my friends to play. This kind of appreciation takes time and effort; I won't fault anyone if they can't commit to it, and I recognize the privileges one might need to get this far. In the end, I like to think it's all been worth the patience. True love waits.
1976
Where does the versus arcade game go after Atari's Pong or Tank? Both games stuck to the ball-and-paddle paradigm in one way or another. Blockade was the solution: turn Etch-A-Sketch into an entropic competition to fill the screen. Negative space becomes the battleground for a duel of wits and reflexes, as either player tries to snake around each other without colliding. Gremlin's "money magnet" of '76 spawned a whole genre of imitators, leading to the modern snake game as popularized on Nokia phones and the Internet.
It's funny how you can't really play the original snake game, despite its outward simplicity and ease of emulation. We think of the genre today as a single-player experience when it started in the realm of 1-on-1 coin munchers. Arcade-goers still desired the kind of simple competitive pleasures Pong had provided, just with a novel game mechanic. From the moment you and your opponent start moving, with no way to stop, there's a clear, immediate tension. You're all walled in, and you've got nowhere to go but closer to your foe.
Pong, Tank, and Spacewar! before them worked because they provided the illusion of an open space you could play in, even if you either stuck to one plane of movement or had limited room for exchanging fire. I think the genius of Blockade comes from dispelling that notion entirely. You're never in any doubt about your opportunities to corner and trick the other player. And you've always got the harsh green borders of the screen to keep you focused, mentally hemmed in by the game. Clash is inevitable in this slowly filling digital world, promising not the freedom of an open space but a ruthless drive to destruction.
Today, it all seems a bit quaint. We're many decades separated from Blockade—the progenitor of not just snake games all about managing a depleting space, but the confinement of the fighting game genre too. As fast as this must have seemed in '76, it's laborious and simply dull to play today. Indeed, Gremlin engineer Lane Hauck's creation "wasn't a good game from the standpoint of making money...The industry loved Blockade but the public yawned.". Creators like him recognized the sea change this game proved was feasible, though. It wouldn't be long before Disney's TRON demonstrated how exciting this concept could be. Moreover, Blockade's success with operators showed that Tank was no fluke, that plenty of multiplayer dueling concepts beyond the ball and paddle were not just viable, but desirable.
All in all, I can't really hold much against a game that did well enough to get clones with names like Bigfoot Bonkers. I'd have never grown up chomping down every little dot on my flip-phone LCD screen were it not for this. (Hell, where would Head-On or Pac-Man be if Blockade hadn't paved the way?!) Of their pre-SEGA achievements, Gremlin's original screen filler has earned its place in arcade game history.
It's funny how you can't really play the original snake game, despite its outward simplicity and ease of emulation. We think of the genre today as a single-player experience when it started in the realm of 1-on-1 coin munchers. Arcade-goers still desired the kind of simple competitive pleasures Pong had provided, just with a novel game mechanic. From the moment you and your opponent start moving, with no way to stop, there's a clear, immediate tension. You're all walled in, and you've got nowhere to go but closer to your foe.
Pong, Tank, and Spacewar! before them worked because they provided the illusion of an open space you could play in, even if you either stuck to one plane of movement or had limited room for exchanging fire. I think the genius of Blockade comes from dispelling that notion entirely. You're never in any doubt about your opportunities to corner and trick the other player. And you've always got the harsh green borders of the screen to keep you focused, mentally hemmed in by the game. Clash is inevitable in this slowly filling digital world, promising not the freedom of an open space but a ruthless drive to destruction.
Today, it all seems a bit quaint. We're many decades separated from Blockade—the progenitor of not just snake games all about managing a depleting space, but the confinement of the fighting game genre too. As fast as this must have seemed in '76, it's laborious and simply dull to play today. Indeed, Gremlin engineer Lane Hauck's creation "wasn't a good game from the standpoint of making money...The industry loved Blockade but the public yawned.". Creators like him recognized the sea change this game proved was feasible, though. It wouldn't be long before Disney's TRON demonstrated how exciting this concept could be. Moreover, Blockade's success with operators showed that Tank was no fluke, that plenty of multiplayer dueling concepts beyond the ball and paddle were not just viable, but desirable.
All in all, I can't really hold much against a game that did well enough to get clones with names like Bigfoot Bonkers. I'd have never grown up chomping down every little dot on my flip-phone LCD screen were it not for this. (Hell, where would Head-On or Pac-Man be if Blockade hadn't paved the way?!) Of their pre-SEGA achievements, Gremlin's original screen filler has earned its place in arcade game history.
2003
Credit where it's due: at least the Game Boy Camera and SEGA's DreamEye got treated with enough dignity to never suffer a minigame collection this lame.
More credit goes to London Studio for injecting some much-needed, if dated amount of personality where it counts. I'll always fondly remember unpacking this honestly not terrible webcam (Logitech wasn't much better in '03), then loading into the cheeky, very post-Psygnosis tutorial movie explaining how to use the peripheral. Watching what might as well be the queen mother and her clones dancing to stock library disco as the Stanley Parable narrator goodbye-s you is still surreal. I wish the game itself had as much family-friendly anarchy. Part of me wants to argue the inconsistent art direction between minigames brings this closer to WarioWare or a modern game jam, but it's just not there.
With 12 minigames of varying quality on offer, Sony's making a go at matching its competitors in silly gimmickry. A good chunk of the experience revolves around variations on whack-a-mole, or something like those Moorhuhn (Crazy Chicken) shovelware titles you see every now and then. This whole idea of pairing a novel, limited but intriguing add-on console toy with what amounts to a prototype Carnival Games worked at the time. The folks & I had a solid time looking stupid in front of the TV, though my sister stuck mostly to our metal DDR pad since those games had far more substance. Little did we know this would have us wibblin' and wobblin' in the living room some years later—that was Wii Sports, though, which remains far more replayable in 2023.
EyeToy Play is fun enough for what it is, a serviceable pack-in game which took the safe route with proving that this idea could even work. Nintendo's aforementioned handheld lens toy has somehow managed to age better by dint of offering a uniquely lo-fi experience, though. Going from harsh but exotic monochrome games and photo printing to the blurry, often out-of-focus mess EyeToy provides seems a bit underwhelming nowadays. What I really lament, though, is the C-rate Y2K aesthetic dominating this collection. (Half of the game looks like it's recycling unused Psybadek concepts, mashing them up with Gorillaz and other post-Y2K intercontinental mascot designs.) It just reminds me too much of when these developers, a mix of ex-Psygnosis fellas and The Getaway's team, had more creative projects to work on.
Again, this isn't a strictly bad game. Most minigames work properly with the EyeToy in most room settings, and it's a bit amusing to wave your arms around, a kind of bastardized ParaPara Paradise or Samba de Amigo for the new era. Just temper your expectations if you collect one of these square, googly things and stick this in your PS2. I'd personally rather play SEGA Superstars if only for the IP variety and actual Samba de Amigo experience. However, the lack of ambition and increasingly quaint presentation behind this pack-in was kind of the point. If it was too good a free disc to keep playing, would you have bought all those other EyeToy games coming later? Consider how Nintendo fell into that trap later, with Wii Sports & Play offering enough for most owners to just skip out on following minigame collections (or settle for the bargain bin equivalents).
See, this is exactly what Thursday does to an oldhead like me. I get vaguely nostalgic thoughts about what passed muster for party night amusement at the end of elementary school, and then I think harder about what this was actually like. Youngsters have it so much easier in these social media dog days. EyeToy: Play was the offline TikTok dance simulator of its day, cheaper than a ParaPara cab every weekend but not much more advanced than some plastic maracas. Games like this fall through the cracks of half-remembered cringe and convenient historic amnesia—some would say for the better. I just feel sorry for all the UK devs Sony chopped into teams like London Studio, who then had to take any mid project they could get by their corporate sponsor. tl;dr Where the hell's the Wipeout minigame in this set?!
More credit goes to London Studio for injecting some much-needed, if dated amount of personality where it counts. I'll always fondly remember unpacking this honestly not terrible webcam (Logitech wasn't much better in '03), then loading into the cheeky, very post-Psygnosis tutorial movie explaining how to use the peripheral. Watching what might as well be the queen mother and her clones dancing to stock library disco as the Stanley Parable narrator goodbye-s you is still surreal. I wish the game itself had as much family-friendly anarchy. Part of me wants to argue the inconsistent art direction between minigames brings this closer to WarioWare or a modern game jam, but it's just not there.
With 12 minigames of varying quality on offer, Sony's making a go at matching its competitors in silly gimmickry. A good chunk of the experience revolves around variations on whack-a-mole, or something like those Moorhuhn (Crazy Chicken) shovelware titles you see every now and then. This whole idea of pairing a novel, limited but intriguing add-on console toy with what amounts to a prototype Carnival Games worked at the time. The folks & I had a solid time looking stupid in front of the TV, though my sister stuck mostly to our metal DDR pad since those games had far more substance. Little did we know this would have us wibblin' and wobblin' in the living room some years later—that was Wii Sports, though, which remains far more replayable in 2023.
EyeToy Play is fun enough for what it is, a serviceable pack-in game which took the safe route with proving that this idea could even work. Nintendo's aforementioned handheld lens toy has somehow managed to age better by dint of offering a uniquely lo-fi experience, though. Going from harsh but exotic monochrome games and photo printing to the blurry, often out-of-focus mess EyeToy provides seems a bit underwhelming nowadays. What I really lament, though, is the C-rate Y2K aesthetic dominating this collection. (Half of the game looks like it's recycling unused Psybadek concepts, mashing them up with Gorillaz and other post-Y2K intercontinental mascot designs.) It just reminds me too much of when these developers, a mix of ex-Psygnosis fellas and The Getaway's team, had more creative projects to work on.
Again, this isn't a strictly bad game. Most minigames work properly with the EyeToy in most room settings, and it's a bit amusing to wave your arms around, a kind of bastardized ParaPara Paradise or Samba de Amigo for the new era. Just temper your expectations if you collect one of these square, googly things and stick this in your PS2. I'd personally rather play SEGA Superstars if only for the IP variety and actual Samba de Amigo experience. However, the lack of ambition and increasingly quaint presentation behind this pack-in was kind of the point. If it was too good a free disc to keep playing, would you have bought all those other EyeToy games coming later? Consider how Nintendo fell into that trap later, with Wii Sports & Play offering enough for most owners to just skip out on following minigame collections (or settle for the bargain bin equivalents).
See, this is exactly what Thursday does to an oldhead like me. I get vaguely nostalgic thoughts about what passed muster for party night amusement at the end of elementary school, and then I think harder about what this was actually like. Youngsters have it so much easier in these social media dog days. EyeToy: Play was the offline TikTok dance simulator of its day, cheaper than a ParaPara cab every weekend but not much more advanced than some plastic maracas. Games like this fall through the cracks of half-remembered cringe and convenient historic amnesia—some would say for the better. I just feel sorry for all the UK devs Sony chopped into teams like London Studio, who then had to take any mid project they could get by their corporate sponsor. tl;dr Where the hell's the Wipeout minigame in this set?!
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!
Whoever escaped the Abenomics-era Konami developer prison to make this and keep it mostly ad-free for a couple of years: I salute you. May your cockles be warm and your curry plate tasty.
Jupiter took their precious sweet time doing more Picross collabs with IPs from corps like SEGA, yet the company no one expected put this out for free. And it barely feels like a free-to-play monstrosity, either! I picked up Pixel Puzzle Collection back around release since I wanted a meaty mobile game for the road, but got plenty more than I'd hoped for. There's a decades-spanning rogues' gallery of cool references made into nonograms here, from Frogger to Tokimeki Memorial. Playing these in a randomized sequence, albeit tuned for difficulty, makes it a smooth stop-and-go experience. I didn't realize that I'd gotten far into the total puzzles list until reaching the first batch of big multi-piece pictures, a good sign if ever.
UI and touch precision responsiveness are everything in a mobile nonogram app like this. I'm happy to report that, while a little stiff at times, this still feels better to use than the much bigger, easily discoverable competitors on the iOS marketplace. It rarely feels like I'm fat-fingering myself into a misplaced pip I'll regret later, or that I can't quickly redo grid sections when needed. This matters once you reach the game's second loop (its "Hard Mode"), where the inability to mark X pips means you must fill each line more carefully. After all, how am I gonna make my Shiori Fujisaki solutions come true if I keep messing up thirty minutes back?! (That's still more generous than the games she's from, no doubt.)
Pixel Puzzle Collection feels like an M2 employee's pet project at times, the kind of passionate mega-mini-game you'd make in the shadows and then slap into one of their compilations like it's nothing. This stood out five years ago mainly because it stood against all the stereotypes Konami's earned in recent years, most of which oppose that which this Picross set exalts. It's telling how classic Hudson Soft icons and characters from many games share plenty of space with the core Konami crew, as the corporation had become awfully good at erasing Hudson's history from digital stores by this point. There's nothing quite like hopping from Ganbare Goemon to Star Solider in a moment's notice, let's just put it that way.
For less experienced nonogram heads, there's a smartly designed hint system in play here. You get three daily solutions to use for any puzzle (plus the add for "boss" grids), and then a 10-minute cooldown for each new one after those. I like this more than the overly generous equivalents I see on my other phone Picross apps, and it feels naturally tuned to how much attention I'd give a hard puzzle before moving on. All I want now is more, which I guess is too much for Konami since they've done nothing for Pixel Puzzle Collection these past few years except shove more ads in. They really want you playing any other mobile game that could squeeze more coin, as if a prestige experience like this is somehow hurting their bottom line enough to deserve such harm. I hope whoever coded/designed the game is having an alright time, wherever they are.
All this sounds frustrating and it is when you consider how well Nintendo treats Jupiter's Picross works. Even then, the official Picross games you can get on the eShop now feel creatively stagnant, or just unwilling to toy with riskier concepts like that company used to. I'm not saying this weird misbegotten Konami counterpart is innovative, either, but it had so much sequel potential that's just getting squandered over time. Indie scene developers are taking the genre in all sorts of new directions while those who can access the kinds of resources Nintendo & Konami have are getting screwed. And I find it harder to recommend Pixel Puzzle Collection now because, while the core game's unchanged, all the new ads and annoyances remind you of what could have been. But I think it's still an easy choice for game fans who are either into nonograms or could use a cute diversion playing on nostalgia without feeling like a copout.
Jupiter took their precious sweet time doing more Picross collabs with IPs from corps like SEGA, yet the company no one expected put this out for free. And it barely feels like a free-to-play monstrosity, either! I picked up Pixel Puzzle Collection back around release since I wanted a meaty mobile game for the road, but got plenty more than I'd hoped for. There's a decades-spanning rogues' gallery of cool references made into nonograms here, from Frogger to Tokimeki Memorial. Playing these in a randomized sequence, albeit tuned for difficulty, makes it a smooth stop-and-go experience. I didn't realize that I'd gotten far into the total puzzles list until reaching the first batch of big multi-piece pictures, a good sign if ever.
UI and touch precision responsiveness are everything in a mobile nonogram app like this. I'm happy to report that, while a little stiff at times, this still feels better to use than the much bigger, easily discoverable competitors on the iOS marketplace. It rarely feels like I'm fat-fingering myself into a misplaced pip I'll regret later, or that I can't quickly redo grid sections when needed. This matters once you reach the game's second loop (its "Hard Mode"), where the inability to mark X pips means you must fill each line more carefully. After all, how am I gonna make my Shiori Fujisaki solutions come true if I keep messing up thirty minutes back?! (That's still more generous than the games she's from, no doubt.)
Pixel Puzzle Collection feels like an M2 employee's pet project at times, the kind of passionate mega-mini-game you'd make in the shadows and then slap into one of their compilations like it's nothing. This stood out five years ago mainly because it stood against all the stereotypes Konami's earned in recent years, most of which oppose that which this Picross set exalts. It's telling how classic Hudson Soft icons and characters from many games share plenty of space with the core Konami crew, as the corporation had become awfully good at erasing Hudson's history from digital stores by this point. There's nothing quite like hopping from Ganbare Goemon to Star Solider in a moment's notice, let's just put it that way.
For less experienced nonogram heads, there's a smartly designed hint system in play here. You get three daily solutions to use for any puzzle (plus the add for "boss" grids), and then a 10-minute cooldown for each new one after those. I like this more than the overly generous equivalents I see on my other phone Picross apps, and it feels naturally tuned to how much attention I'd give a hard puzzle before moving on. All I want now is more, which I guess is too much for Konami since they've done nothing for Pixel Puzzle Collection these past few years except shove more ads in. They really want you playing any other mobile game that could squeeze more coin, as if a prestige experience like this is somehow hurting their bottom line enough to deserve such harm. I hope whoever coded/designed the game is having an alright time, wherever they are.
All this sounds frustrating and it is when you consider how well Nintendo treats Jupiter's Picross works. Even then, the official Picross games you can get on the eShop now feel creatively stagnant, or just unwilling to toy with riskier concepts like that company used to. I'm not saying this weird misbegotten Konami counterpart is innovative, either, but it had so much sequel potential that's just getting squandered over time. Indie scene developers are taking the genre in all sorts of new directions while those who can access the kinds of resources Nintendo & Konami have are getting screwed. And I find it harder to recommend Pixel Puzzle Collection now because, while the core game's unchanged, all the new ads and annoyances remind you of what could have been. But I think it's still an easy choice for game fans who are either into nonograms or could use a cute diversion playing on nostalgia without feeling like a copout.
1995
Gotta see some games to believe 'em, and this might well be the most pop art looking-ass OutRun clone in existence. It's the spitting image of what an indie take on AM2's classic with Atari 2600 graphics could resemble today. Bio_100% (programmer "metys" specifically) first distributed this in 1994 across various Japanese BBS networks before the final version arrived a year later, both online and via shareware collections. Playing any racer this fast, arcade-y, and devil-may-care on an aging PC-98 platform must have been a revelation.
No one's gonna fool themselves into deeming this a realistic driving sim(-cade) experience, and it's better off for that. Polestar's got the kind of DIY spirit and a style all its own that newer takes on classic Super Scaler racers could learn from. You've got two sets of increasingly complex circuits to lap, a sleek sports car to learn the handling of, and the most uncanny, smoothly performing arts-and-crafts visual style I've seen in this genre. It's all clearly working within the boundaries of what a primarily text & static graphics-focused system can do best. And I love that kind of platform-pushing pride which acknowledges the limits of the PC-98 (let alone other home computers back then) but leads to seemingly impossible achievements anyway.
This short but sweet game runs best at on 486 chips running 20 MHz or more, a rather low figure which many users reached or exceeded, so it managed all its feats without becoming the Crysis of its community. Controls are the standard but responsive pedal, brake, and low-to-high shifter seen in OutRun and countless titles like it. What's nice is the detailed options/configuration screen Bio_100% provides, letting you change everything from the measurement system to in-game FOV! There's just enough customization here to compensate for a lack of extra vehicles, plus the low amount of content and novel replayability. It's also a rare later game to only use PSG or MIDI music, forgoing the PC-98's usual FM-synth sound chip even at the expense of some players. (Then again, never a better time to slap Tatsuro Yamashita in your Walkman.)
Simple keyboard & gamepad commands, plus ways to achieve a solid 60 FPS feeling even on 25 KHz refresh monitors, all fortify Polestar's gamefeel. Getting used to the game's sometimes slipper road physics can take a couple tries, but comes naturally over time. You're sharing lanes with hazards like errant trucks and breaks in the pavement; avoiding any off-roading when crossing water or passing by a big creepy clown animatronic (among other things) gives you plenty of challenge. But like any arcade auto-sseys worth a damn, you're mostly racing the time limit and your past records, zipping around with glee as the numbers tick up. There's not a whole lot for me to say here except that metys and his Bio_100% collaborators loved their classic racers and effortlessly brought the genre's strengths to an unlikely venue.
At this point in the PC-98's lifecycle, Windows 95 was beginning its reign of terror upon the once relatively isolated Japanese PC market. Commercial game makers either tried to work with Microsoft's initial, admittedly shoddy development tools for the new OS, or they bailed on their PC strongholds to find success on consoles instead. This left a big variety gap for doujin creators like metys, a coder accustomed to working remotely over BBS and now the Internet. Whether creating for the whole online country or just Comiket runs, Japan's changing PC gaming landscape behooved smaller, less financially bound game makers to pick up where studios like Telenet and Micro Cabin left off. Bio_100%'s renown in the doujin freeware space reached its peak at the middle of the decade, and Polestar represents this in so many ways.
Above all, it's rare to play an arcade-style racer this imbued with a bubble-era ethos and optimism, yet staunchly opposed to commercialization and any related baggage. So many players invested in the PC-98 could dial up their local ASCII net, pay much less to download this than even a Takeru vending-machine floppy game, and have a nightly favorite running on their turn-of-the-'90s PC within a day. The slow but sure democratization of online networking and doujin free-/shareware in mid-'90s Japan did wonders to buoy an ecosystem transitioning from one dominant power, NEC, to another under Windows. Polestar may not have a hydraulic taikan cabinet with cool gizmos, nor a bevy of extra tracks like you'd expect from the hot new racers on PS1 & Saturn. But with all else it offers at such high quality, it filled a niche in that special way only Bio_100% and a few other doujin creators could at the time. Perhaps a certain Team Shanghai Alice learned a thing or two from this group's smart decisions.
Like with most Bio_100% releases from '90-'96, Polestar's easily accessible via PC-98 emulator running either the floppies or a multi-game compilation. Jumping between this and the group's earlier, rougher but similarly joyful titles makes it even easier to appreciate what the '94 racer accomplished. It's a shame how the group basically died down and soon disbanded as Windows really took over, with Bio_100% creators moving further into their careers away from doujin development. But if that meant ending on such a high note between this and Sengoku TURB for Dreamcast, then I can't complain much. Polestar's a sporty circuit racer for the people, and one of the best PC-98 games you can just jump into right now, no extra work or mental prep required.
No one's gonna fool themselves into deeming this a realistic driving sim(-cade) experience, and it's better off for that. Polestar's got the kind of DIY spirit and a style all its own that newer takes on classic Super Scaler racers could learn from. You've got two sets of increasingly complex circuits to lap, a sleek sports car to learn the handling of, and the most uncanny, smoothly performing arts-and-crafts visual style I've seen in this genre. It's all clearly working within the boundaries of what a primarily text & static graphics-focused system can do best. And I love that kind of platform-pushing pride which acknowledges the limits of the PC-98 (let alone other home computers back then) but leads to seemingly impossible achievements anyway.
This short but sweet game runs best at on 486 chips running 20 MHz or more, a rather low figure which many users reached or exceeded, so it managed all its feats without becoming the Crysis of its community. Controls are the standard but responsive pedal, brake, and low-to-high shifter seen in OutRun and countless titles like it. What's nice is the detailed options/configuration screen Bio_100% provides, letting you change everything from the measurement system to in-game FOV! There's just enough customization here to compensate for a lack of extra vehicles, plus the low amount of content and novel replayability. It's also a rare later game to only use PSG or MIDI music, forgoing the PC-98's usual FM-synth sound chip even at the expense of some players. (Then again, never a better time to slap Tatsuro Yamashita in your Walkman.)
Simple keyboard & gamepad commands, plus ways to achieve a solid 60 FPS feeling even on 25 KHz refresh monitors, all fortify Polestar's gamefeel. Getting used to the game's sometimes slipper road physics can take a couple tries, but comes naturally over time. You're sharing lanes with hazards like errant trucks and breaks in the pavement; avoiding any off-roading when crossing water or passing by a big creepy clown animatronic (among other things) gives you plenty of challenge. But like any arcade auto-sseys worth a damn, you're mostly racing the time limit and your past records, zipping around with glee as the numbers tick up. There's not a whole lot for me to say here except that metys and his Bio_100% collaborators loved their classic racers and effortlessly brought the genre's strengths to an unlikely venue.
At this point in the PC-98's lifecycle, Windows 95 was beginning its reign of terror upon the once relatively isolated Japanese PC market. Commercial game makers either tried to work with Microsoft's initial, admittedly shoddy development tools for the new OS, or they bailed on their PC strongholds to find success on consoles instead. This left a big variety gap for doujin creators like metys, a coder accustomed to working remotely over BBS and now the Internet. Whether creating for the whole online country or just Comiket runs, Japan's changing PC gaming landscape behooved smaller, less financially bound game makers to pick up where studios like Telenet and Micro Cabin left off. Bio_100%'s renown in the doujin freeware space reached its peak at the middle of the decade, and Polestar represents this in so many ways.
Above all, it's rare to play an arcade-style racer this imbued with a bubble-era ethos and optimism, yet staunchly opposed to commercialization and any related baggage. So many players invested in the PC-98 could dial up their local ASCII net, pay much less to download this than even a Takeru vending-machine floppy game, and have a nightly favorite running on their turn-of-the-'90s PC within a day. The slow but sure democratization of online networking and doujin free-/shareware in mid-'90s Japan did wonders to buoy an ecosystem transitioning from one dominant power, NEC, to another under Windows. Polestar may not have a hydraulic taikan cabinet with cool gizmos, nor a bevy of extra tracks like you'd expect from the hot new racers on PS1 & Saturn. But with all else it offers at such high quality, it filled a niche in that special way only Bio_100% and a few other doujin creators could at the time. Perhaps a certain Team Shanghai Alice learned a thing or two from this group's smart decisions.
Like with most Bio_100% releases from '90-'96, Polestar's easily accessible via PC-98 emulator running either the floppies or a multi-game compilation. Jumping between this and the group's earlier, rougher but similarly joyful titles makes it even easier to appreciate what the '94 racer accomplished. It's a shame how the group basically died down and soon disbanded as Windows really took over, with Bio_100% creators moving further into their careers away from doujin development. But if that meant ending on such a high note between this and Sengoku TURB for Dreamcast, then I can't complain much. Polestar's a sporty circuit racer for the people, and one of the best PC-98 games you can just jump into right now, no extra work or mental prep required.
2000
One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.
We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.
One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.
I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.
Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to
In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.
The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit
Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.
L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!
Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.
The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?
There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead
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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.
Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.
And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.
Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.
No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.
To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?
LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.
In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?
Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.
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End of spoilers
One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.
Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.
Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.
ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.
We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.
One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.
I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.
Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to
In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.
The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit
Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.
L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!
Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.
The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?
There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead
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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.
Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.
And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.
Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.
No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.
To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?
LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.
In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?
Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.
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End of spoilers
One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.
Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.
Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.
ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
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
It is the year 198X. Fragile lives persist in the flow of electric frames, traveling wide across the pre-Internet infrastructure, looking for someone or something. The progeny of the ARPANET, Community Memory, and PLATO networks now spread from one bulletin board system (BBS) to another, bringing the soapbox nature of CB radio into the information age. But danger lurks beneath all this novelty and optimism. The Cold War looms as ever, and rogue threats come in many guises, from hackers to aberrant chatbots. Anything can happen in this world, so long as it runs on telephone wire.
That's the romanticized frame through which this early standout from the 2010 RenPy scene immerses and involves you. A few older puzzle and adventure titles had already dabbled with diegetic story-telling about and set within earlier, tight-knit computerized communities. There's the seminal Hacker from 1985, combining illicit access with a cinematic plot (later succeeded by 2001's Uplink). La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs, also an '85 release, told a more personal tale of a woman dealing with sexual harassment on France's proto-BBS system called Minitel. But a fully character-driven plot combining these BBS-era subjects into one cohesive story, yet relatable to a post-Internet age? It's hardly what author Christine Love had set out to accomplish, yet here we are.
Today you can find plenty of these "literal computing games" where you mainly interact with a fictional PC or terminal interface, doing anything from traversing networks to forensics or surveillance work, etc. Digital manages to do a bit of everything without spreading itself too thin. You start off just learning the basics of your Amie Workbench OS (oh how I love the blatant Amiga-ness throughout!) before meeting welcoming strangers on your local nets. This quickly turns into a larger mystery when your new friend and potential lover Emilia goes missing, all while the BBS you chatted on has gone up in smoke. Thankfully you know a few others willing to help figure out what's going on, either by providing shady software in messages or giving you useful information like phone numbers. You do all this while jamming out to what sounds suspiciously like mod-tracker music, complementing the Amiga stylings of your desktop.
C. Love was already a known quantity in NaNoRenMo game jams, writing one or more short but satiating visual novels within a month. This wasn't meant to be any different, but the game made a strong first impression that lasts to this day. Booting into Amie, laboriously typing in each address to dial up networks, and hearing that gloriously shrill modem song every time…it's all here, fellas. The UI mechanics used in Digital: A Love Story make it easy to slip into a period-accurate mindset; clever quality-of-life shortcuts, like your notepad switching tabs based on context, keep your playthrough smooth and well-paced despite the intentional tedium. I had a lot of fun just downloading & replying to each public or private message, as well as guessing passwords or even the penultimate BBS' address before the story gave me a direct clue.
So there's a strong interplay between these light textual puzzles and the simple but engrossing alternate history you uncover along the way. The whole concept of accidentally creating a self-evolving AI, which itself needs to create separate network nodes to store its compartmentalized personalities, is compelling on its own (if not exactly original). We quickly go from thinking we were talking to a basic chatbot this whole time to grokking the sheer scope of techno-existential advancement. Digital excels at wrapping an idealized history of the real BBS milieu with an alternate history needed both for plot and after-the-fact critique. This also allows C. Love to justify your main cast interactions by having a unifying antagonist, which you only deal with indirectly. The game provides more than a few good reasons to care about Emilia and the friends you make along the way, inching towards a suitably cyberpunk-ish calamity.
Digital isn't afraid to indulge many classic cyberpunk ideas, usually for good reason. You're not going to bust down any corporation's doors or upset the military-industrial complex here, but spoofing long-distance calling card numbers rarely gets old. I wish the game provided many more gizmos to download and use from your desktop, not just one or two plot trinkets like a brute-force password cracker or C recompiler. Still, having these interface doodads to mess with is fun even before their progression utility. I've already spoiled quite a bit for this admittedly 2-hour game, but I'll say its take on near-future AIs and their human interactions is serviceable. Nothing here's as compelling as the William Gibson examples alluded to mid-way through, just solidly characterized in that late-'80s genre mold. The most cyberpunk we get here, otherwise, is a positive outlook on casual hacking in a time before federal regulations and enforced oversight curbed the power of grassroots networks, thus incentivizing adoption of the Internet & WWW.
What's clearly more on C. Love's mind this whole time is the nature of remote relationships. Finding out the truth behind Eliza's disappearance may be the main plot thrust, but understanding why she's fallen in love with you is nearly as important. The creator's said in later blogs & interviews how she wanted to balance a universal love story with romantic themes relatable to a queer audience much like herself. (Any cursory look at her works since will show much this matters to her!) The whole premise of finding a deep, inter-personal connection via the most remote means a lot more when talking about historically marginalized LGBTQIA+ people. Running into a sapphic chatbot, one whose first post on your home BBS is literally a love poem, is all too believable and relevant. Later on, you'll run into a user posting a series of fantasy wargames (which, like other games warez, isn't playable here due to the game's quick dev time), all of which involve a lesbian warrior queen. Cyberpunk can and should highlight people forced into the periphery of the mainstream, those who fight back against a harmful status quo even at their own expense.
Story ending spoilers ahead!
This all comes together when, after reviving Eliza on your Amie PC using a compiler and her crash dump/log, she endeavors to defeat Reaper at the cost of her own digital life. For as much as she loves you, the player, her biggest concern now is saving all the aspects of Mother from this rogue worm meant to keep them all in check. Sure enough, trying to access any networks at end-game is futile, as Reaper's bulldozed through every system it can, with nothing but black screens of death remaining. Putting a larger existential goal before one's love is no easy decision, and I'm still not convinced this works much better than a typical kill-your-gays plot resolution. To the writer's credit, Eliza gives you all the warning, apologies, and resignation one could while asking to be armed with an anti-viral payload that will destroy her as well. It's your choice whether or not to see this tragic comedy through to the end.
Plot spoilers end here
Given the unsubtle nods to Shakespeare, and Digital's generally hopeful outlook on how cyberpunk elements can bleed into our world without destroying us or enriching the 1%, I think the story ended on steady ground. There's a cool outro with commentary from BBS users recalling the plot's events, and the game has an unction of replay value in case you want to look for more lore hidden in plain sight. I could do this all over again just for the smartly written bantz between amateurs and pros across each node! But this ended up being a memorable one-and-done too, effortlessly meshing its diegetic play with a likable dramedy. Digital: A Love Story became a surprise cause celebre not long after its release, making C. Love's career and paving the way for countless newer computing adventures throughout indie circles. It's a swift play and, for me, practically required to understand the origins of this genre movement as it exists now.
That's the romanticized frame through which this early standout from the 2010 RenPy scene immerses and involves you. A few older puzzle and adventure titles had already dabbled with diegetic story-telling about and set within earlier, tight-knit computerized communities. There's the seminal Hacker from 1985, combining illicit access with a cinematic plot (later succeeded by 2001's Uplink). La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs, also an '85 release, told a more personal tale of a woman dealing with sexual harassment on France's proto-BBS system called Minitel. But a fully character-driven plot combining these BBS-era subjects into one cohesive story, yet relatable to a post-Internet age? It's hardly what author Christine Love had set out to accomplish, yet here we are.
Today you can find plenty of these "literal computing games" where you mainly interact with a fictional PC or terminal interface, doing anything from traversing networks to forensics or surveillance work, etc. Digital manages to do a bit of everything without spreading itself too thin. You start off just learning the basics of your Amie Workbench OS (oh how I love the blatant Amiga-ness throughout!) before meeting welcoming strangers on your local nets. This quickly turns into a larger mystery when your new friend and potential lover Emilia goes missing, all while the BBS you chatted on has gone up in smoke. Thankfully you know a few others willing to help figure out what's going on, either by providing shady software in messages or giving you useful information like phone numbers. You do all this while jamming out to what sounds suspiciously like mod-tracker music, complementing the Amiga stylings of your desktop.
C. Love was already a known quantity in NaNoRenMo game jams, writing one or more short but satiating visual novels within a month. This wasn't meant to be any different, but the game made a strong first impression that lasts to this day. Booting into Amie, laboriously typing in each address to dial up networks, and hearing that gloriously shrill modem song every time…it's all here, fellas. The UI mechanics used in Digital: A Love Story make it easy to slip into a period-accurate mindset; clever quality-of-life shortcuts, like your notepad switching tabs based on context, keep your playthrough smooth and well-paced despite the intentional tedium. I had a lot of fun just downloading & replying to each public or private message, as well as guessing passwords or even the penultimate BBS' address before the story gave me a direct clue.
So there's a strong interplay between these light textual puzzles and the simple but engrossing alternate history you uncover along the way. The whole concept of accidentally creating a self-evolving AI, which itself needs to create separate network nodes to store its compartmentalized personalities, is compelling on its own (if not exactly original). We quickly go from thinking we were talking to a basic chatbot this whole time to grokking the sheer scope of techno-existential advancement. Digital excels at wrapping an idealized history of the real BBS milieu with an alternate history needed both for plot and after-the-fact critique. This also allows C. Love to justify your main cast interactions by having a unifying antagonist, which you only deal with indirectly. The game provides more than a few good reasons to care about Emilia and the friends you make along the way, inching towards a suitably cyberpunk-ish calamity.
Digital isn't afraid to indulge many classic cyberpunk ideas, usually for good reason. You're not going to bust down any corporation's doors or upset the military-industrial complex here, but spoofing long-distance calling card numbers rarely gets old. I wish the game provided many more gizmos to download and use from your desktop, not just one or two plot trinkets like a brute-force password cracker or C recompiler. Still, having these interface doodads to mess with is fun even before their progression utility. I've already spoiled quite a bit for this admittedly 2-hour game, but I'll say its take on near-future AIs and their human interactions is serviceable. Nothing here's as compelling as the William Gibson examples alluded to mid-way through, just solidly characterized in that late-'80s genre mold. The most cyberpunk we get here, otherwise, is a positive outlook on casual hacking in a time before federal regulations and enforced oversight curbed the power of grassroots networks, thus incentivizing adoption of the Internet & WWW.
What's clearly more on C. Love's mind this whole time is the nature of remote relationships. Finding out the truth behind Eliza's disappearance may be the main plot thrust, but understanding why she's fallen in love with you is nearly as important. The creator's said in later blogs & interviews how she wanted to balance a universal love story with romantic themes relatable to a queer audience much like herself. (Any cursory look at her works since will show much this matters to her!) The whole premise of finding a deep, inter-personal connection via the most remote means a lot more when talking about historically marginalized LGBTQIA+ people. Running into a sapphic chatbot, one whose first post on your home BBS is literally a love poem, is all too believable and relevant. Later on, you'll run into a user posting a series of fantasy wargames (which, like other games warez, isn't playable here due to the game's quick dev time), all of which involve a lesbian warrior queen. Cyberpunk can and should highlight people forced into the periphery of the mainstream, those who fight back against a harmful status quo even at their own expense.
Story ending spoilers ahead!
This all comes together when, after reviving Eliza on your Amie PC using a compiler and her crash dump/log, she endeavors to defeat Reaper at the cost of her own digital life. For as much as she loves you, the player, her biggest concern now is saving all the aspects of Mother from this rogue worm meant to keep them all in check. Sure enough, trying to access any networks at end-game is futile, as Reaper's bulldozed through every system it can, with nothing but black screens of death remaining. Putting a larger existential goal before one's love is no easy decision, and I'm still not convinced this works much better than a typical kill-your-gays plot resolution. To the writer's credit, Eliza gives you all the warning, apologies, and resignation one could while asking to be armed with an anti-viral payload that will destroy her as well. It's your choice whether or not to see this tragic comedy through to the end.
Plot spoilers end here
Given the unsubtle nods to Shakespeare, and Digital's generally hopeful outlook on how cyberpunk elements can bleed into our world without destroying us or enriching the 1%, I think the story ended on steady ground. There's a cool outro with commentary from BBS users recalling the plot's events, and the game has an unction of replay value in case you want to look for more lore hidden in plain sight. I could do this all over again just for the smartly written bantz between amateurs and pros across each node! But this ended up being a memorable one-and-done too, effortlessly meshing its diegetic play with a likable dramedy. Digital: A Love Story became a surprise cause celebre not long after its release, making C. Love's career and paving the way for countless newer computing adventures throughout indie circles. It's a swift play and, for me, practically required to understand the origins of this genre movement as it exists now.
1989
Compile's arcade shooters have earned a reputation, for better or worse. Aleste Gaiden isn't going to change your mind about that. It's a solid appetizer, possessing many of the distinctive bits found in its series cousins; you won't find a less offensive '80s STG from the long-defunct studio. Likewise, its limited development time and budget hints at another purpose, playing sideshow to the more ambitious Aleste 2 releasing two months later. All this works to the game's benefit, turning a competent but standard riff on previous MSX shooters into something more contextually interesting.
Some would take one look at this and say "well there's barely anything here!", but that's got an explanation too. Just as European micro-computers had their own budget games market, so too did the Japanese PC sphere. Reprint brands like SOFBOX syndicated software from many companies like Bothtec or Falcom. Brother Industries ran a floppy disk vending machine service, their Takeru brand, to cheaply distribute big-box games on new or rewritable disks, plus many indie exclusives. And, akin to the cover disks packed in with hobby publications throughout the UK and other countries, disk magazines spread throughout Japan via MSXFan and competing lines, giving most users something to slap into their machine. Compile stood out here, creating and distributing their own Disc Station print-plus-digital magazine via mail order. They only sold Aleste Gaiden and similarly short affairs through this service, either in the main series or in special, somewhat pricier box volumes.
Like its companion piece on Disc Station Special Vol. 4, the more idiosyncratic strategy-sim Children's Wars, Aleste Gaiden eats up a whole disk, but feels much slimmer on content than pricier one-disk MSX2 titles. The slow, music-less opening shows a familiar hero, Raymond Waizen, donning a powerful exoskeleton before leaving to defeat the aberrant DIA 51 system yet again. We're not blasting through the typical sci-fi planet environments here, though. This side-story's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, with the first stage literally having you dodge fallen Statue of Liberty heads as if the 3D printers all got carried away! This game only has 5 short levels, generally increasing in challenge while recycling several enemy types aside from bosses. It's an economic affair, even borrowing most of its soundtrack from the recent MSX2 version of Golvellius, though at least the opening and ending themes are new.
Mechanics are usually what Compile's classic STGs do best, and that's generally the case here. Ray's got a decent pea-shooter attack, plus a Raiden-style choice between three shot types you pick up from destroyable enemies. I stuck to the initial throwing stars and had no trouble that way, but the fast lasers and much slower fire circles can suit others' playstyles better. Another ballistic blimp drops the Big O, which you can pick up to add a max of two Gradius-style option clones trailing behind you. These shadow fighters never die and let you spread fire across the screen with some finesse, a smart compromise to help players while avoiding slowdown. Rounding everything out is the jump button. You heard me right: there's platforming in this one, albeit on the simple side to add variety. There's no concept of height for dodging bullets, but you'll need to hop around unless falling to your doom sounds fun (let alone catching on obstacles).
Pair all the above with customary vertical scrolling stages and that's the game loop. Aleste Gaiden is far from ambitious, content to stay within the lane set by Konami's Knightmare & Capcom's Commando years before. Not even Compile's famed numbered weapon system from previous Zanac and Aleste games appears here! So this game rides or dies based on how fun the levels themselves are, more than its basic systems. I'm happy to report that Gaiden's brevity works in its favor. None of the stages ever overstay their welcome the way you'd expect from some of its contemporaries. Enemies and waves are simple in concept, but combine in ways that can throw you off when least expected. The platforming integrates into bullet dodging and item management without feeling vestigial. Really, the only weak link is the boss design overall, with none of the end-level baddies ever posing a threat like the screens before them.
Another plus for Aleste Gaiden is its presentation. The graphics look nice for a later MSX2 game, with consistently smooth vertical scrolling and sprite movement. Everything sports a colorful but recognizably cyberpunk-ish design philosophy, from the generic robo-soliders you gun down to stage 3's eerily angelic boss fight. Compile's team did what they could to imply a story progression with so little, taking you from city streets to wilderness ruins before cutting sharply to an alien-looking enemy headquarters with hexagonal flooring. Most importantly, there's scarcely any moment where I couldn't read and dodge enemy bullet trails, and that's saying something since screen readability in Compile J-PC STGs wasn't that great back then. Maybe the music's mostly lifted from Golvellius, but they made smart track choices nonetheless; I've got nothing to say about the sound design, either. It's a handsome snack of an MSX2 shooter.
So if the game's pleasant but less than memorable, why does this one stick out so much to me? I think it's that feeling of Compile revisiting their roots, right before the ascent of Madou Monogatari & especially Puyo Puyo among the company's brands. Aleste Gaiden's largely the work of staff who'd just joined or been recruited, a way for them to hone their development skills while shipping a fun game. It makes sense that this game, though using MSX2-level audiovisuals, could easily work on an early-'80s original MSX with some smart coding. Compile's own veterans had moved on to more ambitious projects like The Guardian Legend or Alien Crush, but here's a throwback shooter at a time when that concept seemed novel. Despite having every chance to make some nostalgic cash-in on Xevious and others in the Japanese arcade pantheon, Aleste Gaiden retains something of its own identity, mainly via its platforming & on-ground running and gunning. Amateurish, yet refined…that's a winning combo to me.
Give this late-'80s little ditty a try if you're bored and want a quick 1CC. (The game also gives you infinite continues, which can help if those tricky patterns on the final stage keep you down.) Better yet, treat this as an intro to Compile's vast Disc Station series of games, doodads, and other neat software things. Their disk magazines would only improve over time from the MSX days, arguably peaking in the late-'90s by providing a lot of needed Windows 95 games for starved Japanese players. Until then, Alesta Gaiden saw the studio reaching its peak period with shooter design, some years before their STG pros left to form Raizing and other off-shoots. It's part of a long legacy debated and engaged with to this day, and I don't think it's prudent to leave even the most minor experiences out of the discussion.
Some would take one look at this and say "well there's barely anything here!", but that's got an explanation too. Just as European micro-computers had their own budget games market, so too did the Japanese PC sphere. Reprint brands like SOFBOX syndicated software from many companies like Bothtec or Falcom. Brother Industries ran a floppy disk vending machine service, their Takeru brand, to cheaply distribute big-box games on new or rewritable disks, plus many indie exclusives. And, akin to the cover disks packed in with hobby publications throughout the UK and other countries, disk magazines spread throughout Japan via MSXFan and competing lines, giving most users something to slap into their machine. Compile stood out here, creating and distributing their own Disc Station print-plus-digital magazine via mail order. They only sold Aleste Gaiden and similarly short affairs through this service, either in the main series or in special, somewhat pricier box volumes.
Like its companion piece on Disc Station Special Vol. 4, the more idiosyncratic strategy-sim Children's Wars, Aleste Gaiden eats up a whole disk, but feels much slimmer on content than pricier one-disk MSX2 titles. The slow, music-less opening shows a familiar hero, Raymond Waizen, donning a powerful exoskeleton before leaving to defeat the aberrant DIA 51 system yet again. We're not blasting through the typical sci-fi planet environments here, though. This side-story's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, with the first stage literally having you dodge fallen Statue of Liberty heads as if the 3D printers all got carried away! This game only has 5 short levels, generally increasing in challenge while recycling several enemy types aside from bosses. It's an economic affair, even borrowing most of its soundtrack from the recent MSX2 version of Golvellius, though at least the opening and ending themes are new.
Mechanics are usually what Compile's classic STGs do best, and that's generally the case here. Ray's got a decent pea-shooter attack, plus a Raiden-style choice between three shot types you pick up from destroyable enemies. I stuck to the initial throwing stars and had no trouble that way, but the fast lasers and much slower fire circles can suit others' playstyles better. Another ballistic blimp drops the Big O, which you can pick up to add a max of two Gradius-style option clones trailing behind you. These shadow fighters never die and let you spread fire across the screen with some finesse, a smart compromise to help players while avoiding slowdown. Rounding everything out is the jump button. You heard me right: there's platforming in this one, albeit on the simple side to add variety. There's no concept of height for dodging bullets, but you'll need to hop around unless falling to your doom sounds fun (let alone catching on obstacles).
Pair all the above with customary vertical scrolling stages and that's the game loop. Aleste Gaiden is far from ambitious, content to stay within the lane set by Konami's Knightmare & Capcom's Commando years before. Not even Compile's famed numbered weapon system from previous Zanac and Aleste games appears here! So this game rides or dies based on how fun the levels themselves are, more than its basic systems. I'm happy to report that Gaiden's brevity works in its favor. None of the stages ever overstay their welcome the way you'd expect from some of its contemporaries. Enemies and waves are simple in concept, but combine in ways that can throw you off when least expected. The platforming integrates into bullet dodging and item management without feeling vestigial. Really, the only weak link is the boss design overall, with none of the end-level baddies ever posing a threat like the screens before them.
Another plus for Aleste Gaiden is its presentation. The graphics look nice for a later MSX2 game, with consistently smooth vertical scrolling and sprite movement. Everything sports a colorful but recognizably cyberpunk-ish design philosophy, from the generic robo-soliders you gun down to stage 3's eerily angelic boss fight. Compile's team did what they could to imply a story progression with so little, taking you from city streets to wilderness ruins before cutting sharply to an alien-looking enemy headquarters with hexagonal flooring. Most importantly, there's scarcely any moment where I couldn't read and dodge enemy bullet trails, and that's saying something since screen readability in Compile J-PC STGs wasn't that great back then. Maybe the music's mostly lifted from Golvellius, but they made smart track choices nonetheless; I've got nothing to say about the sound design, either. It's a handsome snack of an MSX2 shooter.
So if the game's pleasant but less than memorable, why does this one stick out so much to me? I think it's that feeling of Compile revisiting their roots, right before the ascent of Madou Monogatari & especially Puyo Puyo among the company's brands. Aleste Gaiden's largely the work of staff who'd just joined or been recruited, a way for them to hone their development skills while shipping a fun game. It makes sense that this game, though using MSX2-level audiovisuals, could easily work on an early-'80s original MSX with some smart coding. Compile's own veterans had moved on to more ambitious projects like The Guardian Legend or Alien Crush, but here's a throwback shooter at a time when that concept seemed novel. Despite having every chance to make some nostalgic cash-in on Xevious and others in the Japanese arcade pantheon, Aleste Gaiden retains something of its own identity, mainly via its platforming & on-ground running and gunning. Amateurish, yet refined…that's a winning combo to me.
Give this late-'80s little ditty a try if you're bored and want a quick 1CC. (The game also gives you infinite continues, which can help if those tricky patterns on the final stage keep you down.) Better yet, treat this as an intro to Compile's vast Disc Station series of games, doodads, and other neat software things. Their disk magazines would only improve over time from the MSX days, arguably peaking in the late-'90s by providing a lot of needed Windows 95 games for starved Japanese players. Until then, Alesta Gaiden saw the studio reaching its peak period with shooter design, some years before their STG pros left to form Raizing and other off-shoots. It's part of a long legacy debated and engaged with to this day, and I don't think it's prudent to leave even the most minor experiences out of the discussion.
lol, uh, I'm concerned that anyone might actually think the Speccy games this "homage" references were ever this bad
It's not horrible for a 5-10 minute romp through hastily-made, gorily garish mazes until you find the somewhat hidden secret room that ends it. The music choices remind me of the earlier Space Funeral in a good way, and its commitment to just being a little fucked-up guy of a game, only loved by its creator, is admirable. Sadly, Fucker Gamer Scum Get Fucked almost entirely misunderstands the source material it's deriving from. Both of John George Jones' splatterpunk classics for the ZX Spectrum, Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly, are both more playable than this and offer an ironically meaningful kind of Thatcher-era nihilism. They were emblematic "video nasties" taken to the computer's known limits, while FGSGS would barely escape the Newgrounds blam-hammer with how much it tries my patience.
From the start, you're bombarded with Speccy-like colors-on-black aesthetics, albeit balking that platform's infamous graphical restrictions (ex. sprite color clash). None of this looks as cohesive as I think the creator intended. More detailed sprites and objects stand out in an uncanny but uninteresting way, like an overworked collage canvas. We're supposed to be floating a bizarre nightmare maze of sorts, the kind of Grand Guignol show turned gore film that Go to Hell did so well. But I wasn't even a bit spooked or put-off by the imagery, just bored. At least this doesn't fall into the same traps as fashionable mascot horror one-offs these days, but the baneful bits of J.G. Jones' duo have lasting power this doesn't. Used syringes, nondescript projectiles, and a cheap glut of bloody surfaces does not a fun horror show make. Gimme me the conjoined babies, flying guillotines, walls made of Hell's victims spanning all its rings, distorted scrimblo faces to make Otto from Berzerk proud...all that you'll get in the actual '80s games.
Now, you won't catch me saying there's any trenchant narrative or commentary in something like Soft & Cuddly. Transgression was by far the most important goal for Jones, using the Sinclair PC's inimitable visual strengths to transform horror cliches into something more compelling. But his creations weren't lumped into the more literary splatterpunk movement without good reason. There's a distinct air of anti-Tory, pro-creators ethos felt throughout either adventure, from the mercurial hells you explore to cute humor like the game over screen punchlines. All the grim, strange sights on offer, plus shrill soundscapes, evokes the evolving, never-ending drudgery of living through miners' strikes, predatory capitalism, and Mary Whitehouse screeds against non-conservative art in general. Jones made these shambling but nonetheless enjoyable scare houses for himself and friends, something the punks and outsiders could share in common.
I'm not sure who the audience for this modern retread is. Parts of FGSGS look too polished, too modern game engine-based to fit a visual style made under technical constraints. Go to Hell wasn't much more than a decent if tedious maze adventure, but this has barely any progression at all. You quickly jet your way through not nearly enough screens to feel as complete as its inspiration, all while seemingly anything kills you without logic. The life-draining walls and enemies in Go to Hell are very punitive, but possible to work around and feel some accomplishment for reaching each cross. FGSGS just has nothing like that. It's a big nothingburger of an attempted mid-2000s Flash game in its current state. Less like an amateur's earnest riff on Clive Barker, Alan Moore, Tanith Lee, or any other icons of '80s UK pulp fiction—more like My First VVVVVV Fangame v0.3.
But worst of all, this just doesn't get the kind of socio-economic nihilism that makes Jones' games so interesting today. I couldn't come across any weird level design, enemy type, or wacky set-piece here suggesting that vibe of "we're stuck in a hellish war-torn ghost town world with nowhere to go, hounded by those above us". Go to Hell has you playing a very simple but recognizably Manic Miner-like character, traveling through corridors adorned with commodified villains, symbols, and unfortunates like yourself. The crosses you seek are themselves distorted, flashing neon facsimiles of the real thing, lighting up a night of meticulous wandering. Jones' hell feels surprisingly barren despite its content overload, a telling contrast. Reaching each cross and finally Alice Cooper's digitized mug may not mean much, but there's something to feel accomplished about. FGSGS really just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you, hoping something sticks.
IDK, there's not much more to say for this one. Throw it on if you love watching your PC monitor forcibly switch to 640x480 resolution, or want a quick laugh. I get more enjoyment from Livesey Walk animations, let alone a quality YouTube Poop with the same runtime. Normally I'd just give this kind of game a 2-star rating and move on, but it's hurt a bit by having such a dismissive attitude towards Jones' games and the "ZX Spectrum aesthetic" in general. (Not that I fault anyone for disliking how Speccy games almost always look, but developers have crafted very artistically interesting works on it for a long time.) The most praise I'll give to Fucker Game Scrum Get Stabbed is that I finally played Go to Hell because of it—now that's what I call Entertainment.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 2023
It's not horrible for a 5-10 minute romp through hastily-made, gorily garish mazes until you find the somewhat hidden secret room that ends it. The music choices remind me of the earlier Space Funeral in a good way, and its commitment to just being a little fucked-up guy of a game, only loved by its creator, is admirable. Sadly, Fucker Gamer Scum Get Fucked almost entirely misunderstands the source material it's deriving from. Both of John George Jones' splatterpunk classics for the ZX Spectrum, Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly, are both more playable than this and offer an ironically meaningful kind of Thatcher-era nihilism. They were emblematic "video nasties" taken to the computer's known limits, while FGSGS would barely escape the Newgrounds blam-hammer with how much it tries my patience.
From the start, you're bombarded with Speccy-like colors-on-black aesthetics, albeit balking that platform's infamous graphical restrictions (ex. sprite color clash). None of this looks as cohesive as I think the creator intended. More detailed sprites and objects stand out in an uncanny but uninteresting way, like an overworked collage canvas. We're supposed to be floating a bizarre nightmare maze of sorts, the kind of Grand Guignol show turned gore film that Go to Hell did so well. But I wasn't even a bit spooked or put-off by the imagery, just bored. At least this doesn't fall into the same traps as fashionable mascot horror one-offs these days, but the baneful bits of J.G. Jones' duo have lasting power this doesn't. Used syringes, nondescript projectiles, and a cheap glut of bloody surfaces does not a fun horror show make. Gimme me the conjoined babies, flying guillotines, walls made of Hell's victims spanning all its rings, distorted scrimblo faces to make Otto from Berzerk proud...all that you'll get in the actual '80s games.
Now, you won't catch me saying there's any trenchant narrative or commentary in something like Soft & Cuddly. Transgression was by far the most important goal for Jones, using the Sinclair PC's inimitable visual strengths to transform horror cliches into something more compelling. But his creations weren't lumped into the more literary splatterpunk movement without good reason. There's a distinct air of anti-Tory, pro-creators ethos felt throughout either adventure, from the mercurial hells you explore to cute humor like the game over screen punchlines. All the grim, strange sights on offer, plus shrill soundscapes, evokes the evolving, never-ending drudgery of living through miners' strikes, predatory capitalism, and Mary Whitehouse screeds against non-conservative art in general. Jones made these shambling but nonetheless enjoyable scare houses for himself and friends, something the punks and outsiders could share in common.
I'm not sure who the audience for this modern retread is. Parts of FGSGS look too polished, too modern game engine-based to fit a visual style made under technical constraints. Go to Hell wasn't much more than a decent if tedious maze adventure, but this has barely any progression at all. You quickly jet your way through not nearly enough screens to feel as complete as its inspiration, all while seemingly anything kills you without logic. The life-draining walls and enemies in Go to Hell are very punitive, but possible to work around and feel some accomplishment for reaching each cross. FGSGS just has nothing like that. It's a big nothingburger of an attempted mid-2000s Flash game in its current state. Less like an amateur's earnest riff on Clive Barker, Alan Moore, Tanith Lee, or any other icons of '80s UK pulp fiction—more like My First VVVVVV Fangame v0.3.
But worst of all, this just doesn't get the kind of socio-economic nihilism that makes Jones' games so interesting today. I couldn't come across any weird level design, enemy type, or wacky set-piece here suggesting that vibe of "we're stuck in a hellish war-torn ghost town world with nowhere to go, hounded by those above us". Go to Hell has you playing a very simple but recognizably Manic Miner-like character, traveling through corridors adorned with commodified villains, symbols, and unfortunates like yourself. The crosses you seek are themselves distorted, flashing neon facsimiles of the real thing, lighting up a night of meticulous wandering. Jones' hell feels surprisingly barren despite its content overload, a telling contrast. Reaching each cross and finally Alice Cooper's digitized mug may not mean much, but there's something to feel accomplished about. FGSGS really just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you, hoping something sticks.
IDK, there's not much more to say for this one. Throw it on if you love watching your PC monitor forcibly switch to 640x480 resolution, or want a quick laugh. I get more enjoyment from Livesey Walk animations, let alone a quality YouTube Poop with the same runtime. Normally I'd just give this kind of game a 2-star rating and move on, but it's hurt a bit by having such a dismissive attitude towards Jones' games and the "ZX Spectrum aesthetic" in general. (Not that I fault anyone for disliking how Speccy games almost always look, but developers have crafted very artistically interesting works on it for a long time.) The most praise I'll give to Fucker Game Scrum Get Stabbed is that I finally played Go to Hell because of it—now that's what I call Entertainment.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 28 – Mar. 6, 2023
1979
SEGA's last great discrete logic (aka non-microprocessor) game remains the best thing they ever made in the '70s. I first learned about this via the PS2 3D remake bundled with Sega Classics Collection, a real standout amidst that disc's dubious offerings. While the Tamsoft redux adds a lot more to replay, it's very faithful to what was already a rock-solid original game, one which had its own faithful SG-1000 port. In an age before arcade racers switched to a behind-the-shoulder paradigm, this was a hugely influential, polished triumph in birds-eye Formula 1 dodge-ems and racing the clock.
Japan might love baseball most, but Formula 1 racing has been a favorite sport over there since the mid-'70s. The post-occupation rise of novelty games in arcades, once dominated by pinball and jukeboxes, brought with it the first vertical scrolling electromechanical racers. Taito, SEGA, and Namco (among others) competed to create the most challenging, thrilling, and immersive sports racing experiences one could have for 50 yen. But while these cabinets were popular, they exacted a hefty toll on the manufacturers. Taito's own Tomohiko Nishikado (later of Space Invaders fame) solved this problem with 1974's Speed Race, a digital recreation of elements found in the company's practical effects-based racers. Not only did this pioneer vertical scrolling in video games, but it introduced the now common 100-yen-a-play price scheme in video arcade games.
Taito and their overseas distributor Midway took turns producing variations, most notably Super Speed Race which added better sound design & score-based time extensions. SEGA's internal video games developers didn't have a Nishikado in their ranks, nor their rival's level of skill and experience with TTL board or microchip games, but the market for their own AAA racer was apparent. So how did they make Monaco GP stand out from the crowd? In short, this game came with more course variety, attention to detail, and a more challenging extended play system.
Like in Speed Race, you simply need to accelerate and/or decelerate past endless legions of racecars, trying to complete and loop the course for as long as possible. Crashing into guardrails, veering too off-course, and ramming other cars costs you the game—at least until you hit 2000 points. Monaco GP's secret sauce is lifting all time restrictions on your run once you reach this threshold. Instead, the game now increases rival car speed at 4000 and 6000, and you have a lives system to deal with now. Reaching 9999 is possible, but hard thanks to tricky AI patterns and a gauntlet of track types to get through.
There's nothing quite like slamming head first into the rear of an F1 exhaust. You'll be doing this often at first. It's easy to mess up like this as you enter dark tunnels, with only your headlights showing the road and rivals, or cram together onto a comically narrow bridge over the waters. Going fast is nice, but maintaining pace, predicting other cars' movements, and memorizing the simple but tense course loop matters more. I eventually managed to pass one loop on my quick run of the SG-1000 version, and that still took a lot of concentration!
This early home version makes for maybe the best showcase of SEGA's console hardware around release, with scrolling and mechanics all preserved from the original game. Still, it's hard to beat the level of detail in Monaco GP '79's audiovisuals, a combo of lush pixel art and surprisingly effective sound work. Because they weren't building the game with microchips, this gave SEGA more freedom to add special logic just for things like sampled engine noises, or the separate clock dials showing time and score next to the monitor. One cool showpiece is the occasional fire engine, its klaxon blaring out of the blue as you try and get away from this unstoppable machine coming from below. Every distinct set-piece and sound effect feels right, like the developers knew exactly what was missing from Super Speed Race and its brethren.
I've glossed over the simple appeal of this game for too long. It's just so, damn, fast! And this kind of speed doesn't sacrifice depth of play, either. We think of "fast" and "SEGA" today in terms of the Sonic franchise, undoubtedly for good reasons. But here's the primordial origins of that quest to impress, a leap ahead of Taito (let alone Atari's Hi-Way...) and a timely release in the wake of F1 races at Suzuka Circuit. Perhaps there's no real sense of navigating a technical racetrack, or managing your tire wear and pit stops, yet the fun essence of racing some of the world's fastest vehicles is all here.
To make something this strong, balanced, and well-rounded in a time before video game design conventions had crystallized is no small feat. Hell, to effectively bring all this to a rather underpowered, soon commercially ravaged first multi-game home console wasn't easy either. I consider Monaco GP the beginnings of SEGA's golden years, the point where they no longer relied on their American subsidiary Gremlin to make anything as successful as Blockade. The coming decade would see them pioneer 3D racers with Turbo, plus other fast-paced sprite scaling games like Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom. Less and less of their arcade output would derive strictly from innovative competitors, with creators like Yu Suzuki (Space Harrier et al.) and Yoij Ishii (Sappter, Fantasy Zone) join the ranks of Nishikado or Namco's Masanobu Endo. This racer might seem as simple as it gets, but damn does it deliver on its premise and game loop. I recommend either the SG-1000 port or this excellent PC remake of the arcade original for Windows/Linux players. This deserves to be more than a mere footnote in any history of SEGA or the arcade racer as we know it. All the landmarks in Daytona USA or brutal traps in SEGA Rally owe everything to this precursor.
Japan might love baseball most, but Formula 1 racing has been a favorite sport over there since the mid-'70s. The post-occupation rise of novelty games in arcades, once dominated by pinball and jukeboxes, brought with it the first vertical scrolling electromechanical racers. Taito, SEGA, and Namco (among others) competed to create the most challenging, thrilling, and immersive sports racing experiences one could have for 50 yen. But while these cabinets were popular, they exacted a hefty toll on the manufacturers. Taito's own Tomohiko Nishikado (later of Space Invaders fame) solved this problem with 1974's Speed Race, a digital recreation of elements found in the company's practical effects-based racers. Not only did this pioneer vertical scrolling in video games, but it introduced the now common 100-yen-a-play price scheme in video arcade games.
Taito and their overseas distributor Midway took turns producing variations, most notably Super Speed Race which added better sound design & score-based time extensions. SEGA's internal video games developers didn't have a Nishikado in their ranks, nor their rival's level of skill and experience with TTL board or microchip games, but the market for their own AAA racer was apparent. So how did they make Monaco GP stand out from the crowd? In short, this game came with more course variety, attention to detail, and a more challenging extended play system.
Like in Speed Race, you simply need to accelerate and/or decelerate past endless legions of racecars, trying to complete and loop the course for as long as possible. Crashing into guardrails, veering too off-course, and ramming other cars costs you the game—at least until you hit 2000 points. Monaco GP's secret sauce is lifting all time restrictions on your run once you reach this threshold. Instead, the game now increases rival car speed at 4000 and 6000, and you have a lives system to deal with now. Reaching 9999 is possible, but hard thanks to tricky AI patterns and a gauntlet of track types to get through.
There's nothing quite like slamming head first into the rear of an F1 exhaust. You'll be doing this often at first. It's easy to mess up like this as you enter dark tunnels, with only your headlights showing the road and rivals, or cram together onto a comically narrow bridge over the waters. Going fast is nice, but maintaining pace, predicting other cars' movements, and memorizing the simple but tense course loop matters more. I eventually managed to pass one loop on my quick run of the SG-1000 version, and that still took a lot of concentration!
This early home version makes for maybe the best showcase of SEGA's console hardware around release, with scrolling and mechanics all preserved from the original game. Still, it's hard to beat the level of detail in Monaco GP '79's audiovisuals, a combo of lush pixel art and surprisingly effective sound work. Because they weren't building the game with microchips, this gave SEGA more freedom to add special logic just for things like sampled engine noises, or the separate clock dials showing time and score next to the monitor. One cool showpiece is the occasional fire engine, its klaxon blaring out of the blue as you try and get away from this unstoppable machine coming from below. Every distinct set-piece and sound effect feels right, like the developers knew exactly what was missing from Super Speed Race and its brethren.
I've glossed over the simple appeal of this game for too long. It's just so, damn, fast! And this kind of speed doesn't sacrifice depth of play, either. We think of "fast" and "SEGA" today in terms of the Sonic franchise, undoubtedly for good reasons. But here's the primordial origins of that quest to impress, a leap ahead of Taito (let alone Atari's Hi-Way...) and a timely release in the wake of F1 races at Suzuka Circuit. Perhaps there's no real sense of navigating a technical racetrack, or managing your tire wear and pit stops, yet the fun essence of racing some of the world's fastest vehicles is all here.
To make something this strong, balanced, and well-rounded in a time before video game design conventions had crystallized is no small feat. Hell, to effectively bring all this to a rather underpowered, soon commercially ravaged first multi-game home console wasn't easy either. I consider Monaco GP the beginnings of SEGA's golden years, the point where they no longer relied on their American subsidiary Gremlin to make anything as successful as Blockade. The coming decade would see them pioneer 3D racers with Turbo, plus other fast-paced sprite scaling games like Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom. Less and less of their arcade output would derive strictly from innovative competitors, with creators like Yu Suzuki (Space Harrier et al.) and Yoij Ishii (Sappter, Fantasy Zone) join the ranks of Nishikado or Namco's Masanobu Endo. This racer might seem as simple as it gets, but damn does it deliver on its premise and game loop. I recommend either the SG-1000 port or this excellent PC remake of the arcade original for Windows/Linux players. This deserves to be more than a mere footnote in any history of SEGA or the arcade racer as we know it. All the landmarks in Daytona USA or brutal traps in SEGA Rally owe everything to this precursor.
1988
A hyperlinking manifesto for the funny lil' guy in all of us. You exit that clean Mac OS desktop and meet the eponymous object, framed like a Mayan calendar in all its majesty. Then the camera snaps to a more bizarre scene, a fantastically mundane fire hydrant separate from the hatch. Futzing with it either spews water from the spout or invites you to "Touch Me!", upon which begins an adventure in juxtaposition that would make Carroll proud. It's a non-Euclidean, all-inclusive sojourn into an information age lucid dream, a palate cleanser for our inner child, that most surreal utopia.
It can't be understated just how much Bill Atkinson's 1987 invention of HyperCard (and its scripting language, HyperTalk) democratized multimedia software creation. That's a lot of words to say that Rand & Robyn Miller never would made Cyan Worlds the atelier it is today without such a simple but feature-rich engine like this. And they were far from the first to start probing HyperCard's potential. Earlier digital storybooks, like '87's Inigo Gets Out, showed how you could make a simple but amusing story from postcards and duct tape. This software suit did for collages, graphic adventures, and even more real-time games what The Quill had for text adventures, or Pinball Construction Kit for that genre. We know The Manhole today both for its connection to later masterworks like Riven, but it matters more to me as an ambassador for so many ambitious HyperCard works made up to the advent of Mac OS X. Together with the puzzle-oriented, point-and-click paradigm first codified in Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion a year before, Rand & Robyn's earliest title pushed the medium in new directions.
One could look at this short trip and call it slight or too tedious for what unique content's actually included. It's true you spend a lot of time waiting through laborious scene transitions, a compromise worth making at the time. Not only was HyperCard generally not the fastest or most efficient way to make a Mac game (though certainly the easiest), but all the cool animations and sounds the Miller brothers packed in here slow the pacing down further. I'd argue this gives ample time for reflection on the things you've just encountered, however—let alone how they all connect together. From the start, the Millers had their own predilection towards meditation, with a world that beckons your attention but doesn't demand concentration.
The Manhole feels like a dérive, an anarchic dive through unexpected portals to events and characters both showy and quaint. First comes the beanstalk, casting aside the concrete status of the titular object in favor of the unknown. Climbing up and down the vine brings you to the heavens and seas, followed by yet more turns around the proverbial corner. My stroll through this world became a circular rhythm of entering, leaving, and returning to personable spaces, from hub & spokes to beguiling dead ends. And every personality you meet seems to know and accept this bewilderment, the unexplained but hardly unexpected confusion of time, location, and cause-effect.
I doubt the Millers had any Situationist or psychogeographical angle of critique to communicate here. They improvised nearly the whole game as a pet project, a simple consequence of learning how to work with Atkinson's tools and having fun in the process. It's that ease of transferring their creative processes and hobbies into a previously inaccessible venue, the personal computer, that makes this adventure so compelling. Sure, I could criticize how short the stack is, as well as the bits more obviously categorized as edutainment just for Rand's two daughters. (Even then, the rabbit's bookcase of classics has its own idiosyncracies, like the book Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy which isn't about anything.) Well before the highly regarded, non-condescending storytelling approach Humungous Entertainment's adventures used, I see The Manhole treating any player of any age with empathy and intelligence. Hierarchies and transactions need not exist here. There's a better, more equitable reality promised by the laggy, monochrome disk in your floppy drive.
Enough big words. Let's talk about Mr. Dragon's disco clothes, the elephant boating you through the white rabbit's teacup, and all the linking books and frames later used in Myst for dramatic effect. Observe how easily you can click around each slide, finding new angles in odd places or a delightful audiovisual gag where least expected. Just as Mac OS was the iconic "digital workbench" full of easter eggs and creative potential, The Manhole puts itself aside so that you can just explore, appreciate, and vibe all throughout. It's nice to not have puzzles or roadblocks for the sake of them—if anything's here to challenge you, it's the absence of game-y mechanics or progression. This might as well have been the original walking simulator of its day with how loose it's structured and what few interactions you need to use. And it's entirely in service to the amorphous but memorable, personalized sabbatical you take through Wonderland.
HyperCard cut out the hard parts of multimedia creation, expediting the processes once interfering with non-coders' motivation to finish their work. As such, The Manhole remains a convincing demo of the benefits, philosophies, and cultural impact this technology made possible. Even the initial floppy release I played has a lot of digitized speech and music for its time, and the CD release would leverage that format's increased storage and sample rate to improve this further. Compare this with just the first island of Myst, a place as enshrined in gaming history's pantheon as it is loathed by players seeking to make progress in that game. That single, setpiece-driven location couldn't have its staying power or sense of discovery were it not for Cyan's '88 debut. So much of this game's simple wonder, interconnections, and whimsy would get encapsulated into the '93 title's opening hour, showing how far the Millers had come. This kind of design continuity is hard to accomplish today, let alone back then.
Honestly, I could go on and on and on about this adventure often dismissed as just a children's intro to the point-and-click adventure. In the context of Mac gaming, this was an important distillation of the genre that the platform's earliest game of note, Enchanted Scepters, had pioneered. In my so far short acquaintance with Cyan's library, the parallels between this and Myst are too hard and meaningful to ignore. In The Manhole's defense, you need not play it to understand through cultural osmosis the message and principles it luxuriates in. That's what makes this so perplexing on an analytic level. Though Rand & Robyn made this ditty to satisfy their urges and ultimately start selling software, it's more introspective and uncaring of what you think about it than usual. One can sense the confidence and ease with which this colorful 1-bit universe exists and presents itself. Why rush or insist itself upon any and all who wander in? How can it know who we are, other than a friendly traveler? Our dialogue with such a game should respect both its outward simplicity and the subtleties that creep into view.
I first played The Manhole maybe a decade and a half ago, back when my ex-Mac user dad tried introducing me to this genre and Mac OS software at large. Predictably, I bounced off of it hard, sticking to my fancy PS2, DS, and Windows XP games. But beyond just having a vested interest in older video games and their history now, I've grokked what this unassuming pop-up storybook wanted to communicate. Food for thought, perhaps. Nothing in The Manhole strikes me as therapeutic, though—hardly chicken soup for the gamer's soul. It's as cartoonish, surreal, and irreverent as ever, a brief respite that one can claw into or bask in. Akin to something contemporary like If Monks Had Macs, this piece of history delights in playing the part of a media crossroad, a frame through which new perspectives can be found. I think there's a lot of value in that; if and when I write my own interactive stories, I'll be revisiting this to remind myself of what I cherish in this medium.
It can't be understated just how much Bill Atkinson's 1987 invention of HyperCard (and its scripting language, HyperTalk) democratized multimedia software creation. That's a lot of words to say that Rand & Robyn Miller never would made Cyan Worlds the atelier it is today without such a simple but feature-rich engine like this. And they were far from the first to start probing HyperCard's potential. Earlier digital storybooks, like '87's Inigo Gets Out, showed how you could make a simple but amusing story from postcards and duct tape. This software suit did for collages, graphic adventures, and even more real-time games what The Quill had for text adventures, or Pinball Construction Kit for that genre. We know The Manhole today both for its connection to later masterworks like Riven, but it matters more to me as an ambassador for so many ambitious HyperCard works made up to the advent of Mac OS X. Together with the puzzle-oriented, point-and-click paradigm first codified in Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion a year before, Rand & Robyn's earliest title pushed the medium in new directions.
One could look at this short trip and call it slight or too tedious for what unique content's actually included. It's true you spend a lot of time waiting through laborious scene transitions, a compromise worth making at the time. Not only was HyperCard generally not the fastest or most efficient way to make a Mac game (though certainly the easiest), but all the cool animations and sounds the Miller brothers packed in here slow the pacing down further. I'd argue this gives ample time for reflection on the things you've just encountered, however—let alone how they all connect together. From the start, the Millers had their own predilection towards meditation, with a world that beckons your attention but doesn't demand concentration.
The Manhole feels like a dérive, an anarchic dive through unexpected portals to events and characters both showy and quaint. First comes the beanstalk, casting aside the concrete status of the titular object in favor of the unknown. Climbing up and down the vine brings you to the heavens and seas, followed by yet more turns around the proverbial corner. My stroll through this world became a circular rhythm of entering, leaving, and returning to personable spaces, from hub & spokes to beguiling dead ends. And every personality you meet seems to know and accept this bewilderment, the unexplained but hardly unexpected confusion of time, location, and cause-effect.
I doubt the Millers had any Situationist or psychogeographical angle of critique to communicate here. They improvised nearly the whole game as a pet project, a simple consequence of learning how to work with Atkinson's tools and having fun in the process. It's that ease of transferring their creative processes and hobbies into a previously inaccessible venue, the personal computer, that makes this adventure so compelling. Sure, I could criticize how short the stack is, as well as the bits more obviously categorized as edutainment just for Rand's two daughters. (Even then, the rabbit's bookcase of classics has its own idiosyncracies, like the book Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy which isn't about anything.) Well before the highly regarded, non-condescending storytelling approach Humungous Entertainment's adventures used, I see The Manhole treating any player of any age with empathy and intelligence. Hierarchies and transactions need not exist here. There's a better, more equitable reality promised by the laggy, monochrome disk in your floppy drive.
Enough big words. Let's talk about Mr. Dragon's disco clothes, the elephant boating you through the white rabbit's teacup, and all the linking books and frames later used in Myst for dramatic effect. Observe how easily you can click around each slide, finding new angles in odd places or a delightful audiovisual gag where least expected. Just as Mac OS was the iconic "digital workbench" full of easter eggs and creative potential, The Manhole puts itself aside so that you can just explore, appreciate, and vibe all throughout. It's nice to not have puzzles or roadblocks for the sake of them—if anything's here to challenge you, it's the absence of game-y mechanics or progression. This might as well have been the original walking simulator of its day with how loose it's structured and what few interactions you need to use. And it's entirely in service to the amorphous but memorable, personalized sabbatical you take through Wonderland.
HyperCard cut out the hard parts of multimedia creation, expediting the processes once interfering with non-coders' motivation to finish their work. As such, The Manhole remains a convincing demo of the benefits, philosophies, and cultural impact this technology made possible. Even the initial floppy release I played has a lot of digitized speech and music for its time, and the CD release would leverage that format's increased storage and sample rate to improve this further. Compare this with just the first island of Myst, a place as enshrined in gaming history's pantheon as it is loathed by players seeking to make progress in that game. That single, setpiece-driven location couldn't have its staying power or sense of discovery were it not for Cyan's '88 debut. So much of this game's simple wonder, interconnections, and whimsy would get encapsulated into the '93 title's opening hour, showing how far the Millers had come. This kind of design continuity is hard to accomplish today, let alone back then.
Honestly, I could go on and on and on about this adventure often dismissed as just a children's intro to the point-and-click adventure. In the context of Mac gaming, this was an important distillation of the genre that the platform's earliest game of note, Enchanted Scepters, had pioneered. In my so far short acquaintance with Cyan's library, the parallels between this and Myst are too hard and meaningful to ignore. In The Manhole's defense, you need not play it to understand through cultural osmosis the message and principles it luxuriates in. That's what makes this so perplexing on an analytic level. Though Rand & Robyn made this ditty to satisfy their urges and ultimately start selling software, it's more introspective and uncaring of what you think about it than usual. One can sense the confidence and ease with which this colorful 1-bit universe exists and presents itself. Why rush or insist itself upon any and all who wander in? How can it know who we are, other than a friendly traveler? Our dialogue with such a game should respect both its outward simplicity and the subtleties that creep into view.
I first played The Manhole maybe a decade and a half ago, back when my ex-Mac user dad tried introducing me to this genre and Mac OS software at large. Predictably, I bounced off of it hard, sticking to my fancy PS2, DS, and Windows XP games. But beyond just having a vested interest in older video games and their history now, I've grokked what this unassuming pop-up storybook wanted to communicate. Food for thought, perhaps. Nothing in The Manhole strikes me as therapeutic, though—hardly chicken soup for the gamer's soul. It's as cartoonish, surreal, and irreverent as ever, a brief respite that one can claw into or bask in. Akin to something contemporary like If Monks Had Macs, this piece of history delights in playing the part of a media crossroad, a frame through which new perspectives can be found. I think there's a lot of value in that; if and when I write my own interactive stories, I'll be revisiting this to remind myself of what I cherish in this medium.
1997
The Myth of "Consensual" Destruction Racers Canon
Carmageddon & Grand Theft Auto: "I consent!"
Gaming press & media controversy: "I consent!"
Runabout/Felony series: "I don't!"
Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?!
Ex-Dragon Quest and Landstalker programmer Kan Naito, head of Climax Entertainment as it entered the mid-'90s era, just had to push the 3D tech of the day. He and his co-developers had by now released Dark Savior, their Saturn-exclusive, 360-degrees isometric action-RPG opus which undoubtedly took a toll on the studio. Any project they'd do for PlayStation would be much easier, as he admitted in the May '97 issue of Next Generation magazine. Their previous SEGA works featured detailed, sumptuous 2D art for their platforms, which this new title would contrast with the kind of moldable polygonal brawn Sony's machine could provide. Most of all, Dark Savior was a beast of an adventure, with multiple endings, numerous levels to design, and a relatively low return due to the Saturn's stagnating market share. Whatever this master coder and his crew did on PS1, it had to cost less and gain a lot more.
So they settled on a much quainter idea, both an arcade throwback and a more flexible design concept in turn. The original Runabout may well have been born from Climax's programmers and modelers toying with vehicle deformation, a defining part of the game's identity when it released on May 23, 1997 in Japan. The only thing that won't damage and crunch your car, truck, bus, tank, or whatever into mush are the course walls and barriers. Meanwhile, just about every NPC vehicle or stage prop you see in Felony 11-79 can become a victim of your reckless driving. And with said destruction comes a cash payout, ranging in magnitude from a few hundred bucks to potentially a million! Based on this system, you'd think the game's goals revolve more around traversing open areas, smashing everyone and everything in your path. But Naito's team had a different idea: combine this car-pocalypse with a rally racing structure.
Felony 11-79 has the player driving from point A to point B across three unique tracks, each with secrets, objectives, and a whole lot of hazards. It's as much an evolution of Chase H.Q. and similar racers as it is a looser, more chaotic mashup of SEGA Rally and Destruction Derby. There's not a lot of original ideas here, nor the kind of spit-polish expected for mid-'90s 3D arcade-y faire. Still, it's hard to not have a shit-ton of fun ramming your reinforced pickup truck through a congested coastal Japanese highway, or launching a Formula 1 racecar into a Paris subway only to collide with a train! If you've ever wondered where the sheer hilarious stunt carnage of something like Burnout first graced home consoles, this might be the candidate.
Sadly, though, there isn't anywhere near enough to do here once you complete your first run of the game's tracks. Unless we count the optional test track meant for learning controls and tuning your vehicle, that's all the road you're gonna get, no mirror mode provided. Most of the game's progression instead comes from unlocking hidden rides, from exotic supercars to a mothafuckin' TANK (which can even fire its cannon and destroy all in its wake!). Doing this entails completing optional goals on each course. One example involves drastically outspeeding a police radar benchmark on the highway. Another involves smashing a vending machine to unlock the diminutive RC car. Now you've got some unconventional new toys to play around with in and out of the garage. Just make sure to save all this progress in that separate menu, though, since there's no auto-save or post-race equivalent to speak of.
Climax wants players to enjoy the mere act of piloting these machines, so the controls are simple but responsive. This predates the DualShock, so there's unfortunately no analog controls aside from using a racing wheel, but the handling model's built with D-pad turning in mind. I wish the tire physics and reverse motion was better polish, as it can be a bit too easy to spin out with all those fast but light cars. Still, that's why tinkering in the Settings menu can alleviate, giving you a basic way to set suspension strength, loosen or tighten brakes, and other technical aspects. This can add a lot of playtime if you're gunning for fast times, or if a particular unlockable's giving you trouble. I certainly don't mind the customization, slight as it is, given the content shortage elsewhere.
The main missions themselves are damn fun, though I encountered a few annoying quirks of the engine and developers' design choices. You mainly need to race for the finish while picking up objects in-between, either by hitting checkpoints or hitting things. I learned that, while dueling AI racers isn't a thing here, Felony 11-79 still expects the kind of practice and routing demanded in contemporary circuit or rally games. Your vehicle's damage meter complicates this by enforcing consequences for your collateral; hit too many things and you're done for. So learning which objects yield the highest "felony" rewards matters too, as is weaving between passenger cars and not blowing up entire civilian spaces for meager return vs. damage. All the courses are well-designed, with plenty of cool set-pieces, landmarks, and shortcuts to marvel at and use for your runs. Managing your worsening cornering and spinouts as you get bruised adds some simcade depth to the proceedings, too.
All this works great until you literally get stuck on a vehicle you've just crippled, its hitbox snagging yours while you try to escape. Reversing usually works fine, but the moments when it doesn't got on my nerves. It also doesn't help that the game's draw distance and level-of-detail scaling, though damn good for its time and hardware, isn't really good enough for the game loop. Moving fast on a narrow stretch can lead to disaster if the time limit's bearing down and you hit a random sedan or something. Frustration is an inevitable part of playing most behind-the-wheel media from this era, mostly the arcade-style stuff, but this kind of jank isn't endearing.
What is endearing are all the cheesy, over-the-top flourishes the Runabout series indulges right from the start. Little else in the arcade racer pantheon combines '60s surfer buttrock with vibrant environments, an utter disregard for anyone's well-being, and one-liners that would make Duke Nukem proud. I also have to chuckle at the game's framing story, where your driver's client has requested the forceful recovery of three key parts needed to unlock an Egyptian sarcophagus full of "treasure". Well, it doesn't go so well for this greedy mogul in the end, but we're getting paid to retrieve the McGuffins at all costs, so what does it matter? There's maybe not the same kind or intensity of punk energy here that SEGA's Hitmaker team would realized in Crazy Taxi a couple years later, but Climax sure was on to something.
Felony 11-79 had distant progenitors over in the arcades, but there wasn't much like this available at home, except maybe on predominantly European micro-computers. The PlayStation had a preview of this kind of destruction racer with the latter third of Die Hard Trilogy, as well as Reflection's Destruction Derby defining part of the system's early ranks. It's just that Naito & co. had found a new, straightforward formula to exploit which would echo into the coming decade, from 1999's Driver to the iconic Burnout 3: Takedown among others. This initial series entry may not amount to more than a prototype, but its immediate PS1 sequel and the beefier Super Runabout on Dreamcast deliver on the original's promises. I can't think of a better single-A comedy driving franchise from this period, not even among the ranks of similarly scrappy budget releases from D3 Publishing's Simple lines. These games would do for the arcade racer what Earth Defense Force later accomplished for musou-style action, and I'm itching to try some more.
Carmageddon & Grand Theft Auto: "I consent!"
Gaming press & media controversy: "I consent!"
Runabout/Felony series: "I don't!"
Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?!
Ex-Dragon Quest and Landstalker programmer Kan Naito, head of Climax Entertainment as it entered the mid-'90s era, just had to push the 3D tech of the day. He and his co-developers had by now released Dark Savior, their Saturn-exclusive, 360-degrees isometric action-RPG opus which undoubtedly took a toll on the studio. Any project they'd do for PlayStation would be much easier, as he admitted in the May '97 issue of Next Generation magazine. Their previous SEGA works featured detailed, sumptuous 2D art for their platforms, which this new title would contrast with the kind of moldable polygonal brawn Sony's machine could provide. Most of all, Dark Savior was a beast of an adventure, with multiple endings, numerous levels to design, and a relatively low return due to the Saturn's stagnating market share. Whatever this master coder and his crew did on PS1, it had to cost less and gain a lot more.
So they settled on a much quainter idea, both an arcade throwback and a more flexible design concept in turn. The original Runabout may well have been born from Climax's programmers and modelers toying with vehicle deformation, a defining part of the game's identity when it released on May 23, 1997 in Japan. The only thing that won't damage and crunch your car, truck, bus, tank, or whatever into mush are the course walls and barriers. Meanwhile, just about every NPC vehicle or stage prop you see in Felony 11-79 can become a victim of your reckless driving. And with said destruction comes a cash payout, ranging in magnitude from a few hundred bucks to potentially a million! Based on this system, you'd think the game's goals revolve more around traversing open areas, smashing everyone and everything in your path. But Naito's team had a different idea: combine this car-pocalypse with a rally racing structure.
Felony 11-79 has the player driving from point A to point B across three unique tracks, each with secrets, objectives, and a whole lot of hazards. It's as much an evolution of Chase H.Q. and similar racers as it is a looser, more chaotic mashup of SEGA Rally and Destruction Derby. There's not a lot of original ideas here, nor the kind of spit-polish expected for mid-'90s 3D arcade-y faire. Still, it's hard to not have a shit-ton of fun ramming your reinforced pickup truck through a congested coastal Japanese highway, or launching a Formula 1 racecar into a Paris subway only to collide with a train! If you've ever wondered where the sheer hilarious stunt carnage of something like Burnout first graced home consoles, this might be the candidate.
Sadly, though, there isn't anywhere near enough to do here once you complete your first run of the game's tracks. Unless we count the optional test track meant for learning controls and tuning your vehicle, that's all the road you're gonna get, no mirror mode provided. Most of the game's progression instead comes from unlocking hidden rides, from exotic supercars to a mothafuckin' TANK (which can even fire its cannon and destroy all in its wake!). Doing this entails completing optional goals on each course. One example involves drastically outspeeding a police radar benchmark on the highway. Another involves smashing a vending machine to unlock the diminutive RC car. Now you've got some unconventional new toys to play around with in and out of the garage. Just make sure to save all this progress in that separate menu, though, since there's no auto-save or post-race equivalent to speak of.
Climax wants players to enjoy the mere act of piloting these machines, so the controls are simple but responsive. This predates the DualShock, so there's unfortunately no analog controls aside from using a racing wheel, but the handling model's built with D-pad turning in mind. I wish the tire physics and reverse motion was better polish, as it can be a bit too easy to spin out with all those fast but light cars. Still, that's why tinkering in the Settings menu can alleviate, giving you a basic way to set suspension strength, loosen or tighten brakes, and other technical aspects. This can add a lot of playtime if you're gunning for fast times, or if a particular unlockable's giving you trouble. I certainly don't mind the customization, slight as it is, given the content shortage elsewhere.
The main missions themselves are damn fun, though I encountered a few annoying quirks of the engine and developers' design choices. You mainly need to race for the finish while picking up objects in-between, either by hitting checkpoints or hitting things. I learned that, while dueling AI racers isn't a thing here, Felony 11-79 still expects the kind of practice and routing demanded in contemporary circuit or rally games. Your vehicle's damage meter complicates this by enforcing consequences for your collateral; hit too many things and you're done for. So learning which objects yield the highest "felony" rewards matters too, as is weaving between passenger cars and not blowing up entire civilian spaces for meager return vs. damage. All the courses are well-designed, with plenty of cool set-pieces, landmarks, and shortcuts to marvel at and use for your runs. Managing your worsening cornering and spinouts as you get bruised adds some simcade depth to the proceedings, too.
All this works great until you literally get stuck on a vehicle you've just crippled, its hitbox snagging yours while you try to escape. Reversing usually works fine, but the moments when it doesn't got on my nerves. It also doesn't help that the game's draw distance and level-of-detail scaling, though damn good for its time and hardware, isn't really good enough for the game loop. Moving fast on a narrow stretch can lead to disaster if the time limit's bearing down and you hit a random sedan or something. Frustration is an inevitable part of playing most behind-the-wheel media from this era, mostly the arcade-style stuff, but this kind of jank isn't endearing.
What is endearing are all the cheesy, over-the-top flourishes the Runabout series indulges right from the start. Little else in the arcade racer pantheon combines '60s surfer buttrock with vibrant environments, an utter disregard for anyone's well-being, and one-liners that would make Duke Nukem proud. I also have to chuckle at the game's framing story, where your driver's client has requested the forceful recovery of three key parts needed to unlock an Egyptian sarcophagus full of "treasure". Well, it doesn't go so well for this greedy mogul in the end, but we're getting paid to retrieve the McGuffins at all costs, so what does it matter? There's maybe not the same kind or intensity of punk energy here that SEGA's Hitmaker team would realized in Crazy Taxi a couple years later, but Climax sure was on to something.
Felony 11-79 had distant progenitors over in the arcades, but there wasn't much like this available at home, except maybe on predominantly European micro-computers. The PlayStation had a preview of this kind of destruction racer with the latter third of Die Hard Trilogy, as well as Reflection's Destruction Derby defining part of the system's early ranks. It's just that Naito & co. had found a new, straightforward formula to exploit which would echo into the coming decade, from 1999's Driver to the iconic Burnout 3: Takedown among others. This initial series entry may not amount to more than a prototype, but its immediate PS1 sequel and the beefier Super Runabout on Dreamcast deliver on the original's promises. I can't think of a better single-A comedy driving franchise from this period, not even among the ranks of similarly scrappy budget releases from D3 Publishing's Simple lines. These games would do for the arcade racer what Earth Defense Force later accomplished for musou-style action, and I'm itching to try some more.