PasokonDeacon
Young Walter Mitty for Japan's jilted generation, a show hazily recalled but always produced. For the residents of Setagaya, it's a St. Vitus dance every end of the week, with too many interpretations to reconcile before the day-to-day grind begins anew. For us, there's a calm before the storm followed by the euphoria of living through a kind disaster, as mild as it is transformative. For the developers, all this presents a release from the simple, sorrowful nostalgia of their past games, a more cynical yet still passionate affair. For Level 5, it's another lauded product in their catalog, a shining example of what Nintendo's 3DS offered to players. For around five hours, this was an bewildering piece of fiction I couldn't get enough of, until somehow I did…and then it couldn't stop. For all of that, I'd feel like a fool to rate this any lower, both for its quality and for how much I esteem the life's work of its creator. Yet this appraisal yearns to be higher.
Consider lead developer Kaz Ayabe, who describes spending a chunk of his post-high school days listening to techno and IDM. Going to rave parties in the countryside, finding his inner caveman…all that energy, melancholy, and plenty of inaka nostalgia fed into what became the Boku no Natsuyasumi series. But where the Bokunatsu games revel in remembered childhood, free from all but the most sensible restrictions, Attack of the Friday Monsters deals directly with a modernity you can't escape, the waking dream of life under smoky layers. Our frame hero, Sohta, is stuck coming of age in a shared stupor, watching and acting through the post-war obsoletion of an imperfect arcadia. And we're brought along for the ride, encapsulated in one interminable day of discovery.
This project was developer Millennium Kitchen's chance to subvert their formula, to leave the proverbial family ramen stall and make a divebar izakaya of a game, both more childish and more adult. It wasn't ever going to be as glamorous or idyllic, but the old recipes and principles which sublimated Bokunatsu into such a masterwork all remain. I just wish Level-5's stipulations and some less well-considered design choices hadn't gotten in the way of this experiment.
Let's settle L5's role in the equation. Their Guild brand of 3DS-exclusive smaller titles—produced/developed together with studios like Nextech, Comcept, Vivarium, and Grasshopper Manufacture—was a smart way to jumpstart the system's paltry launch-window lineup. Why settle for Steel Diver, neat as it is, when cheaper, more immediate larks like Liberation Maiden or Aero Porter are available? Nor did this brand skimp on deeper experiences, like the Yasumi Matsuno-penned Crimson Shroud or the publisher's own Starship Damrey? Among this smorgasbord, Friday Monsters claims its spot as the most relatable, uncompromising adventure within the 3DS' early days. It hardly feels as lacking in meaningful hours of play as you'd expect from a 4-to-6-hour story.
As a Guild02 release, the final product had a similarly low budget and developer count, a budget take on what Ayabe's team and their partners @ Aquria were used to. I can't help but marvel at how they accomplished so much within these limits. While I appreciate L5's former willingness to bankroll and promote other creators' works with little intervention, they clearly signaled their partners to consider how few early adopters the platform had, and how their games should account for that. Finding that balance between "content" and artistic integrity must have been worth the challenge for Ayabe's team, and it leads to an excellent, ambitious yet rougher take on their usual slice-of-life toyboxes.
This makes itself very apparent in the interesting but tedious card collecting & battling system you use throughout Friday Monsters. I knew this was going to get awkward once I noticed the conspicuous lack of tutorializing for anything else in the whole game. Running around, talking to neighbors, and solving simple puzzles all explains itself, but the Monster Glim scavenging and combat rules needed explication. So that's one mark against the game loop's sense of immersion, even if, again, this kind of artifice isn't unusual throughout the experience. I've learned to distinguish the "good" kind of artifice—that which dissuades me from considering the story's events and interactions through realistic terms—and the other, more distracting kind which begs me to question its use or inclusion.
Card battling usually boils down to getting as many gems as you can find, combining cards of a set to increase their power, and then hoping your utterly random placement puts you on the losing end. Rounds come down to who makes the correct rock-paper-scissors predictions, or just has the larger numbers. This all ties into other themes of mutually understood but lightly lampooned adult rules and hierarchies that tie us down, but the player has to go through all this on Sohta's behalf, rather than just existing in plot and dialogue regardless.
Bokunatsu's game loop almost always manages to avoid this pitfall by having you engage in more obvious, more rewarding activities like bug-catching, environmental puzzles, or just managing the passage of time by moving between camera angles. Friday Monsters uses a less chronologically fixed premise, encouraging completion by removing time skips across screens in favor of a loose episodic structure. But even these are more like bookmarks to tracks and remind you of ongoing plot threads, while Ayabe & co. nudge players towards methodically circling the town during each beat. If the typical Bokunatsu day uses its style of progression to force a basic amount of player priority, then what Friday Monsters has instead emphasizes the periphery events and observations of the village's afternoon and evening.
All this comes back to the Guild series' need for back-of-box justification for spending your precious $8, something that Millennium Kitchen's other works aren't so concerned with. What I'm trying to say is that, more than any other Guild release, this one shouldn't have had to include a post-game, or any hinted insecurities about what's "missing". Extra stuff for its own sake is generally optional here, but incentivized by the narrator + promises of extra story which you neither need nor actually get much of in the end.
Much of the story's strengths and staying power comes from what it insinuates, with characters' routines and tribulations shown in enough depth yet elided when necessary to preserve dignity and mystery. After all, it's not just Sohta's tale, the aimless but excited wanderings of a kid trying to take his golden years at a slippery pace. Friday Monsters is just as much concerned with his parents, especially the downtrodden father who wants a courage to live he's never had. While the children only know TV, a story around every corner no matter how slight or recycled, the parents and post-teens stuck on Tokyo's recovering borderlands still remember the tragedies and romance of the cinema or puppet theater.
Sohta's mom and dad are struggling to keep their love and dedication as they enter middle age, denied the economic and cultural promises emblemized in classic Shochiku dramas. Megami and Akebi's dad now have to reconicle their own free time and hobbies with devoting their energy and resources to creating and supporting the tokusatsu shows that seem all too real for Tokyo's new youth, but no different from genre pictures by Toei or Toho. Emiko and her police officer father share an intimate Ozu-esque dialogue while a kaiju duel rages behind them, Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu's archetypes juxtaposed against superhero depictions of the country's calamities, environmental injustices, and looming specters of globalization. All of them could fit right onto the silver screen, if they weren't too wrapped up in their comfortable itineraries.
At least he kids are all right. School's always over when they wake up to play, and the simpler joys of learning their vernacular and playing absurd master-servant games never gets old. Two of the boys even reduce their identities to family professions, as Ramen and Billboard both exude their working-class roots in place of stodgy, less memorable formal names. It's precisely that contrast of Sohta & S-chan's mundane but precious growing up with all the frustrations of adulthood which drives not just the plot, but the dive into magical realism this game unleashes upon players.
One example is the protagonist's baffling ability to warp from a seemingly inescapable bad ending back into Ramen's family's diner. Context clues from talking with friends and acquaintances tell the player that Sohta had almost passed out, not remembering his feverish journey to the watering hole, but he doesn't recall nor care that much about it. Any grown-up would understand the gravity of the situation, yet our "hero" plays helpless ghost and witness to an imagination shared with his close circle. Dreams and willpower make any outcome possible on a dog day like this, be it becoming the new cosmic hero of your hometown or falling from Godzilla's claws back into reality. And if they don't even know how to overthink it (discounting A-Plus' genre savvy mumblings), why should we? There's always time later for crack theories about how our protagonist and the "6th cutest girl in class" represent Izanagi and Izanami, after all.
How about the big 'ol kaiju, then? They all look impressive, even if most are reduced to card illustrations. Only Frankasaurus and Cleaner Man get the big 3D showdown, but their wrestling and interactions with Setagaya and the surrounding wards are so damn effective I don't need to see the other giants in action. Nowhere better does Friday Monsters nail its sense of scale and romanticism, that contrast between you and the wider world around you waiting to be explored, than with its climactic fight. Again, it's likely these science fantasy events happening in front of us could be the result of a community's exposure to harmful pollution and chemical from nearby factories, causing hallucinations. But what we're shown could just as well be the real deal, a marvelous if frightening set of circumstances always repeating but rarely understood. This isn't your typical Friday Monsters, uh, Friday twilight—now the unready man of the house becomes an avatar of justice and moral fulfillment, playing Ultraman to Ayabe's hazily remembered Tokyo suburbia. We're not stuck in Sohta's story, nor in his dad's or anyone else's. There's an undercurrent of Japan's indigenous and regional mythology metamorphizing in response to foreign influences, with communal storytelling traditions used here to comment on the transition into the modern.
A great example of Friday Monsters' writing chops is this funny guy named Frank, a well-dressed European gentleman who looks waaaaaaay too much like the original Doctor Who. He's the broadest caricature in this story, an ambassador of weird Western invasion who's nonetheless become part of the community. What part he plays in it, though, remains up to interpretation. Ayaba presents possibilities as wide-ranging as Frank being Sohta's imaginary friend, born from playing with sausages in his bento box. Or he's an elaborate tarento personality working for the local TV station, an example of outside talent brought in from abroad or the local subculture. Maybe this William Hartnell look-a-like really is an alien, the spitting image of an English sophisticate intervening with local affairs for increasingly imperialistic reasons.
No matter what, this one character can go from a cute little sideshow to a narrative-warping anti-hero, stuck between the suspected real and the seductively imagined. That's a lot of adjectives to say this game's full of similarly compelling individuals, each of whom interact with others and the setting in unique ways. Nanafumi, angsty loner and bully in the making, runs the gamut from puzzle obstacle you must solve to a minor hero later in the story, as much a moral example as a person to acknowledge on his own merits. I can remember almost everyone's name here, and not because there's anyone I ever wanted to avoid talking to.
Maybe the story's biggest theme is the theatrical nature of modern life, from Meiji-era home businesses upon farmland to the unavoidable broadcasts and pageantries these families engage in. Friday Monsters indulges you in rituals, from small details like Sohta not wearing his shoes at home to the "ninjutsu" he and the other kids use on each other to show dominance. Pre-rendered 3D environs come to us through carefully chosen camera angles, often disobeying Hollywood's rules of visual progression for the sake of dramatic and thematic effect. Sightlines clue you in on the separation between rural and suburban Tokyo, as well as the pervasive eternal railway walling you off from the picket line and other harsh politics of this era. If anything, I wish there was just a bit more area to explore, or more to interact with on the scenic routes (something Bokunatsu balances well with its lack of urgency). But the game's visual splendor and lush audio design makes it so easy to stay in this world for longer than you'd expect.
Much longer indeed, as I found out when trying the post-game before eventually bouncing off to write this review. There's a simple reason why, as I'd hinted earlier: the "bonus story" of Friday Monsters is antithetical to the game's design and messages. Sure, it'd be nice to learn even more about these people and the weird stories defining them, but we've spent enough time in Sohta's community to know it's worth moving on from. Why crawl around to dig up the scraps when I could just play the core game again? It's like Ayabe & co. are nudging players towards the realization that completionism is a trap both in media and in our own lives, but L5 told them to develop this post-game anyway.
What we're left with is a slower, even more decompressed village to hang out in where Sohta semi-randomly switches conversation topics and more focus goes to card battling or snooping around for the final Monster Glims. This can be fun if played in short bursts, but definitely not as much as the few hours of well-paced, slow and steady social adventuring beforehand. And actually reaching 100% makes this game the kind of slog some of Bokunatsu's skeptics wrongly deem it. Diminishing returns is the last situation I expected here, and it almost sours an otherwise awe-inspiring experience. We even already had a clean opening and ending like you'd see in an anime or children's show from the time, cute theme song and all. Dragging this out threatens to cheapen all the player's just enjoyed.
Encompassing all the intricacies behind this game and its wider context is a battle between idealism and cynicism, with childhood nostalgia as the battleground. I'm unsure if this spinoff's any darker or lighter than the most rigorous Bokunatsu titles, but that almost decade-long gap between this and Millennium Kitchen's recent Shin-chan game stands out to me. After making four summer vacation games with more content, iteration, and repetition than the last, here comes a more constrained, more wanting variation on the genre. (Let's not forget Bokura no Kazoku, a promising inversion of this formula idealizing urban Japan.) Friday Monsters achieves so much immersion and introspection via its clash of ideas against labors, feeling like more than a set of tropes or binaries thrown into its confined space. Perhaps this was Ayabe's own journey to stretch outside the Bokunatsu comfort zone, even knowing he'd have to compromise with his publisher as he'd did with Sony and Contrail years prior. Embracing fantasy to this degree was more than a novelty that would appease Akihiro Hino and other higer-ups; it was the natural next step.
For me, it's just frustrating how close this gets to becoming the masterpiece it hints at. A telltale sign early on was seeing the fairly barebones, clunky UI which makes Bokunatsu's skeuomorphic menus look like fine art. I pressed on and enjoyed myself oh so much anyway, but I can only nod in agreement with Ayabe about the perils of funding these more niche adventures without leaning too far into conventions or market trends. What flaws and missed opportunities crop up here manage to highlight all that Friday Monsters succeeds with, though. Other reviewers have rightly pointed out the sheer charm, verisimilitude, and admirable qualities found all throughout, making it the most complete Guild series entry by some distance. You can't stay in this world forever, no matter how much you want to, but the fond memories of this suburban fantasy can last a lifetime. Here's a story that understands the impossibility of utopia yet lets us yearn for an exciting and sustainable social contract between kids, taller kids, and the processes and solidarity making it all possible.
Nintendo should get raked over the coals for letting media marvels like this fall into unavailability because they can't be bothered to spend chump change on server and network maintenance. Little stories like this are what inspire me to keep playing video games, no matter how much I think I've seen or what I might miss out on. That's most valuable of all.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023
Consider lead developer Kaz Ayabe, who describes spending a chunk of his post-high school days listening to techno and IDM. Going to rave parties in the countryside, finding his inner caveman…all that energy, melancholy, and plenty of inaka nostalgia fed into what became the Boku no Natsuyasumi series. But where the Bokunatsu games revel in remembered childhood, free from all but the most sensible restrictions, Attack of the Friday Monsters deals directly with a modernity you can't escape, the waking dream of life under smoky layers. Our frame hero, Sohta, is stuck coming of age in a shared stupor, watching and acting through the post-war obsoletion of an imperfect arcadia. And we're brought along for the ride, encapsulated in one interminable day of discovery.
This project was developer Millennium Kitchen's chance to subvert their formula, to leave the proverbial family ramen stall and make a divebar izakaya of a game, both more childish and more adult. It wasn't ever going to be as glamorous or idyllic, but the old recipes and principles which sublimated Bokunatsu into such a masterwork all remain. I just wish Level-5's stipulations and some less well-considered design choices hadn't gotten in the way of this experiment.
Let's settle L5's role in the equation. Their Guild brand of 3DS-exclusive smaller titles—produced/developed together with studios like Nextech, Comcept, Vivarium, and Grasshopper Manufacture—was a smart way to jumpstart the system's paltry launch-window lineup. Why settle for Steel Diver, neat as it is, when cheaper, more immediate larks like Liberation Maiden or Aero Porter are available? Nor did this brand skimp on deeper experiences, like the Yasumi Matsuno-penned Crimson Shroud or the publisher's own Starship Damrey? Among this smorgasbord, Friday Monsters claims its spot as the most relatable, uncompromising adventure within the 3DS' early days. It hardly feels as lacking in meaningful hours of play as you'd expect from a 4-to-6-hour story.
As a Guild02 release, the final product had a similarly low budget and developer count, a budget take on what Ayabe's team and their partners @ Aquria were used to. I can't help but marvel at how they accomplished so much within these limits. While I appreciate L5's former willingness to bankroll and promote other creators' works with little intervention, they clearly signaled their partners to consider how few early adopters the platform had, and how their games should account for that. Finding that balance between "content" and artistic integrity must have been worth the challenge for Ayabe's team, and it leads to an excellent, ambitious yet rougher take on their usual slice-of-life toyboxes.
This makes itself very apparent in the interesting but tedious card collecting & battling system you use throughout Friday Monsters. I knew this was going to get awkward once I noticed the conspicuous lack of tutorializing for anything else in the whole game. Running around, talking to neighbors, and solving simple puzzles all explains itself, but the Monster Glim scavenging and combat rules needed explication. So that's one mark against the game loop's sense of immersion, even if, again, this kind of artifice isn't unusual throughout the experience. I've learned to distinguish the "good" kind of artifice—that which dissuades me from considering the story's events and interactions through realistic terms—and the other, more distracting kind which begs me to question its use or inclusion.
Card battling usually boils down to getting as many gems as you can find, combining cards of a set to increase their power, and then hoping your utterly random placement puts you on the losing end. Rounds come down to who makes the correct rock-paper-scissors predictions, or just has the larger numbers. This all ties into other themes of mutually understood but lightly lampooned adult rules and hierarchies that tie us down, but the player has to go through all this on Sohta's behalf, rather than just existing in plot and dialogue regardless.
Bokunatsu's game loop almost always manages to avoid this pitfall by having you engage in more obvious, more rewarding activities like bug-catching, environmental puzzles, or just managing the passage of time by moving between camera angles. Friday Monsters uses a less chronologically fixed premise, encouraging completion by removing time skips across screens in favor of a loose episodic structure. But even these are more like bookmarks to tracks and remind you of ongoing plot threads, while Ayabe & co. nudge players towards methodically circling the town during each beat. If the typical Bokunatsu day uses its style of progression to force a basic amount of player priority, then what Friday Monsters has instead emphasizes the periphery events and observations of the village's afternoon and evening.
All this comes back to the Guild series' need for back-of-box justification for spending your precious $8, something that Millennium Kitchen's other works aren't so concerned with. What I'm trying to say is that, more than any other Guild release, this one shouldn't have had to include a post-game, or any hinted insecurities about what's "missing". Extra stuff for its own sake is generally optional here, but incentivized by the narrator + promises of extra story which you neither need nor actually get much of in the end.
Much of the story's strengths and staying power comes from what it insinuates, with characters' routines and tribulations shown in enough depth yet elided when necessary to preserve dignity and mystery. After all, it's not just Sohta's tale, the aimless but excited wanderings of a kid trying to take his golden years at a slippery pace. Friday Monsters is just as much concerned with his parents, especially the downtrodden father who wants a courage to live he's never had. While the children only know TV, a story around every corner no matter how slight or recycled, the parents and post-teens stuck on Tokyo's recovering borderlands still remember the tragedies and romance of the cinema or puppet theater.
Sohta's mom and dad are struggling to keep their love and dedication as they enter middle age, denied the economic and cultural promises emblemized in classic Shochiku dramas. Megami and Akebi's dad now have to reconicle their own free time and hobbies with devoting their energy and resources to creating and supporting the tokusatsu shows that seem all too real for Tokyo's new youth, but no different from genre pictures by Toei or Toho. Emiko and her police officer father share an intimate Ozu-esque dialogue while a kaiju duel rages behind them, Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu's archetypes juxtaposed against superhero depictions of the country's calamities, environmental injustices, and looming specters of globalization. All of them could fit right onto the silver screen, if they weren't too wrapped up in their comfortable itineraries.
At least he kids are all right. School's always over when they wake up to play, and the simpler joys of learning their vernacular and playing absurd master-servant games never gets old. Two of the boys even reduce their identities to family professions, as Ramen and Billboard both exude their working-class roots in place of stodgy, less memorable formal names. It's precisely that contrast of Sohta & S-chan's mundane but precious growing up with all the frustrations of adulthood which drives not just the plot, but the dive into magical realism this game unleashes upon players.
One example is the protagonist's baffling ability to warp from a seemingly inescapable bad ending back into Ramen's family's diner. Context clues from talking with friends and acquaintances tell the player that Sohta had almost passed out, not remembering his feverish journey to the watering hole, but he doesn't recall nor care that much about it. Any grown-up would understand the gravity of the situation, yet our "hero" plays helpless ghost and witness to an imagination shared with his close circle. Dreams and willpower make any outcome possible on a dog day like this, be it becoming the new cosmic hero of your hometown or falling from Godzilla's claws back into reality. And if they don't even know how to overthink it (discounting A-Plus' genre savvy mumblings), why should we? There's always time later for crack theories about how our protagonist and the "6th cutest girl in class" represent Izanagi and Izanami, after all.
How about the big 'ol kaiju, then? They all look impressive, even if most are reduced to card illustrations. Only Frankasaurus and Cleaner Man get the big 3D showdown, but their wrestling and interactions with Setagaya and the surrounding wards are so damn effective I don't need to see the other giants in action. Nowhere better does Friday Monsters nail its sense of scale and romanticism, that contrast between you and the wider world around you waiting to be explored, than with its climactic fight. Again, it's likely these science fantasy events happening in front of us could be the result of a community's exposure to harmful pollution and chemical from nearby factories, causing hallucinations. But what we're shown could just as well be the real deal, a marvelous if frightening set of circumstances always repeating but rarely understood. This isn't your typical Friday Monsters, uh, Friday twilight—now the unready man of the house becomes an avatar of justice and moral fulfillment, playing Ultraman to Ayabe's hazily remembered Tokyo suburbia. We're not stuck in Sohta's story, nor in his dad's or anyone else's. There's an undercurrent of Japan's indigenous and regional mythology metamorphizing in response to foreign influences, with communal storytelling traditions used here to comment on the transition into the modern.
A great example of Friday Monsters' writing chops is this funny guy named Frank, a well-dressed European gentleman who looks waaaaaaay too much like the original Doctor Who. He's the broadest caricature in this story, an ambassador of weird Western invasion who's nonetheless become part of the community. What part he plays in it, though, remains up to interpretation. Ayaba presents possibilities as wide-ranging as Frank being Sohta's imaginary friend, born from playing with sausages in his bento box. Or he's an elaborate tarento personality working for the local TV station, an example of outside talent brought in from abroad or the local subculture. Maybe this William Hartnell look-a-like really is an alien, the spitting image of an English sophisticate intervening with local affairs for increasingly imperialistic reasons.
No matter what, this one character can go from a cute little sideshow to a narrative-warping anti-hero, stuck between the suspected real and the seductively imagined. That's a lot of adjectives to say this game's full of similarly compelling individuals, each of whom interact with others and the setting in unique ways. Nanafumi, angsty loner and bully in the making, runs the gamut from puzzle obstacle you must solve to a minor hero later in the story, as much a moral example as a person to acknowledge on his own merits. I can remember almost everyone's name here, and not because there's anyone I ever wanted to avoid talking to.
Maybe the story's biggest theme is the theatrical nature of modern life, from Meiji-era home businesses upon farmland to the unavoidable broadcasts and pageantries these families engage in. Friday Monsters indulges you in rituals, from small details like Sohta not wearing his shoes at home to the "ninjutsu" he and the other kids use on each other to show dominance. Pre-rendered 3D environs come to us through carefully chosen camera angles, often disobeying Hollywood's rules of visual progression for the sake of dramatic and thematic effect. Sightlines clue you in on the separation between rural and suburban Tokyo, as well as the pervasive eternal railway walling you off from the picket line and other harsh politics of this era. If anything, I wish there was just a bit more area to explore, or more to interact with on the scenic routes (something Bokunatsu balances well with its lack of urgency). But the game's visual splendor and lush audio design makes it so easy to stay in this world for longer than you'd expect.
Much longer indeed, as I found out when trying the post-game before eventually bouncing off to write this review. There's a simple reason why, as I'd hinted earlier: the "bonus story" of Friday Monsters is antithetical to the game's design and messages. Sure, it'd be nice to learn even more about these people and the weird stories defining them, but we've spent enough time in Sohta's community to know it's worth moving on from. Why crawl around to dig up the scraps when I could just play the core game again? It's like Ayabe & co. are nudging players towards the realization that completionism is a trap both in media and in our own lives, but L5 told them to develop this post-game anyway.
What we're left with is a slower, even more decompressed village to hang out in where Sohta semi-randomly switches conversation topics and more focus goes to card battling or snooping around for the final Monster Glims. This can be fun if played in short bursts, but definitely not as much as the few hours of well-paced, slow and steady social adventuring beforehand. And actually reaching 100% makes this game the kind of slog some of Bokunatsu's skeptics wrongly deem it. Diminishing returns is the last situation I expected here, and it almost sours an otherwise awe-inspiring experience. We even already had a clean opening and ending like you'd see in an anime or children's show from the time, cute theme song and all. Dragging this out threatens to cheapen all the player's just enjoyed.
Encompassing all the intricacies behind this game and its wider context is a battle between idealism and cynicism, with childhood nostalgia as the battleground. I'm unsure if this spinoff's any darker or lighter than the most rigorous Bokunatsu titles, but that almost decade-long gap between this and Millennium Kitchen's recent Shin-chan game stands out to me. After making four summer vacation games with more content, iteration, and repetition than the last, here comes a more constrained, more wanting variation on the genre. (Let's not forget Bokura no Kazoku, a promising inversion of this formula idealizing urban Japan.) Friday Monsters achieves so much immersion and introspection via its clash of ideas against labors, feeling like more than a set of tropes or binaries thrown into its confined space. Perhaps this was Ayabe's own journey to stretch outside the Bokunatsu comfort zone, even knowing he'd have to compromise with his publisher as he'd did with Sony and Contrail years prior. Embracing fantasy to this degree was more than a novelty that would appease Akihiro Hino and other higer-ups; it was the natural next step.
For me, it's just frustrating how close this gets to becoming the masterpiece it hints at. A telltale sign early on was seeing the fairly barebones, clunky UI which makes Bokunatsu's skeuomorphic menus look like fine art. I pressed on and enjoyed myself oh so much anyway, but I can only nod in agreement with Ayabe about the perils of funding these more niche adventures without leaning too far into conventions or market trends. What flaws and missed opportunities crop up here manage to highlight all that Friday Monsters succeeds with, though. Other reviewers have rightly pointed out the sheer charm, verisimilitude, and admirable qualities found all throughout, making it the most complete Guild series entry by some distance. You can't stay in this world forever, no matter how much you want to, but the fond memories of this suburban fantasy can last a lifetime. Here's a story that understands the impossibility of utopia yet lets us yearn for an exciting and sustainable social contract between kids, taller kids, and the processes and solidarity making it all possible.
Nintendo should get raked over the coals for letting media marvels like this fall into unavailability because they can't be bothered to spend chump change on server and network maintenance. Little stories like this are what inspire me to keep playing video games, no matter how much I think I've seen or what I might miss out on. That's most valuable of all.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Feb. 21 - 27, 2023
2000
Oh how I love to squid around, showing Ironhead who's the boss of this swim. It's not much larger than a single part of Cave Story, but this little game has an identity beyond just demoing Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya's future works. (Let's also deem this a doujin classic, just like its successor which is so often only called an indie game.) Our unlikely hero has no grim backstory or workmanlike mentality, just the earnestness and intuition to do what's right for this troubled underseas enclave. Jetting around caverns, helping out the residents, and eventually rescuing them from certain doom makes for one exciting hour-long adventure. It's like if Lunar Lander had a story, boss fights, cute characters, and an inimitable style that set Pixel apart from his peers. Squidlander, if you will! Just don't waste your time on the 3DS port, let alone the money Nicalis doesn't deserve.
I'll spare you any more puns and set the scene. The turn of the millennium saw rapid flux in Japan's doujin game community. Widespread adoption of Windows and the Internet meant the old BBS days were fading. Anyone could hop onto Vector.jp, Enterbrain, or another host site to spread their work, get feedback, and maybe get a booth at Comiket or some other big event. All but the most prominent circles were moving on from the PC-98's strict limits in pursuit of new technologies, online multiplayer, and even more niche stories to tell. The conventionality of prior years, a need to design your game for easy transmittal across pricey phone minutes, gave way to the World Wide Web's promises of creative freedom. Only later did programmers, artists, musicians, and designers the world over realize how little had changed. This brief period of Y2K WWW optimism hadn't yet given way to paywalls, community siloing, or the reality distortion fields emanating from social media today. Coteries talked, created, and shared with each other like there was no tomorrow.
Within this primordial soup of an always-online doujin world came Ikachan, hatched out of Pixel's early efforts to make what would become Cave Story. By his own recollection, that better known title started from one of his roommates teaching the future indie legend some game development basics, sometime in 1999. The existence of even earlier micro-games like JiL JiL from 1997 puts this story in question, but it's true that Pixel's earliest software was much smaller in scope and ambition. Pixel's aims of making a multi-hour, consummate experience wouldn't show until this plucky underwater kid graced the Japanese web, using a bespoke engine and music format to massively compress its filesize for distribution. He's mentioned in multiple interviews how keeping these games small, accessible, and ideal for replays has always been the priority, something I think Ikachan exemplifies better than its spiritual successor.
Fittingly, your squid-ling journey begins in an isolated nadir of a small cave system, accompanied only by a smaller starfish fellow trapped behind sponge. This section introduces you to the game's conceit: you can only float and propel left, right, or up, with gravity in effect at all times. Cave Story starts out very similarly, forcing you to learn the base mechanics or face a swift and humiliating demise. I shuddered at the sight of spikes this early on, knowing how fatal they are at the start of the 2004 game, but Pixel's too kind here, letting you survive just one puncture. It's not even a couple minutes or so before you reach the first of many cute urchin friends, each sharing small tidbits about the setting and player goals. And the story tension's made clear right here as you learn about dangerous earthquakes threatening to collapse the whole place. Time's running out to stop the tremors or simply escape, and the player's only just wormed their way out of a craggy prison cell!
Ikachan doesn't deal with time limits, though, nor is it ever what I'd call challenging. Maybe that's because I'm used to the classic gravity platformers that inspired this one, but it's only a matter of patience to navigate these tunnels and bop enemies with your soon acquired mantle. Attacking is never that easy, even once you acquire the jet propulsion ability. Enemies have simple but somewhat jarring movement patterns one must track in order to time floats or boosts, and side attacks simply aren't possible until you get the Capacitor after the first of two bosses. The item & ability progression here is quite satisfying due to said simplicity, at least until after you defeat Ironhead. More than just bopping one or two starfish at a time with easy ways to dodge them, the iconic head honcho requires timing to reliably hit his underside and avoid those charges. Being such a short, restrained design exercise of a project, Ikachan kind of just ends after the big fight, with no new abilities or areas to test your skills. It's a bit of a letdown since the escape sequence could have benefited from even a light 3-to-5 minute timer, just to put more pressure on players.
Pixel compensates for these scant few mini-dungeons and set-pieces with a quality-over-quantity approach. Every critter you meet is memorable, either through appearance or interactions. Neither the PC freeware or 3DS commercial translations feel all that polished like Aeon Genesis' work on Cave Story, but they succeed at conveying the blasé dialogues and economic storytelling you'd expect from this creator. What small areas you dive through, and the mini obstacles you must overcome feel good to surpass. For all I've nitpicked about the game's ending, it's fun to do a kind of victory lap around this netherworld, rescuing each NPC before rocketing off into space, wondering where the hell they're going to end up. And Ikachan has a bit of worldbuilding mystery, too; why were the protagonist and Ben trapped down in the depths to begin with? Were either of them originally from the above world? What kind of bony-finned dumbass would request you deliver them raw blowfish, knowing it'd be poisoned?!
Of course, we can't forget how sumptuous the game looks and sounds even today. This was the debut work featuring Pixel's, uh, highly pixelated and textured artwork, and his catchy PC Engine-like chiptunes in turn. At no point was I ever confused about where to go, a function of a highly readable tileset and use of negative space in these environments. Wise coloring and immediately recognizable character silhouettes gave Ikachan the identity it needed to stand out amidst other, more detailed doujin games of the time. I've always considered this and Cave Story more than just retro throwbacks in both style and substance. They're two of the best examples of minimalist 2D dot visuals I know, and just as impressively coded for efficiency. Performance isn't super smooth due to the 50 FPS limit, but frames never drop and the controls always feel as low-latency as they should. So, despite its rough origins, the game's engine and presentation has more than survived the perils of Windows' evolution.
I wish I could be as glowing and partial to the 3DS version, though, which I acquired through Totally Legal Means and used for a quick replay. Nicalis has a history of making changes and additions to Pixel's work both welcome and dubious. In this case, I'm torn on the level design alterations, which range from adding more rooms to house new enemy types (none of which are much different from the originals) to straight-up padding out runtime. A couple of the routes players take to upgrades are now a bit too long for comfort, but there's a cool change to the Pinky rescue area where you now have to navigate a partially-hidden rock maze. Some nice new details like the shiny claws on crabs help too, yet I can't help but feel all of these changes are either too slight to matter or too irritating to ignore.
Worse still is the new localization, which interferes with the more humble themes and characterization of the original. See, Ikachan was never that much of a hero, nor destined to save the village from destruction. We start from the bottom and then, through our actions and honesty, do the right thing. But the revised character lines point to Nicalis' interpretation of the story, where Pinky becomes a Lisa Simpson type upon and Ironhead's no longer as hostile as he ought to be. The original English translation presents more fitting voices for each NPC and distributes the plot details better across the playthrough. Here it's more haphazardly presented, with Pinky's dad being much more mean to you for no good reason, or the upper tunnels sentry no longer being a pathetic bully like the pearl carrier back below. And there's still no added, meaningful new bits of plot or development here that would justify these liberal rewrites.
The 3DS port is otherwise very faithful, perhaps too much to justify the $5 pricetag. But that's a problem Nicalis faces with Cave Story, too, except they very likely brought ikachan to the eShop as a quick cash grab most of all. No extra sections, bosses, or challenge modes sends a clear sign of "we think you're dumb enough to buy this freeware". Enough's been said about Tyrone Rodriguez's downfall into exploiting Pixel's games and prestige for his benefit, and I hope everyone else who worked on this release got paid properly (or are eventually compensated despite the company president's asshole actions). I still hope this romp gets a proper custom engine or decompilation in the near-future. A level editor exists, and I presume there's gotta be at least one mod out there, but so much oxygen goes to a certain later title that everyone's kind of slept on this one's potential. Well, be the change you want to see in this world, I suppose. This wouldn't be my first time modding a fan favorite game just for my own pleasure.
Until then, Ikachan is a fun, unassuming Metroidvania channeling the better parts of the genre and its legacy. So many doujin and indie works have long since achieved much greater things, yet this would have been my favorite Flash-/Shockwave-ish PC game if I'd stumbled upon it in my childhood. Most importantly, this was something of a missing link between the quaint J-PC doujin period and the increasingly cross-regional, indie-adjacent paradigm that circles and creators now work in. Without this and especially Pixel's next game, so much pomp and circumstance around the revival of the bedroom coder dream may not have worked out as strongly. That's enough reason to try this ditty! It's definitely a case of untapped potential, justifiably viewed as a taste of Pixel's games to come, yet I can boot this up anytime and come away with a smile.
I'll spare you any more puns and set the scene. The turn of the millennium saw rapid flux in Japan's doujin game community. Widespread adoption of Windows and the Internet meant the old BBS days were fading. Anyone could hop onto Vector.jp, Enterbrain, or another host site to spread their work, get feedback, and maybe get a booth at Comiket or some other big event. All but the most prominent circles were moving on from the PC-98's strict limits in pursuit of new technologies, online multiplayer, and even more niche stories to tell. The conventionality of prior years, a need to design your game for easy transmittal across pricey phone minutes, gave way to the World Wide Web's promises of creative freedom. Only later did programmers, artists, musicians, and designers the world over realize how little had changed. This brief period of Y2K WWW optimism hadn't yet given way to paywalls, community siloing, or the reality distortion fields emanating from social media today. Coteries talked, created, and shared with each other like there was no tomorrow.
Within this primordial soup of an always-online doujin world came Ikachan, hatched out of Pixel's early efforts to make what would become Cave Story. By his own recollection, that better known title started from one of his roommates teaching the future indie legend some game development basics, sometime in 1999. The existence of even earlier micro-games like JiL JiL from 1997 puts this story in question, but it's true that Pixel's earliest software was much smaller in scope and ambition. Pixel's aims of making a multi-hour, consummate experience wouldn't show until this plucky underwater kid graced the Japanese web, using a bespoke engine and music format to massively compress its filesize for distribution. He's mentioned in multiple interviews how keeping these games small, accessible, and ideal for replays has always been the priority, something I think Ikachan exemplifies better than its spiritual successor.
Fittingly, your squid-ling journey begins in an isolated nadir of a small cave system, accompanied only by a smaller starfish fellow trapped behind sponge. This section introduces you to the game's conceit: you can only float and propel left, right, or up, with gravity in effect at all times. Cave Story starts out very similarly, forcing you to learn the base mechanics or face a swift and humiliating demise. I shuddered at the sight of spikes this early on, knowing how fatal they are at the start of the 2004 game, but Pixel's too kind here, letting you survive just one puncture. It's not even a couple minutes or so before you reach the first of many cute urchin friends, each sharing small tidbits about the setting and player goals. And the story tension's made clear right here as you learn about dangerous earthquakes threatening to collapse the whole place. Time's running out to stop the tremors or simply escape, and the player's only just wormed their way out of a craggy prison cell!
Ikachan doesn't deal with time limits, though, nor is it ever what I'd call challenging. Maybe that's because I'm used to the classic gravity platformers that inspired this one, but it's only a matter of patience to navigate these tunnels and bop enemies with your soon acquired mantle. Attacking is never that easy, even once you acquire the jet propulsion ability. Enemies have simple but somewhat jarring movement patterns one must track in order to time floats or boosts, and side attacks simply aren't possible until you get the Capacitor after the first of two bosses. The item & ability progression here is quite satisfying due to said simplicity, at least until after you defeat Ironhead. More than just bopping one or two starfish at a time with easy ways to dodge them, the iconic head honcho requires timing to reliably hit his underside and avoid those charges. Being such a short, restrained design exercise of a project, Ikachan kind of just ends after the big fight, with no new abilities or areas to test your skills. It's a bit of a letdown since the escape sequence could have benefited from even a light 3-to-5 minute timer, just to put more pressure on players.
Pixel compensates for these scant few mini-dungeons and set-pieces with a quality-over-quantity approach. Every critter you meet is memorable, either through appearance or interactions. Neither the PC freeware or 3DS commercial translations feel all that polished like Aeon Genesis' work on Cave Story, but they succeed at conveying the blasé dialogues and economic storytelling you'd expect from this creator. What small areas you dive through, and the mini obstacles you must overcome feel good to surpass. For all I've nitpicked about the game's ending, it's fun to do a kind of victory lap around this netherworld, rescuing each NPC before rocketing off into space, wondering where the hell they're going to end up. And Ikachan has a bit of worldbuilding mystery, too; why were the protagonist and Ben trapped down in the depths to begin with? Were either of them originally from the above world? What kind of bony-finned dumbass would request you deliver them raw blowfish, knowing it'd be poisoned?!
Of course, we can't forget how sumptuous the game looks and sounds even today. This was the debut work featuring Pixel's, uh, highly pixelated and textured artwork, and his catchy PC Engine-like chiptunes in turn. At no point was I ever confused about where to go, a function of a highly readable tileset and use of negative space in these environments. Wise coloring and immediately recognizable character silhouettes gave Ikachan the identity it needed to stand out amidst other, more detailed doujin games of the time. I've always considered this and Cave Story more than just retro throwbacks in both style and substance. They're two of the best examples of minimalist 2D dot visuals I know, and just as impressively coded for efficiency. Performance isn't super smooth due to the 50 FPS limit, but frames never drop and the controls always feel as low-latency as they should. So, despite its rough origins, the game's engine and presentation has more than survived the perils of Windows' evolution.
I wish I could be as glowing and partial to the 3DS version, though, which I acquired through Totally Legal Means and used for a quick replay. Nicalis has a history of making changes and additions to Pixel's work both welcome and dubious. In this case, I'm torn on the level design alterations, which range from adding more rooms to house new enemy types (none of which are much different from the originals) to straight-up padding out runtime. A couple of the routes players take to upgrades are now a bit too long for comfort, but there's a cool change to the Pinky rescue area where you now have to navigate a partially-hidden rock maze. Some nice new details like the shiny claws on crabs help too, yet I can't help but feel all of these changes are either too slight to matter or too irritating to ignore.
Worse still is the new localization, which interferes with the more humble themes and characterization of the original. See, Ikachan was never that much of a hero, nor destined to save the village from destruction. We start from the bottom and then, through our actions and honesty, do the right thing. But the revised character lines point to Nicalis' interpretation of the story, where Pinky becomes a Lisa Simpson type upon and Ironhead's no longer as hostile as he ought to be. The original English translation presents more fitting voices for each NPC and distributes the plot details better across the playthrough. Here it's more haphazardly presented, with Pinky's dad being much more mean to you for no good reason, or the upper tunnels sentry no longer being a pathetic bully like the pearl carrier back below. And there's still no added, meaningful new bits of plot or development here that would justify these liberal rewrites.
The 3DS port is otherwise very faithful, perhaps too much to justify the $5 pricetag. But that's a problem Nicalis faces with Cave Story, too, except they very likely brought ikachan to the eShop as a quick cash grab most of all. No extra sections, bosses, or challenge modes sends a clear sign of "we think you're dumb enough to buy this freeware". Enough's been said about Tyrone Rodriguez's downfall into exploiting Pixel's games and prestige for his benefit, and I hope everyone else who worked on this release got paid properly (or are eventually compensated despite the company president's asshole actions). I still hope this romp gets a proper custom engine or decompilation in the near-future. A level editor exists, and I presume there's gotta be at least one mod out there, but so much oxygen goes to a certain later title that everyone's kind of slept on this one's potential. Well, be the change you want to see in this world, I suppose. This wouldn't be my first time modding a fan favorite game just for my own pleasure.
Until then, Ikachan is a fun, unassuming Metroidvania channeling the better parts of the genre and its legacy. So many doujin and indie works have long since achieved much greater things, yet this would have been my favorite Flash-/Shockwave-ish PC game if I'd stumbled upon it in my childhood. Most importantly, this was something of a missing link between the quaint J-PC doujin period and the increasingly cross-regional, indie-adjacent paradigm that circles and creators now work in. Without this and especially Pixel's next game, so much pomp and circumstance around the revival of the bedroom coder dream may not have worked out as strongly. That's enough reason to try this ditty! It's definitely a case of untapped potential, justifiably viewed as a taste of Pixel's games to come, yet I can boot this up anytime and come away with a smile.
1979
Apply directly to the forehead! Wait, that's a joystick in your hand, not some placebo wax scam. (It's disgraceful how antique software like this never got on my local station's Jeopardy block while that snake oil did.) Now there's a car rolling right towards you in this garish maze, and you're weaving in and out of lanes. This isn't Pac-Man, but it's the beginnings of that formula, with dots to grab and Game Over-s to avoid. Sega-Gremlin had pioneered today's Snake clones with 1976's Blockade; Head On did much the same for maze games before the decade's end.
When this first released in Japan's arcades and adjacent venues, Space Invaders had spent a good half of a year dominating players' attention and wallets. Both games took some time to achieve their breakout sales, but Sega's success with this innovative, US-developed microprocessor board showed the industry that neither Atari's Pong nor Taito's alien shooter were fads. Genre variety was steadily creeping into game centers the world over, and Head On itself was one of the first hybrid titles moving past a ball-and-paddle model. In a sea of sit-down Breakout clones and taikan racers emphasizing the wheel and cabinet, Gremlin's new versus screen-clearing duel of wits must have seemed oddly esoteric.
It's very simple to us today, of course. You drive one car, the AI another, circling a single-screen maze of corridors filled with collectibles. The goal: grab every ball to get that score bonus, all while avoiding a direct collision! But it's easier said than done. Head On's secret sauce is the computer player's tenacity to run you down, driving faster and faster the more pellets you snag. Rather than accelerating in the same lane, you can move up and down to exit and enter the nearest two paths, which works to throw off the AI. The player's only got so much time before the other racer's just too fast to dodge, though, so slam that pedal and finish the course before then!
No extends, a barebones high scoring system, and limited variation across loops means this symmetrical battle of wits gets old fast. There's a bit of strategy to waiting for the AI driver to pass over dots and turn them red, which you can then grab for more points than before. By and large, though, this is as simple as the classic lives-based maze experience gets. I heartily recommend the sequel from that same year, which uses a more complex maze and a second AI racer to keep you invested for much longer. Even so, the original Head On more than earned its popularity. It improved and codified a genre merely toyed with earlier that decade. Gotcha and The Amazing Maze look like prototypes compared to this, something designer Lane Hauck probably knew at the time. Contemporary challengers from later that year, like Taito's Space Chaser or Exidy's Side Trak, each tried new gimmicks to stand out, but the Gremlin originals are frankly more polished and intuitive to play.
While Gremlin never again made such an impact on the Golden Age arcade game milieu, this formed part of Sega's big break into a market then led by Atari, Taito, and Midway. Monaco GP that same year kept up this momentum, as did Head On 2, and many clones spawned in the years to come. Namco 's own Rally-X iterates directly on this premise, though most know a certain pizza-shaped fellow's 1980 maze game better. Gremlin Industries arguably became more important as Sega's vector developer and U.S. board distributor going forward, but none of that would have happened if these early creations never went into production.
Anyone can give this a try nowadays on MAME or the Internet Archive. I'll also mention the various Sega Ages ports via the Memorial Collection discs for Saturn and PS2. This never got a more in-depth remake a la Monaco GP, and that's a shame given Head On's historic significance.
When this first released in Japan's arcades and adjacent venues, Space Invaders had spent a good half of a year dominating players' attention and wallets. Both games took some time to achieve their breakout sales, but Sega's success with this innovative, US-developed microprocessor board showed the industry that neither Atari's Pong nor Taito's alien shooter were fads. Genre variety was steadily creeping into game centers the world over, and Head On itself was one of the first hybrid titles moving past a ball-and-paddle model. In a sea of sit-down Breakout clones and taikan racers emphasizing the wheel and cabinet, Gremlin's new versus screen-clearing duel of wits must have seemed oddly esoteric.
It's very simple to us today, of course. You drive one car, the AI another, circling a single-screen maze of corridors filled with collectibles. The goal: grab every ball to get that score bonus, all while avoiding a direct collision! But it's easier said than done. Head On's secret sauce is the computer player's tenacity to run you down, driving faster and faster the more pellets you snag. Rather than accelerating in the same lane, you can move up and down to exit and enter the nearest two paths, which works to throw off the AI. The player's only got so much time before the other racer's just too fast to dodge, though, so slam that pedal and finish the course before then!
No extends, a barebones high scoring system, and limited variation across loops means this symmetrical battle of wits gets old fast. There's a bit of strategy to waiting for the AI driver to pass over dots and turn them red, which you can then grab for more points than before. By and large, though, this is as simple as the classic lives-based maze experience gets. I heartily recommend the sequel from that same year, which uses a more complex maze and a second AI racer to keep you invested for much longer. Even so, the original Head On more than earned its popularity. It improved and codified a genre merely toyed with earlier that decade. Gotcha and The Amazing Maze look like prototypes compared to this, something designer Lane Hauck probably knew at the time. Contemporary challengers from later that year, like Taito's Space Chaser or Exidy's Side Trak, each tried new gimmicks to stand out, but the Gremlin originals are frankly more polished and intuitive to play.
While Gremlin never again made such an impact on the Golden Age arcade game milieu, this formed part of Sega's big break into a market then led by Atari, Taito, and Midway. Monaco GP that same year kept up this momentum, as did Head On 2, and many clones spawned in the years to come. Namco 's own Rally-X iterates directly on this premise, though most know a certain pizza-shaped fellow's 1980 maze game better. Gremlin Industries arguably became more important as Sega's vector developer and U.S. board distributor going forward, but none of that would have happened if these early creations never went into production.
Anyone can give this a try nowadays on MAME or the Internet Archive. I'll also mention the various Sega Ages ports via the Memorial Collection discs for Saturn and PS2. This never got a more in-depth remake a la Monaco GP, and that's a shame given Head On's historic significance.
1998
Move over 40 Winks Croc: Legend of the Gobbos... Here's the platformer adventure that helped save Apple Computer Inc. from bankruptcy. Every original iMac came bundled with this short but sweet demo, showcasing QuickDraw 3D and giving the kids something fun. And it stars a silly far-future dino blasting through its ancestors to grab some McGuffins. 20 minutes are all you get, and all you need, to have a round with what was possibly the most played GPU-centric game of its day. And it's still worth it today, especially thanks to Iliyas Jorio's source port for modern OSes.
We all love to say 1998 was one of gaming's best years, but rarely does that seem to include the Macintosh. I'm not saying that Apple's once-ailing prosumer home computer line suddenly got anything on the level of Unreal, Metal Gear Solid, or Ocarina of Time, but remember, this was the iMac G3's time to shine. Under interim (and soon permanent) CEO Steve Jobs' direction, the corporation snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, aggressively and effectively marketing a cheap but powerful enough Internet-age Macintosh experience to new users. Tons of schools, businesses, and home users bought into Apple's previously ignored hard and soft ecosystem, even as Windows 95 and its progeny gave Microsoft a near monopoly on the PC space. Beyond a better value product, the iMac was a triumph of design and advertising, this bulbous, umami-like machine benefiting from Mac OS 8's strengths over Windows and previous versions. It also happened to come with a curious pack-in game from this dude out in Austin, TX, stuck in a boring job at Motorola and raring to make another hit shareware game.
Brian Greenstone's the driving force behind Pangea Software and its earlier efforts, mainly Mighty Mike (aka Power Pete) from '95. That earlier release was itself bundled with mid-'90s Performa and Power Macintosh models; Nanosaur logically continued the relationship he'd built with Apple. His early work with Apple's new graphics API, first demoed in '95 and '96, proved important to the iMac's gaming potential, with said line using ATI's baseline Rage II series of accelerator cards. With scarcely more than a month to create a small pack-in title, Greenstone and crew put out what's basically the spiritual successor to Mighty Mike, but set in the Cretaceous.
Nanosaur's premise is simple: you've traveled back in time to 20 minutes before the great meteor mass extinction begins. As part of a civilization of uplifted 'saurs building from humanity's dead remains, you're tasked with collecting five eggs, each from a different species, and returning them to the future. Easier said than done, of course. None of the reptiles are happy to say you invading their land, stealing their young, and blowing up their neighbors. Unluckily for them, our protagonist comes strapped, able to use multiple weapons, power-ups, and a double jump plus jetpack to boot. There's only one level to play over and over again, but it's quite large by '98 standards, and Pangea gives replay incentives like a score table and secret areas.
Actually controlling this raptor is far from smooth going. Croc has the edge on this because it offers strafing, whereas Nanosaur basically uses tank controls. Sense of motion and air control's about as good as in Argonaut Games' platformer, though, and this short thing's more about combat and exploration than pure tests of jumping. No bottomless pits, no required collectibles in the air—none of the frustration I have to grin and bear when trying to save the Gobbos. Turning could have been faster, and I'm pretty sure this control scheme had to account for keyboard-only play, hence the lack of an analog camera. But it's simple, responsive, and offers leeway to less skilled players. Gamepad support's good, too, making it easier to spam shots than just tapping keys. I wish Jorio's port had more options for customizing joy bindings, though.
The game loop itself works very well for something this short. I only wish there was more to actually do here, like a more challenging second level or something. Every cycle of running and jumping across each biome, killing dinos and nabbing eggs to throw into a nearby time portal, feels like a small stage each time. Most enemies just want to ram you for big damage, save the pterodactyls throwing rocks from above. What makes dodging and obliterating them trickier are the environmental hazards, from spore bombs to lava flows, which complicate one's movement and approach. Expect to die a couple times or more when starting out, as there's some traps like the canyon boulders or stegosaurs hiding in shrubs waiting to catch you.
All this comes together to make a thrilling, if very lightweight and predictable fetch-action romp. Granted, it's a miracle Nanosaur plays as well as it does since Greenstone only had three weeks to design and implement the game itself. He'd originally planned this as a QuickDraw 3D demo showing off the tech's potential, as well as his own skin-and-bones animation system inspired by SEGA's recent The Lost World lightgun shooter. To that end, this transformation from pet project to miniaturized Power Pete turned out way better than Greenstone, Apple, or anyone else could have expected. I can beat this in less than 10 minutes, knowing the layout and mechanics quite well now, but so many kids enjoyed trying this over and over again that the runtime hardly matters. There's a quaint joy in optimizing your runs, either for time or score, while jamming out to that funky jungle rock music, traversing the fog for more ammo and health pick-ups to feed your path of destruction.
Pangea had made a relatively small but useful amount of cash over the years, from their Apple IIGS-defining hit Xenocide to the trickle of royalties Greenstone received from MacPlay for Power Pete. But the company's deal with Apple was a boon for everyone, landing him a job on their QuickDraw team and soon leading to more shareware classics for iMac and beyond. As both charityware and a defining pack-in product, Nanosaur marked a maturation of the Mac games market, its success lifting burdens off other beleaguered studios like Bungie and Ambrosia. Greenstone soon leave Apple to give them another hit, the iconic Bugdom a year later, and eventually revisited our plucky chrono-jumping hero with 2004's Nanosaur 2. In the meantime, they put out an expanded paid version of this called Nanosaur Extreme, also included with Jorio's port. All this added was a new high difficulty mode, but having to deal with tens of T-rexes at once definitely gets everything out of the game's design as it deserves. I actually had to stand on geysers and charge up the jetpack when playing this mode, just to keep distance from the hordes cornering me!
I guess the pitch for trying Nanosaur boils down to "cool bipedal boi tears through budget Jurassic Park for great justice". This really isn't something I'd boot up for a revelation or even a great take on the prehistoric action adventure. It's also difficult to appreciate how graphically advanced this was in its time, combining detailed 3D modeling and animation with proto-shaders and a high rendering resolution matching the iMac's hardware. But I'm going out of my way to criticize or downplay a humble, very enjoyable piece of history which stacks up well to modern game jam faire. It takes the best parts of Mighty Mike and competing efforts like Ambrosia's Harry the Handsome Executive, shunting the Mac shareware world into polygonal view just like Avara and Marathon 2 had tried. Weird freeware collect-a-thon platformers would never be the same; given how far this one spread, they could only strive to beat this benchmark.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
We all love to say 1998 was one of gaming's best years, but rarely does that seem to include the Macintosh. I'm not saying that Apple's once-ailing prosumer home computer line suddenly got anything on the level of Unreal, Metal Gear Solid, or Ocarina of Time, but remember, this was the iMac G3's time to shine. Under interim (and soon permanent) CEO Steve Jobs' direction, the corporation snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, aggressively and effectively marketing a cheap but powerful enough Internet-age Macintosh experience to new users. Tons of schools, businesses, and home users bought into Apple's previously ignored hard and soft ecosystem, even as Windows 95 and its progeny gave Microsoft a near monopoly on the PC space. Beyond a better value product, the iMac was a triumph of design and advertising, this bulbous, umami-like machine benefiting from Mac OS 8's strengths over Windows and previous versions. It also happened to come with a curious pack-in game from this dude out in Austin, TX, stuck in a boring job at Motorola and raring to make another hit shareware game.
Brian Greenstone's the driving force behind Pangea Software and its earlier efforts, mainly Mighty Mike (aka Power Pete) from '95. That earlier release was itself bundled with mid-'90s Performa and Power Macintosh models; Nanosaur logically continued the relationship he'd built with Apple. His early work with Apple's new graphics API, first demoed in '95 and '96, proved important to the iMac's gaming potential, with said line using ATI's baseline Rage II series of accelerator cards. With scarcely more than a month to create a small pack-in title, Greenstone and crew put out what's basically the spiritual successor to Mighty Mike, but set in the Cretaceous.
Nanosaur's premise is simple: you've traveled back in time to 20 minutes before the great meteor mass extinction begins. As part of a civilization of uplifted 'saurs building from humanity's dead remains, you're tasked with collecting five eggs, each from a different species, and returning them to the future. Easier said than done, of course. None of the reptiles are happy to say you invading their land, stealing their young, and blowing up their neighbors. Unluckily for them, our protagonist comes strapped, able to use multiple weapons, power-ups, and a double jump plus jetpack to boot. There's only one level to play over and over again, but it's quite large by '98 standards, and Pangea gives replay incentives like a score table and secret areas.
Actually controlling this raptor is far from smooth going. Croc has the edge on this because it offers strafing, whereas Nanosaur basically uses tank controls. Sense of motion and air control's about as good as in Argonaut Games' platformer, though, and this short thing's more about combat and exploration than pure tests of jumping. No bottomless pits, no required collectibles in the air—none of the frustration I have to grin and bear when trying to save the Gobbos. Turning could have been faster, and I'm pretty sure this control scheme had to account for keyboard-only play, hence the lack of an analog camera. But it's simple, responsive, and offers leeway to less skilled players. Gamepad support's good, too, making it easier to spam shots than just tapping keys. I wish Jorio's port had more options for customizing joy bindings, though.
The game loop itself works very well for something this short. I only wish there was more to actually do here, like a more challenging second level or something. Every cycle of running and jumping across each biome, killing dinos and nabbing eggs to throw into a nearby time portal, feels like a small stage each time. Most enemies just want to ram you for big damage, save the pterodactyls throwing rocks from above. What makes dodging and obliterating them trickier are the environmental hazards, from spore bombs to lava flows, which complicate one's movement and approach. Expect to die a couple times or more when starting out, as there's some traps like the canyon boulders or stegosaurs hiding in shrubs waiting to catch you.
All this comes together to make a thrilling, if very lightweight and predictable fetch-action romp. Granted, it's a miracle Nanosaur plays as well as it does since Greenstone only had three weeks to design and implement the game itself. He'd originally planned this as a QuickDraw 3D demo showing off the tech's potential, as well as his own skin-and-bones animation system inspired by SEGA's recent The Lost World lightgun shooter. To that end, this transformation from pet project to miniaturized Power Pete turned out way better than Greenstone, Apple, or anyone else could have expected. I can beat this in less than 10 minutes, knowing the layout and mechanics quite well now, but so many kids enjoyed trying this over and over again that the runtime hardly matters. There's a quaint joy in optimizing your runs, either for time or score, while jamming out to that funky jungle rock music, traversing the fog for more ammo and health pick-ups to feed your path of destruction.
Pangea had made a relatively small but useful amount of cash over the years, from their Apple IIGS-defining hit Xenocide to the trickle of royalties Greenstone received from MacPlay for Power Pete. But the company's deal with Apple was a boon for everyone, landing him a job on their QuickDraw team and soon leading to more shareware classics for iMac and beyond. As both charityware and a defining pack-in product, Nanosaur marked a maturation of the Mac games market, its success lifting burdens off other beleaguered studios like Bungie and Ambrosia. Greenstone soon leave Apple to give them another hit, the iconic Bugdom a year later, and eventually revisited our plucky chrono-jumping hero with 2004's Nanosaur 2. In the meantime, they put out an expanded paid version of this called Nanosaur Extreme, also included with Jorio's port. All this added was a new high difficulty mode, but having to deal with tens of T-rexes at once definitely gets everything out of the game's design as it deserves. I actually had to stand on geysers and charge up the jetpack when playing this mode, just to keep distance from the hordes cornering me!
I guess the pitch for trying Nanosaur boils down to "cool bipedal boi tears through budget Jurassic Park for great justice". This really isn't something I'd boot up for a revelation or even a great take on the prehistoric action adventure. It's also difficult to appreciate how graphically advanced this was in its time, combining detailed 3D modeling and animation with proto-shaders and a high rendering resolution matching the iMac's hardware. But I'm going out of my way to criticize or downplay a humble, very enjoyable piece of history which stacks up well to modern game jam faire. It takes the best parts of Mighty Mike and competing efforts like Ambrosia's Harry the Handsome Executive, shunting the Mac shareware world into polygonal view just like Avara and Marathon 2 had tried. Weird freeware collect-a-thon platformers would never be the same; given how far this one spread, they could only strive to beat this benchmark.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
1982
Making cartridge games in the pre-Famicom years posed a dilemma: they couldn't store much game without costing customers and manufacturers out the butt. It's no surprise that Nintendo later made their own disk add-on, among others, in order to distribute cheaper, larger software. All the excess cart inventory that flooded North American console markets, thus precipitating the region's early-'80s crash, finally got discounted to rates we'd expect today. And it's in that period of decline where something like Miner 2049er would have appealed to Atari PC owners normally priced out of cart games.
This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.
I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.
The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.
It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.
Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.
Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.
This 16K double-board release promised 10 levels of arcade-y, highly replayable platform adventuring, among other items of praise littering the pages of newsletters and magazines. Just one problem: it's a poor mash-up of Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and other better cabinet faire you'd lose less quarters from and enjoy more. This was the same year one could find awesome, innovative experiences like Moon Patrol down at the bar or civic center, let alone Activision's Pitfall and other tech-pushing Atari VCS works. Hell, I'd rather deal with all the exhausting RNG-laden dungeons of Castle Wolfenstein right now than bother with a jack of all trades + master of none such as this.
I don't mean to bag on Bill Hogue's 1982 work that much, knowing the trials and tribulations of bedroom coding in those days. He'd made a modest living off many TRS-80 clones of arcade staples, only having to make this once Radio Shack/Tandy discontinued that platform. His studio Big Five debuted on Apple II & Atari 800 with this unwieldy thing, so large they couldn't smush it into the standard cartridge size of the latter machine. Contrast this with David Crane's masterful compression of Pitfall into just 4 kiloybytes, a quarter as big yet much more enjoyable a play. Surely all these unique stages in Miner 2049er would have given it the edge on other primordial platformers, right? That's what I hoped for going in, not that I expected anything amazing. To my disappointment, its mechanics, progression, and overall game-feel just seems diluted to the point of disrespecting its inspirations.
The premise doesn't make a great impression: rather than reaching an apex or collecting an item quota to clear the stage, you must walk across each and every colorable tile to proceed. Anyone who's played Crush Roller or that stamp minigame in Mario Party 4 (among other odd examples) should recognize this. The only bits of land you need not worry about are elevator/teleporter floors and ladders, but the game requires you to complete a tour of everything else. In addition to padding out my playthrough without much sense of accomplishment, this also let me spend more time with Miner 2049er's platforming physics. And the verdict is they're not good. Falling for even a couple seconds kills you, and a lack of air control means mistimed jumps are fatal. The way jumps carry more horizontal inertia than vertical always throws me off a bit, too. Folks love to complain about a lack of agility or failure avoidance in something like Spelunker, but that game and Donkey Kong at least feel more intuitive and consistent than this.
It wouldn't be so bad if the level designs weren't also full of one-hit-kill monsters and platforms with only the slightest elevation differences. The maze game influences come in strong with this game's enemies, which you can remove from the equation by grabbing bonus items, usually shovels or pickaxes and the like. Managing the critters' patterns, your available route(s), and proximity to these power-ups becomes more important the further in you get. But I rarely if ever felt satisfied by this game loop; the flatter, more fluid and tactical plane of action in Pac-Man et al. works way better. Combine all this with getting undone by the least expected missed jump, or running out of invincibility time right before touching a mook, and there's just more frustration than gratification.
Now it's far from an awful time, as the game hands you multiple lives and extends in case anything bad happens. The game occasionally exudes this charming, irreverent attitude towards Nintendo's precursor and the absurdity of this miner's predicament. Mediocrity wasn't as much of a sin back then, especially not when developers are trying to imitate and expand on new ideas. But I think Miner 2049er is a telltale case of how back-of-the-box features can't compensate for lack of polish or substance. For example, it took less than a year for Doug Smith's Lode Runner to do everything here way better, combining Donkey Kong & Heiankyo Alien with other osmotic influences to make a timeless puzzle platformer. The arcade adventure-platformer took on a distinct identity with Matthew Smith's Manic Miner, part of the European/UK PC game pantheon and itself born from the Trash 80's legacy. One could charitably claims that this pre-crash title never aspired to those competitors' ambitions, that it finds refuge in elegance or something. I wish I could agree, especially given its popularity and number of ports over the decade. All I know is this one ain't got a level editor, or subtle anti-Tory/-Thatcher political commentary. The only identity I can, erm, identify is that silly box art of the shaggy prospector and bovine buddy.
Give this a shot if you appreciate the history and context behind it, or just want something distinctly proto-shareware. I just can't muster much enthusiasm for a game this subpar and oddly mundane, both now and then. None of the conversions and remakes seem all that special either, though props to Epoch for bringing it to the Super Cassette Vision in '85. By the time this could have made a grand comeback on handhelds, Boulder Dash and other spelunking sorties basically obsoleted it. Minor 2049er indeed.
1999
"Peter, which is better: Antz or A Bug's Life?"
"Doesn't matter, Uncle Ben; Bugdom's better than both!"
If Nanosaur was the standard-bearer for Apple's rescue, then this 1999 pack-in pint-size platformer was their marketplace mascot. Pangea Software had delivered them one impressive playable demo, and it stood to reason they'd ask for another. But this go-around would be different for the developer, with lead coder and designer Brian Greenstone had a choice to make. As Cadensia mentioned in her write-up, either he'd keep his current job helping Apple's QuickDraw 3D team, or he and his contractor co-developers would make a successor to their '98 game as bundled shareware for the next generation iMac. He chose the latter, for the better it turns out. (Considering he'd just about bailed on Mac software publishing entirely prior to Nanosaur, all because of Apple's managerial incompetence and imminent failure, this amount of caution makes sense.) Rollie McFly's quest to save the titular 'dom from King Thorax's red ants and accomplices became another windfall for Apple and Pangea, the kind of game even a picky Steve Jobs could feel proud of. Still, I felt a bit of fatigue and disappointment after finishing my playthrough, wishing it had been more of a leap in polish and consistency.
Today it's a solid romp, more ambitious than its predecessor; it also hits higher highs and lower lows. Playing it now's pretty easy thanks Iliyas Jorio's modern PC/Mac port, too. Compared to Nanosaur's 20-minute single stage, Bugdom puts you through 10 untimed ones, with three of them mainly focusing on boss fights. To account for the longer playthrough, players get three save slots, plus the usual assortment of tweaks and control settings found in other Pangea works. Our goals aren't all that different from those games, either:collect rescue the trapped ladybugs, dodge or destroy the realm's disgruntled inhabitants, and use items like keys or power-ups to reach each level's end. But I think Greenstone's able to recontextualize these fundamental elements appropriately, keeping his earlier games' arcade-style antics while opening up the world you explore through both layout and mechanics.
Players start under a blue sky amidst grasses, fungi, and a healthy forest of dirt and foliage. Bugdom manages to cycle through several types of environments, so it's apt that we learn the controls, game loop, and objects of note in a friendly setting. Rollie's most useful technique, beyond just a basic jump and kick, is his Sonic-like ball roll (pun intended), a move that lets the plucky pill-bug dash across most areas in a flash. Careening into enemies damages them, and I had a lot of fun just zooming off of hills and cliffs to clear gaps or leave clumps of baddies in the dust. It's overly sensitive to analog controls on my gamepad, however, making a case for manipulating him and the camera with keyboard & mouse. Unlike Greenstone & Harper's earlier designs, this game does a much better job of using said peripherals, which now included Apple's infamous Y2K USB mice. Both configurations having such pros and cons is an improvement for sure, as the keys-only approach in Mighty Mike and company was less comfortable. I didn't feel a lot of jank or awkwardness moving Rollie around these environments compared to the raptor or knock-off G.I. Joe in those precursors.
However, it's when you reach the water taxi and dragonfly levels that Bugdom shows off its less than pleasant side, starting with hit-or-miss collision detection. The opening two rounds only required that players get through doors and light sections of water or trenches, with little precision platforming needed. Moving into the mosquito swamp complicates things, as fish leap into the air and can easily one-hit-kill you with all their aquatic speed. Getting a token and riding the silt strider's quite fun, but also noticeably chaotic due to a large hitbox and, sure enough, misleading level geometry you can get caught on. Thankfully it goes both ways, as no enemy's gonna knock you off this ride easily. Same goes for the next map, a twilight flight in a garden where humans trample and caterpillars crawl through bramble. Greenstone wisely gives players an invert toggle for the dragonfly section, which is a nice change of pace from dodging huge feet and kicking spear-toting, rock-throwing ants in the kisser.
Collision issues also crop up with combat and the momentum rolling, which isn't too much of an issue until later in-game. See, many of Bugdom's foes take multiple hits to defeat, a given since Rollie's more about agility than pure offense. Continuing the circle of life in this violent manner often leads to tense close-quarters combat, whether it's dodging flies with boxing gloves amidst a maze of deadly Pikmin-esque slugs, or eventually manipulating Thorax's fire-breathing soldiers into detonating cherry bombs around them. The player could try and just kick the whole time, as reliable as that is, but there's extra risk & reward from headbutting the baddies in ball mode, which even lets you sink them into deadly water, honey, or magma. Hell, the final non-boss level punishes players for not punting troops into the fiery goop, as killing them on land just lets their ghost come back to haunt you! Learning how to deal with aggressors while platforming and exploring each maze keeps the pace up, only devolving into molasses towards the end.
After the game's first half concludes with an initially confusing but thrilling dogfight against bees as you shoot down their hive, Pangea starts to seriously challenge anyone who's hoped for a gauntlet. The hive's insides, now wrecked and abuzz with angry apidae, present a series of tunnels, molten honey caves, and dead ends where you must jump on conveniently placed plungers to bomb your way open. This had some irritating, less than clear moments—namely how landing in the sweet stuff ends your life, but grabbing an invincibility drop lets you wade through for a time—but otherwise I consider this Bugdom's finest 15 minutes. The difficulty's just right, and Greenstone wrings a lot of blood from the level's concept, with hordes of drones kamikaze-ing you in vain while you snoop out both hostages and lucky clovers for extra points.
By this point I'd gotten a couple hours in and could really appreciate the audiovisual splendor, at least for the hardware Pangea had to work with. 2nd-gen iMac desktops and laptops weren't a huge leap in power or functionality over the previous year's models, but Bugdom was built to push ATI's newer Rage Pro and Rage 2 GPUs, as well as increased color depth on these displays. Sure, the vibrant hues and more rounded modeling wasn't all that unexpected from a high-end N64 platformer like those this one measures against, but who am I to complain? Kids saw these memorable critters and a decently realized world at a higher resolution without compromises, stripped from the fuzzy TV signal defining console peers. I can even forgive the short draw distance here, as it's improved over Nanosaur and extends far enough to facilitate fast rolling without bumping into everything. Mostly. There's also generally better music and sound design, from jaunty jigs and polkas at the beginning to moodier marches and electronica as one reaches deeper into the evil king's dominion. I vaguely remember fiddling around with a store demo version back when my old man brought to the local Apple store, immediately taken with how much it resembled and evoked the Dreamcast games I was enjoying.
Sadly this level of quality doesn't quite last through to the adventure's conclusion. I can appreciate the increased steps to completing every threatening area across Thorax's ant hills, with so many bombs to explode and dodge while evading those intimidating cockroaches andFloormasters fireflies. But it's here where Bugdom turns rather mean, not providing enough 1-ups and other pickups to compensate for abrupt first encounters with these puzzles. Nor are there a lot of checkpoints to prevent needless runbacks, something I rarely had a problem with earlier. It feels like Pangea fell into that classic game dev trap of testing earlier content with less experienced players, camouflaging the more unfriendly bits later on as testers had practiced so much they'd fly past said tough spots. Perhaps they went a bit too far in demonstrating Thorax's power, with such recalcitrance manifesting as overstuffed rooms with a few too many things going on.
The penultimate stage really goes off the rails, though. It starts off fine, introducing firefighting puzzles where you must locate and turn valves to quench the deadly embers. But then come the Tarzan leaps over lava, beset by unclear jumping angles and timing. I only had to restart any level once before this after biffing it right at the last anthill above-ground, but I had to end this last stretch early rather than suffer several loops of deaths I felt were unwarranted. Moreover, the player's actually punished for using the level's gimmick without prior experience, since new water pools can prevent you from breaking open nuts lying on the floor and thus getting extra score and power-up items. Having to route the best, least risky path through these miniature Moria is just asking too much on a first run. At least the final boss fight's much better, as Rollie just has to get Thorax all soggy via the broken garden pipes and then headbutt him for victory. Contrast that with level 7, the Queen Bee duel, which quickly becomes an unintuitive slog as you try to spin into her abdomen while staying out of honey globs which slow you down. Bleh…what a messy climax to a once spick-and-span undertaking.
Ending Bugdom on such a sour note means I can't rate it as high as I'd hoped, but I'm hardly at a loss for praise elsewhere. Adapting the appealing parts of Mighty Mike and Nanosaur into a mascot platformer took Greenstone & co. much longer than previous projects, eight months vs. a few at best. And I think these efforts pay off in a sometimes frustrating, but generally satisfying small-sized sojourn. It soon graced the raster fade-in of monitors in bedrooms, computer labs, and trend-chasing venues like museums across North America, sustaining plenty of attention. Pangea made so much profit and mindshare from this classic of Mac gaming that Greenstone could effectively run it full-time, no longer having to make his shareware titles when free time or contracting allowed. The new millennium saw not just Bugdom 2 for Apple's long-awaited modern operating system, but Pangea's next take on the action-platformer adventure with Otto Matic, among other early Mac OS X notables.
In a way, Bugdom was Mac OS' most accessible swan song—far from the esoterica of modding scenes for Marathon and Escape Velocity, the literary depths of Riven and Obsidian, or the now aging but ever present HyperCard scene that early-to-mid-'90s Mac owners subsisted on. Whereas Pangea's earlier dino romp dovetailed with an unexpected revival of the Apple brand, Rollie's handsome have-at-you with the king's unending formicae presents the Cult of Mac's commercially coherent legend, with Jobs returning hope to a land ransacked by corporate hatchet-men and the PC world invading and overriding this ecosystem. I'd like to think of Rollie less as Jobs, though, more so Greenstone taking on the visage of mascot platformer classics to stretch and refine a winning formula. I only wish that he hadn't feel this obligation to remake the same game so much, even if something as "out there" as Xenocide on Apple IIGS could only have worked all those years back, before genre codification mattered to more players.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
"Doesn't matter, Uncle Ben; Bugdom's better than both!"
If Nanosaur was the standard-bearer for Apple's rescue, then this 1999 pack-in pint-size platformer was their marketplace mascot. Pangea Software had delivered them one impressive playable demo, and it stood to reason they'd ask for another. But this go-around would be different for the developer, with lead coder and designer Brian Greenstone had a choice to make. As Cadensia mentioned in her write-up, either he'd keep his current job helping Apple's QuickDraw 3D team, or he and his contractor co-developers would make a successor to their '98 game as bundled shareware for the next generation iMac. He chose the latter, for the better it turns out. (Considering he'd just about bailed on Mac software publishing entirely prior to Nanosaur, all because of Apple's managerial incompetence and imminent failure, this amount of caution makes sense.) Rollie McFly's quest to save the titular 'dom from King Thorax's red ants and accomplices became another windfall for Apple and Pangea, the kind of game even a picky Steve Jobs could feel proud of. Still, I felt a bit of fatigue and disappointment after finishing my playthrough, wishing it had been more of a leap in polish and consistency.
Today it's a solid romp, more ambitious than its predecessor; it also hits higher highs and lower lows. Playing it now's pretty easy thanks Iliyas Jorio's modern PC/Mac port, too. Compared to Nanosaur's 20-minute single stage, Bugdom puts you through 10 untimed ones, with three of them mainly focusing on boss fights. To account for the longer playthrough, players get three save slots, plus the usual assortment of tweaks and control settings found in other Pangea works. Our goals aren't all that different from those games, either:
Players start under a blue sky amidst grasses, fungi, and a healthy forest of dirt and foliage. Bugdom manages to cycle through several types of environments, so it's apt that we learn the controls, game loop, and objects of note in a friendly setting. Rollie's most useful technique, beyond just a basic jump and kick, is his Sonic-like ball roll (pun intended), a move that lets the plucky pill-bug dash across most areas in a flash. Careening into enemies damages them, and I had a lot of fun just zooming off of hills and cliffs to clear gaps or leave clumps of baddies in the dust. It's overly sensitive to analog controls on my gamepad, however, making a case for manipulating him and the camera with keyboard & mouse. Unlike Greenstone & Harper's earlier designs, this game does a much better job of using said peripherals, which now included Apple's infamous Y2K USB mice. Both configurations having such pros and cons is an improvement for sure, as the keys-only approach in Mighty Mike and company was less comfortable. I didn't feel a lot of jank or awkwardness moving Rollie around these environments compared to the raptor or knock-off G.I. Joe in those precursors.
However, it's when you reach the water taxi and dragonfly levels that Bugdom shows off its less than pleasant side, starting with hit-or-miss collision detection. The opening two rounds only required that players get through doors and light sections of water or trenches, with little precision platforming needed. Moving into the mosquito swamp complicates things, as fish leap into the air and can easily one-hit-kill you with all their aquatic speed. Getting a token and riding the silt strider's quite fun, but also noticeably chaotic due to a large hitbox and, sure enough, misleading level geometry you can get caught on. Thankfully it goes both ways, as no enemy's gonna knock you off this ride easily. Same goes for the next map, a twilight flight in a garden where humans trample and caterpillars crawl through bramble. Greenstone wisely gives players an invert toggle for the dragonfly section, which is a nice change of pace from dodging huge feet and kicking spear-toting, rock-throwing ants in the kisser.
Collision issues also crop up with combat and the momentum rolling, which isn't too much of an issue until later in-game. See, many of Bugdom's foes take multiple hits to defeat, a given since Rollie's more about agility than pure offense. Continuing the circle of life in this violent manner often leads to tense close-quarters combat, whether it's dodging flies with boxing gloves amidst a maze of deadly Pikmin-esque slugs, or eventually manipulating Thorax's fire-breathing soldiers into detonating cherry bombs around them. The player could try and just kick the whole time, as reliable as that is, but there's extra risk & reward from headbutting the baddies in ball mode, which even lets you sink them into deadly water, honey, or magma. Hell, the final non-boss level punishes players for not punting troops into the fiery goop, as killing them on land just lets their ghost come back to haunt you! Learning how to deal with aggressors while platforming and exploring each maze keeps the pace up, only devolving into molasses towards the end.
After the game's first half concludes with an initially confusing but thrilling dogfight against bees as you shoot down their hive, Pangea starts to seriously challenge anyone who's hoped for a gauntlet. The hive's insides, now wrecked and abuzz with angry apidae, present a series of tunnels, molten honey caves, and dead ends where you must jump on conveniently placed plungers to bomb your way open. This had some irritating, less than clear moments—namely how landing in the sweet stuff ends your life, but grabbing an invincibility drop lets you wade through for a time—but otherwise I consider this Bugdom's finest 15 minutes. The difficulty's just right, and Greenstone wrings a lot of blood from the level's concept, with hordes of drones kamikaze-ing you in vain while you snoop out both hostages and lucky clovers for extra points.
By this point I'd gotten a couple hours in and could really appreciate the audiovisual splendor, at least for the hardware Pangea had to work with. 2nd-gen iMac desktops and laptops weren't a huge leap in power or functionality over the previous year's models, but Bugdom was built to push ATI's newer Rage Pro and Rage 2 GPUs, as well as increased color depth on these displays. Sure, the vibrant hues and more rounded modeling wasn't all that unexpected from a high-end N64 platformer like those this one measures against, but who am I to complain? Kids saw these memorable critters and a decently realized world at a higher resolution without compromises, stripped from the fuzzy TV signal defining console peers. I can even forgive the short draw distance here, as it's improved over Nanosaur and extends far enough to facilitate fast rolling without bumping into everything. Mostly. There's also generally better music and sound design, from jaunty jigs and polkas at the beginning to moodier marches and electronica as one reaches deeper into the evil king's dominion. I vaguely remember fiddling around with a store demo version back when my old man brought to the local Apple store, immediately taken with how much it resembled and evoked the Dreamcast games I was enjoying.
Sadly this level of quality doesn't quite last through to the adventure's conclusion. I can appreciate the increased steps to completing every threatening area across Thorax's ant hills, with so many bombs to explode and dodge while evading those intimidating cockroaches and
The penultimate stage really goes off the rails, though. It starts off fine, introducing firefighting puzzles where you must locate and turn valves to quench the deadly embers. But then come the Tarzan leaps over lava, beset by unclear jumping angles and timing. I only had to restart any level once before this after biffing it right at the last anthill above-ground, but I had to end this last stretch early rather than suffer several loops of deaths I felt were unwarranted. Moreover, the player's actually punished for using the level's gimmick without prior experience, since new water pools can prevent you from breaking open nuts lying on the floor and thus getting extra score and power-up items. Having to route the best, least risky path through these miniature Moria is just asking too much on a first run. At least the final boss fight's much better, as Rollie just has to get Thorax all soggy via the broken garden pipes and then headbutt him for victory. Contrast that with level 7, the Queen Bee duel, which quickly becomes an unintuitive slog as you try to spin into her abdomen while staying out of honey globs which slow you down. Bleh…what a messy climax to a once spick-and-span undertaking.
Ending Bugdom on such a sour note means I can't rate it as high as I'd hoped, but I'm hardly at a loss for praise elsewhere. Adapting the appealing parts of Mighty Mike and Nanosaur into a mascot platformer took Greenstone & co. much longer than previous projects, eight months vs. a few at best. And I think these efforts pay off in a sometimes frustrating, but generally satisfying small-sized sojourn. It soon graced the raster fade-in of monitors in bedrooms, computer labs, and trend-chasing venues like museums across North America, sustaining plenty of attention. Pangea made so much profit and mindshare from this classic of Mac gaming that Greenstone could effectively run it full-time, no longer having to make his shareware titles when free time or contracting allowed. The new millennium saw not just Bugdom 2 for Apple's long-awaited modern operating system, but Pangea's next take on the action-platformer adventure with Otto Matic, among other early Mac OS X notables.
In a way, Bugdom was Mac OS' most accessible swan song—far from the esoterica of modding scenes for Marathon and Escape Velocity, the literary depths of Riven and Obsidian, or the now aging but ever present HyperCard scene that early-to-mid-'90s Mac owners subsisted on. Whereas Pangea's earlier dino romp dovetailed with an unexpected revival of the Apple brand, Rollie's handsome have-at-you with the king's unending formicae presents the Cult of Mac's commercially coherent legend, with Jobs returning hope to a land ransacked by corporate hatchet-men and the PC world invading and overriding this ecosystem. I'd like to think of Rollie less as Jobs, though, more so Greenstone taking on the visage of mascot platformer classics to stretch and refine a winning formula. I only wish that he hadn't feel this obligation to remake the same game so much, even if something as "out there" as Xenocide on Apple IIGS could only have worked all those years back, before genre codification mattered to more players.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
1980
At the turn of the 1980s, Data East wasn't much of a big player in the Japanese video arcade market, having mainly released clones of recent titles like Space Invaders. Their clone Astro Fighter triggered a legal fight with Taito over claims of IP violation due to its similarities. Thankfully such a fate never hung over HWY Chase, despite its obvious resemblance to something like Galaxian from the year before. Rather, this kit-bashed take on both SEGA's Monaco GP and Namco's aforementioned early shooter would itself usher in the DECO Cassette System, the earliest successful inter-changeable arcade board/PCB architecture. On top of that, it's just a fun, thrilling thing to play in small bursts.
How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.
HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.
It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.
How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.
HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.
It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.
2001
For the people, it was just another exhilarating day, punching and rocketing through a deformed, deranged B-movie. For a decorated Pangea Software, this was maybe their most passionate, prestigious creation. Brian Greenstone and his frequent co-developers had the notion to refine their previous Macintosh action platformers, Nanosaur and Bugdom, into nostalgia for cheesy, laughable Hollywood science fantasy films. As the 2000s got started, this studio wasn't as pressured to prove the PowerPC Mac's polygonal potential, but Otto Matic still fits in with its other pack-in game brethren. All that's changed is Greenstone's attention to detail and playability, previously more of a secondary concern. This Flash Gordon reel gone wrong doesn't deviate from the collect-a-thon adventure template of its predecessors, yet it delivers on the promises they'd made but couldn't quite realize. Greenstone had finally delivered; the eponymous hero had arrived in both style and substance.
Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincialUFO bait humans awaiting doom, and this dorky but capable android who kind of resembles Rayman. Start a new game and you're greeted with something rather familiar, yet different: simple keyboard-mouse controls, hostages to rescue, plentiful cartoon violence, and a designer's mean streak hiding in plain sight. The delight's in the details, as Otto has an assortment of weapons and power-ups with which to defeat the alien invaders and warp these humans to safety. It's just as likely you'll fall into a puddle and short-circuit, though, or mistime a long distance jump-jet only to fall into an abyss. What I really liked in even the earliest Pangea soft I've tried, Mighty Mike, is this disarming aesthetic tied closely with such dangers. I hesitate to claim this mix of Ed Wood, Forbidden Planet, and '90s mascot platformers will appeal to everyone (some find it disturbing, let alone off-putting), but it's far from forgettable in a sea of similar titles. It helps that the modern open-source port's as usable as others.
The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.
So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!
Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.
Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.
I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.
And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.
Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.
Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.
The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincial
The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.
So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!
Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.
Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.
I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.
And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.
Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.
Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.
The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023
1982
Two years before the birth of my favorite PBS documentary series, two monumental arcade shooters released in Japanese game centers. We mostly talk about Namco's Xevious today, but that's not to say Taito's Front Line is just a footnote. Real-time games had toyed with replicating the modern ground combat experience before, from Konami's tank excursion Strategy-X to the more tactical, stealth-focused Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner. The former stuck true to the reflexes-driven loop of contemporary vehicle action, whereas the latter hinted at a more realistic approach, boiling the essentials of wargame combat down into an accessible format. It's really Taito's game that first united vehicular and infantry play into a cohesive whole, albeit with many rough edges and quite the jump in difficulty.
Front Line stars a non-descript 20th-century doughboy thrust into the action, with no squad or commanding officers to lead you through the battlefield. This front observer's got just a regular automatic rifle and seemingly no end of grenades, but also an aptitude with commandeering armored cannons on treads. Fighting through interminable waves of conspicuously Axis-like troops and juggernauts requires players to manage their distance, time shots and lobs correctly, and find a sustainable rhythm in the heat of battle.
I make this sound all too simple when it really isn't. Each loop, from the starting woods to the enemy HQ's boss, demands concentration and, often, the kind of luck any frontline soldier hopes for. One can tangibly feel the do-or-die atmosphere of battlefields even in a game as early as this. You won't ever find me calling this "gritty" or "visceral", but the simple audiovisuals and play dynamics mask a somewhat effective depiction of the entropy and senselessness found in a mid-'40s skirmish.
Front Line's creation is usually attributed to one Tetsuya Sasaki, but sources for this escape me. The most prolific person in games with said name worked at Alfa System as a producer, in fact. Whoever developed this '82 board sure didn't have the prominence of Tomohiro Nishikado. Ever since his most famous work Space Invaders, the corporation had deal with naught but imitators and less noteworthy successors to that missing link between the shooter and ball-and-paddle genres. A refresh was due...but how to accomplish it?
Adopting a loose WWII setting, with players controlling a G.I. fighting alone and within either light or heavy tanks, helped separate this game from the crowd. The critical and commercial success of two distinct but rigorously designed arcade shooters, this and Namco's sci-fi classic, set a precedent we see in triple-A shooters today. In one corner sit the futuristic, generally single-mode action of Vanquish or Returnal. In the other resides all those (alt) historic combat titles, from ye olde Call of Duty to everything with a Tom Clancy label slapped on.
Unlike Xevious, however, there's a few too many missteps and needless frustrations throughout Front Line which hold back its potential. First and foremost are the graphics themselves. Character sprites and environments all stick out without becoming garish, but it's often hard to distinguish enemy shots from your own, especially because all gun-fire dissipates after a split-second of travel. Just as loathsome is how the game handles scrolling: you have to move way too close towards the screen edge before the playfield adjusts, meaning AI soldiers or tanks can get cheap shots in on you as soon as they appear. The player's neither able to jump or dash out of the way when a potshot's heading their way, nor is the walking speed all that fast to begin with.
I'd forgive Taito's team for this decision if you could survive more than one hit, but that's just not the case. So this adherence to one-shot-and-you're-dead verisimilitude crashes right into the reality of stiff, limited player agility which itself doesn't reflect what this soldier's likely capable of. Keeping track of crossfire works great when you're in the middle, but definitely not when this game forces you towards the edge. Loathe those tank hitboxes, too, though the ability to cheat death through a quick ejection removes most of the sting there. After that, it's just a frantic jog to the nearest undamaged hunk of metal, assuming nothing guns you down in the meantime.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had no choice but to use said scrolling technique to make Front Line work within hardware limits of the era, though. Both this and Xevious crested new highs of on-screen color, sprite processing, and fluid action that impressed Japanese audiences. They couldn't have had more different approaches, though, with Sasaki's vision of a dour, muddy and torn warscape contrasting hard against Masanobu Endo's preference for green plains, sleek metallic bases, and the Nazca Lines. Anyone would have noticed similar audio design between the games, though, trading out melodic chiptunes for repetitive, dehumanized SFX and short jingles. These developers understood how to strike a balance between highlighting their products on the arcade floor and keeping players immersed without annoying their senses. In short, I'd rather expose my eardrums to all the shrill footsteps and explosions here than 1942's insufferable drill march.
Likewise, the spartan game loop used in Front Line feels tuned to an extent rarely found in Golden Age designs. This unfortunately works against players more often than not due to the scrolling problems, all because the computer fighters can handle it better than us. Yet I get a kick out of rotating that dial (or analog stick in my modern MAME environment), then letting loose bullets and pineapples on these bucketheads. There's much joy here in managing clumps of foes, weaving between their projectiles, and mastering these early but responsive twin-stick controls. Actually surviving to the end of a loop is still way too hard for comfort, but I can understand why this became so popular with Taito's domestic market at the turn of '83.
Front Line may lack the variety, evocative world-building, or fully intuitive playability of its close competitor Xevious, but I still recommend trying it to understand the roots of the history-futurist divide in shooter games persisting today. Here was evidence that Taito's new and veteran creators could confidently emerge from the specter of Space Invaders and Qix, soon followed by other divisive experiments like Chack 'n' Pop. Hints of the following year's Elevator Action also crop up in this predecessor, too. For example, jumping out of tanks after being hit to avoid the explosion parallels frantic hopping between shafts to find cover from henchmen. Hell, that even sounds like a distant inspiration for Metal Slug's escape hatch mechanic.
Like Namco's similarly beloved '82 blaster, though, this arcade icon made little headway overseas, with North American and European arcade-goers rebuffing these more skill-oriented shooters. (I wish the same excitement they had for Konami's Scramble or Super Cobra extended beyond.) Western gamers instead cottoned on to more contained twin-stick standouts like Robotron 2084, and eventually to SNK's Ikari Warriors once this control paradigm had become familiar. Even so, this early innovator would itself reach us in Capcom's more popular Commando, helping to popularize difficult action-packed World War faire in arcades and at home.
You can find Front Line in some recent company compilations these days, or just fire it up in MAME like I did. The dual dial interface maps fairly well to a DualShock 4, among other gamepads, and the game's hard enough that I won't fault anyone for needing save states (especially since there's no continues!).
Front Line stars a non-descript 20th-century doughboy thrust into the action, with no squad or commanding officers to lead you through the battlefield. This front observer's got just a regular automatic rifle and seemingly no end of grenades, but also an aptitude with commandeering armored cannons on treads. Fighting through interminable waves of conspicuously Axis-like troops and juggernauts requires players to manage their distance, time shots and lobs correctly, and find a sustainable rhythm in the heat of battle.
I make this sound all too simple when it really isn't. Each loop, from the starting woods to the enemy HQ's boss, demands concentration and, often, the kind of luck any frontline soldier hopes for. One can tangibly feel the do-or-die atmosphere of battlefields even in a game as early as this. You won't ever find me calling this "gritty" or "visceral", but the simple audiovisuals and play dynamics mask a somewhat effective depiction of the entropy and senselessness found in a mid-'40s skirmish.
Front Line's creation is usually attributed to one Tetsuya Sasaki, but sources for this escape me. The most prolific person in games with said name worked at Alfa System as a producer, in fact. Whoever developed this '82 board sure didn't have the prominence of Tomohiro Nishikado. Ever since his most famous work Space Invaders, the corporation had deal with naught but imitators and less noteworthy successors to that missing link between the shooter and ball-and-paddle genres. A refresh was due...but how to accomplish it?
Adopting a loose WWII setting, with players controlling a G.I. fighting alone and within either light or heavy tanks, helped separate this game from the crowd. The critical and commercial success of two distinct but rigorously designed arcade shooters, this and Namco's sci-fi classic, set a precedent we see in triple-A shooters today. In one corner sit the futuristic, generally single-mode action of Vanquish or Returnal. In the other resides all those (alt) historic combat titles, from ye olde Call of Duty to everything with a Tom Clancy label slapped on.
Unlike Xevious, however, there's a few too many missteps and needless frustrations throughout Front Line which hold back its potential. First and foremost are the graphics themselves. Character sprites and environments all stick out without becoming garish, but it's often hard to distinguish enemy shots from your own, especially because all gun-fire dissipates after a split-second of travel. Just as loathsome is how the game handles scrolling: you have to move way too close towards the screen edge before the playfield adjusts, meaning AI soldiers or tanks can get cheap shots in on you as soon as they appear. The player's neither able to jump or dash out of the way when a potshot's heading their way, nor is the walking speed all that fast to begin with.
I'd forgive Taito's team for this decision if you could survive more than one hit, but that's just not the case. So this adherence to one-shot-and-you're-dead verisimilitude crashes right into the reality of stiff, limited player agility which itself doesn't reflect what this soldier's likely capable of. Keeping track of crossfire works great when you're in the middle, but definitely not when this game forces you towards the edge. Loathe those tank hitboxes, too, though the ability to cheat death through a quick ejection removes most of the sting there. After that, it's just a frantic jog to the nearest undamaged hunk of metal, assuming nothing guns you down in the meantime.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had no choice but to use said scrolling technique to make Front Line work within hardware limits of the era, though. Both this and Xevious crested new highs of on-screen color, sprite processing, and fluid action that impressed Japanese audiences. They couldn't have had more different approaches, though, with Sasaki's vision of a dour, muddy and torn warscape contrasting hard against Masanobu Endo's preference for green plains, sleek metallic bases, and the Nazca Lines. Anyone would have noticed similar audio design between the games, though, trading out melodic chiptunes for repetitive, dehumanized SFX and short jingles. These developers understood how to strike a balance between highlighting their products on the arcade floor and keeping players immersed without annoying their senses. In short, I'd rather expose my eardrums to all the shrill footsteps and explosions here than 1942's insufferable drill march.
Likewise, the spartan game loop used in Front Line feels tuned to an extent rarely found in Golden Age designs. This unfortunately works against players more often than not due to the scrolling problems, all because the computer fighters can handle it better than us. Yet I get a kick out of rotating that dial (or analog stick in my modern MAME environment), then letting loose bullets and pineapples on these bucketheads. There's much joy here in managing clumps of foes, weaving between their projectiles, and mastering these early but responsive twin-stick controls. Actually surviving to the end of a loop is still way too hard for comfort, but I can understand why this became so popular with Taito's domestic market at the turn of '83.
Front Line may lack the variety, evocative world-building, or fully intuitive playability of its close competitor Xevious, but I still recommend trying it to understand the roots of the history-futurist divide in shooter games persisting today. Here was evidence that Taito's new and veteran creators could confidently emerge from the specter of Space Invaders and Qix, soon followed by other divisive experiments like Chack 'n' Pop. Hints of the following year's Elevator Action also crop up in this predecessor, too. For example, jumping out of tanks after being hit to avoid the explosion parallels frantic hopping between shafts to find cover from henchmen. Hell, that even sounds like a distant inspiration for Metal Slug's escape hatch mechanic.
Like Namco's similarly beloved '82 blaster, though, this arcade icon made little headway overseas, with North American and European arcade-goers rebuffing these more skill-oriented shooters. (I wish the same excitement they had for Konami's Scramble or Super Cobra extended beyond.) Western gamers instead cottoned on to more contained twin-stick standouts like Robotron 2084, and eventually to SNK's Ikari Warriors once this control paradigm had become familiar. Even so, this early innovator would itself reach us in Capcom's more popular Commando, helping to popularize difficult action-packed World War faire in arcades and at home.
You can find Front Line in some recent company compilations these days, or just fire it up in MAME like I did. The dual dial interface maps fairly well to a DualShock 4, among other gamepads, and the game's hard enough that I won't fault anyone for needing save states (especially since there's no continues!).
Being an early 3DS adopter sucked. I didn't really feel it back then, and I'd end up having a better time with the system than with its predecessor for some reason. But it's no surprise that a low-scale free eShop release like 3D Classics: Excitebike would have, um, excited launch players desperate for some variety. The promise of no-bullshit stereoscopic 3D on the go, plus improved hardware and online functionality, should have had more of an initial offering. For what it's worth, Arika's first experiment with a full-3D remake of an NES icon went well, albeit conspicuously lacking in new content or multiplayer options. It's nonetheless among the 3DS' best pick-up-and-play software, a natural outcome when the source material's strong to begin with.
The original game needs some context. Excitebike introduced many Famicom gamers to fast, relatively detailed side-scrolling action on their TVs. Its motocross theme stood out in a throng of otherwise predictable racing titles, either from the VCS/Intellivision/ColecoVision era or SEGA's recent SG-1000 lineup. Most importantly, this was one of Shigeru Miyamoto's baby steps towards the game engine needed to make Super Mario Bros. a reality. Only a month after Namco's own Pac-Land showed the arcade-going populace what a side-scrolling athletic adventure could be, here's a similarly ambitious cartridge toying with what was previously a choppy, taxing graphical experiment on home machines. (Let's not forget all the fairly smooth scrolling titles coming out on MSX or Sharp X1 during this time, though!)
Miyamoto's team could easily have settled for a low-risk, multi-lane derby racer with a motorbiking skin. What they instead made was one of the earliest innovations in this genre, a hybrid incorporating the developers' platformer concepts. I think it's best to approach Excitebike today as a physics experiment in disguise, with either game mode asking players to balance dexterity with urgency. You've got just as many awkward jumps to land at awkward angles as you do opponents to dodge and overtake. And the swift pace of play ensures there's always some thrilling combo of track pieces and drivers in clumps to manage. Getting used to the controls and ideal riding positions for each scenario takes practice, but I always feel rewarded for nailing each course. The low amount of content wouldn't have stung in 1984, either, since this still dwarfed almost every other Famicom cart in replayability.
Combined with a nifty track editor which Japanese players could use to save creations on the Data Recorder add-on, this was yet another system seller for Nintendo's soon dominant platform. How fitting, then, to use it again as freeware on a rather underequipped new console decades later! Sadly this was one of the most notable games one could try prior to staples like Pushmo, Etrian Odyssey IV, Bravely Default, Kid Icarus: Uprising, etc. And that meant extra scrutiny and emphasis for 3D Classics: Excitebike which it couldn't possibly live up to. Of course, I was having too much fun with Pilotwings Resort and the surprise Ambassador freebies, but I don't envy anyone making this at Arika as news of middling pre-orders and launch attention trickled in.
This remake doesn't try to reinvent the two-wheels, for the better. All the Famicom game's pros and cons remain, now magnified by the dev team's mix of polygonal models, flat shading, and glasses-free 3D. Going from the active 3DS operating system to the static eShop didn't sell me on these 3D capabilities, but games like this sure did. There's still something special about the bizarre diorama effect these 3D Classics provide, a kind of immersion which M2 carried forward into their own series. In terms of aiding the game loop, the 3D implementation doesn't do a whole lot; I'm just glad it's as unobtrusive and flattering to the visual style as Excitebike deserves. Increased view distance thanks to widescreen's easily the biggest win here, making the game easier and more satisfying for all but the most masochistic players.
Where 3D Classics: Excitebike fails to deliver is its multiplayer feature set. That is, if there was any. I'm baffled that Nintendo and Arika skipped out on letting players share track editor courses with each other. No online leaderboards flies in the face of score play, dis-incentivizing players from learning every quirk of the engine to attain impressive results. And no versus mode, or any pro-oriented extras like mirrored stages, further reduces this remake's value. Whether these were oversights and rushing or conscious omissions to save on time and resources, I come away disappointed with what could have been. It doesn't really get in the way of what's already great here, but it stings for anyone buying this now before the eShop closes. Make this free again, Big N!
Even more regrettable was the demise of Nintendo & Arika's 3D Classics to come. Who in hell asked for a redux of Urban Champions?! At least they got around to highlights like Kid Icarus and especially Kirby's Adventure, both of which shine in stereoscopy even without the polygonal/voxel treatment. But then this line just stopped dead, either because of poor sales or their priorities going elsewhere. This didn't happen with SEGA & M2, thankfully, yet they weren't ever going to try the more liberal approach Arika took with 3D Classics: Excitebike's presentation. The voxel-esque look, bolstered controls and visibility, and having multiple save slots for usermade courses makes it the definitive way to play this '84 NES notable today. Citra runs this perfectly, too, but the ideal experience for an early 3DS tech demo requires the system itself. Get this now before it's pulled alongside the rest of the eShop—I'm not paying extra for 3D glasses my PC monitor would vibe with.
The original game needs some context. Excitebike introduced many Famicom gamers to fast, relatively detailed side-scrolling action on their TVs. Its motocross theme stood out in a throng of otherwise predictable racing titles, either from the VCS/Intellivision/ColecoVision era or SEGA's recent SG-1000 lineup. Most importantly, this was one of Shigeru Miyamoto's baby steps towards the game engine needed to make Super Mario Bros. a reality. Only a month after Namco's own Pac-Land showed the arcade-going populace what a side-scrolling athletic adventure could be, here's a similarly ambitious cartridge toying with what was previously a choppy, taxing graphical experiment on home machines. (Let's not forget all the fairly smooth scrolling titles coming out on MSX or Sharp X1 during this time, though!)
Miyamoto's team could easily have settled for a low-risk, multi-lane derby racer with a motorbiking skin. What they instead made was one of the earliest innovations in this genre, a hybrid incorporating the developers' platformer concepts. I think it's best to approach Excitebike today as a physics experiment in disguise, with either game mode asking players to balance dexterity with urgency. You've got just as many awkward jumps to land at awkward angles as you do opponents to dodge and overtake. And the swift pace of play ensures there's always some thrilling combo of track pieces and drivers in clumps to manage. Getting used to the controls and ideal riding positions for each scenario takes practice, but I always feel rewarded for nailing each course. The low amount of content wouldn't have stung in 1984, either, since this still dwarfed almost every other Famicom cart in replayability.
Combined with a nifty track editor which Japanese players could use to save creations on the Data Recorder add-on, this was yet another system seller for Nintendo's soon dominant platform. How fitting, then, to use it again as freeware on a rather underequipped new console decades later! Sadly this was one of the most notable games one could try prior to staples like Pushmo, Etrian Odyssey IV, Bravely Default, Kid Icarus: Uprising, etc. And that meant extra scrutiny and emphasis for 3D Classics: Excitebike which it couldn't possibly live up to. Of course, I was having too much fun with Pilotwings Resort and the surprise Ambassador freebies, but I don't envy anyone making this at Arika as news of middling pre-orders and launch attention trickled in.
This remake doesn't try to reinvent the two-wheels, for the better. All the Famicom game's pros and cons remain, now magnified by the dev team's mix of polygonal models, flat shading, and glasses-free 3D. Going from the active 3DS operating system to the static eShop didn't sell me on these 3D capabilities, but games like this sure did. There's still something special about the bizarre diorama effect these 3D Classics provide, a kind of immersion which M2 carried forward into their own series. In terms of aiding the game loop, the 3D implementation doesn't do a whole lot; I'm just glad it's as unobtrusive and flattering to the visual style as Excitebike deserves. Increased view distance thanks to widescreen's easily the biggest win here, making the game easier and more satisfying for all but the most masochistic players.
Where 3D Classics: Excitebike fails to deliver is its multiplayer feature set. That is, if there was any. I'm baffled that Nintendo and Arika skipped out on letting players share track editor courses with each other. No online leaderboards flies in the face of score play, dis-incentivizing players from learning every quirk of the engine to attain impressive results. And no versus mode, or any pro-oriented extras like mirrored stages, further reduces this remake's value. Whether these were oversights and rushing or conscious omissions to save on time and resources, I come away disappointed with what could have been. It doesn't really get in the way of what's already great here, but it stings for anyone buying this now before the eShop closes. Make this free again, Big N!
Even more regrettable was the demise of Nintendo & Arika's 3D Classics to come. Who in hell asked for a redux of Urban Champions?! At least they got around to highlights like Kid Icarus and especially Kirby's Adventure, both of which shine in stereoscopy even without the polygonal/voxel treatment. But then this line just stopped dead, either because of poor sales or their priorities going elsewhere. This didn't happen with SEGA & M2, thankfully, yet they weren't ever going to try the more liberal approach Arika took with 3D Classics: Excitebike's presentation. The voxel-esque look, bolstered controls and visibility, and having multiple save slots for usermade courses makes it the definitive way to play this '84 NES notable today. Citra runs this perfectly, too, but the ideal experience for an early 3DS tech demo requires the system itself. Get this now before it's pulled alongside the rest of the eShop—I'm not paying extra for 3D glasses my PC monitor would vibe with.
2021
What should one expect from a JavaScript game jam exercise less than half the size of a mid-'90s Doom WAD? That's the question Phoboslab and other js13k participants try to answer each year. Some contest entries successfully provide a full game, often a puzzler like Road Blocks or something more adventurous like Greeble. Minimal logic, procedurally generated assets, and ingenious reuse of game systems can go a long way in reducing your program's size. But there's also something to be said for demaking a larger, well-known title into something pushing the limits of this coding paradigm. That's something Q1K3 accomplishes with aplomb. It's not even the first throwback FPS to rank high in a js13k roster, but only this one's received a Super Special award just for its technical achievements.
Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!
In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.
There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.
If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.
Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!
In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.
There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.
If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.
1992
I watch the funny cacti boundin', gyrating on screen, racking up points faster than a day trader, and I just think they're neat. /marge
Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.
Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.
Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.
NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.
Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023
Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.
Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.
Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.
NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.
Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023
1973
Lemonade Stand became a staple on Woz & Jobs' iconic people's computer, either as an activity for one classroom to a PC, or just another doodad at home. It's the first notable translation of Hamurabi's numbers game into a simpler, more immediate package, among many others up till today. While that '68 precursor evolved over time through successors like Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio, Jamison's take on the concept meant distilling its profits-and-losses text interactions and formulas to their essence. We're not planning for the survival and growth of a Mesopotamian city, just trying to run daily profits and manage assets for the local beverage counter. All the player's worried about are how many drinks to make, how many ad signs to buy, and how much to charge customers for a cup. It's as straightforward as it sounds, with only the occasional thunderstorm or street market threatening your sales.
Yes, this sounds as simplistic and repetitive as it is. Maybe that's the point, though. Running shop isn't as glamorous as it looks, even in this most accessible form. Players merely need to hunt and peck some keys, then watch the results fly by. There's some cute lil' intermissions for each new day (or inclement weather), accompanied by beeper sound arrangements of tunes from Singin' in the Rain and other classics. By and large, though, the game's beaten once you eliminate obviously bad or sub-optimal mathematical choices, eventually finding the optimal sales formulas for each scenario. Doing this on your first go, all within 12 days in most versions, is a bit more of a challenge, but irrelevant when it's so easy to just start over and steamroll past the RNG for a high cash total.
Back then, even this all-ages rendition of the resource management experience first digitized in Hamurabi would have seemed tricky, or at least addictive. It promotes a 1-to-1 narrative of modern capitalism as rational, mostly predictable, and viable at any rung of society. After all, if a mere kid can solicit this much money from passers-by on the sidewalk during a heat wave, then what's stopping you from making it onto Shark Tank, huh?! Well?! Let's just overlook any possibility of, oh I don't know, selling a bad product while your competitors run you out with any mixture of better or more cunning practices. Lemonade Stand doesn't wants its K-6 audience to consider bad guys robbing your startup business, or the HOA banning this (and garage sales, and solar panels, and [insert cool thing here]) entirely. Nice sentiments are nice, but trying to sugarcoat capitalism only works for so long. It's one thing if I'm playing a hyper-detailed and demanding economy sim, of course. I never expected any trenchant critique of, or answer to, the social-economic hierarchy failing us for the benefit of a few. MECC themselves would do that way later with Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, thankfully.
It's no secret that the lemonade stand's been a trojan-horse metaphor normalizing the American Dream to kids for who knows how long. The concept, its connotations, and all that pop culture imagery was practically inescapable for me, growing up in sunbaked suburban Texas. I never ran such an establishment, being too shy and awkward to exercise that entrepreneurial spirit still reinforced today. Moreover, it seemed increasingly irrelevant—theoretically sound, but way harder than it looks in practice. Girl Scout cookies are the closest equivalent I see in my area nowadays, and it's telling how the most successful kids only sell those thousands of batches because it's their parents' side-gig. The myth of the all-American lemonade stand and its variations dates back to a pre-Internet, pre-9/11 era of good feelings and busy neighborhoods which I've only had the smallest taste of as a late millennial.
Emulating this now is easy-peasy thanks to the Internet Archive. I played this on lunch break, even knowing pretty much exactly how it would go. The more interesting thing is to imagine those coat-swaddled students piling into class, early on a snowy Midwestern morning, expecting the same 'ol usual as their teacher introduces this odd monitor and keyboard to them all. The CRT's green glow fades into view, the floppy disk drive whirrs excitedly, and this impressionable set of youngsters get their first peek into the Information Age at their fingertips. Lemonade Stand always worked best as an educational tool, letting everyone share this technology which you once needed a teletype and printer to enjoy. By selling these games and Apple IIs to so many faculty, MECC themselves promoted a unique edu-tech model that itself mirrors the allegory of the kid's streetside booth. I'm glad to see that history's vindicated the story-driven, more ambiguous paradigm of Oregon Trail and other adventurous software, but I think this game represents the organization's classic era best. Pixel pedagogy would only go up in design efficacy and ambition from here, not that it's bad place to start—just one that's happy to date itself, a self-deprecating lesson if any.
1990
Eons of memes and bantz about many portrayals of, and commentaries on, gods and religion in Japanese pop media all threaten to frame Quintet's debut as a schmaltzy creation myth. The last thing I expected was a translation of Japan's cosmogony into a commentary on the monomyth, hiding its version of the pre-Imperial hero god Okuninushi (or Onamushi) behind a Judeo-Christian façade. But that's the level of creativity and innovation that the studio's founding staff and contractors strived for. Set aside the simple yet subversive premise and you'll still have one of the most fun and clever hybrids in console software history. ActRaiser's influence never traveled as far as it ought to, largely materialized in series like Dark Cloud, yet it's more than earned its cult classic reputation. Not that I'd call this the Velvet Underground & Nico of xRPGs, but it's a valid comparison. Few if any video games marketed for a wide audience tackled such a broad, charged set of themes and sensations in such a formative period for the medium, no matter the imperfections.
As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?
The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.
Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.
Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.
All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!
The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.
In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.
Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.
I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.
The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.
Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.
It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.
Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.
As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?
The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.
Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.
Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.
All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!
The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.
In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.
Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.
I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.
The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.
Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.
It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.
Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.
1985
"The Great Escape" has inspired quite a lot of prison-break games, or even just sequences of that sort across the medium. Who doesn't have fond stories of humiliating those Nazis just to get some fresh air outside Castle Wolfenstein? How can I forget Codemasters' own Prisoners of War, a game all about playing a chronic escapee? Just as interesting are the more arcade-y translations of this premise, from Silas Warner's genre codifier to SNK's P.O.W.. Conveying the gravity of this scenario while still entertaining players is no small feat. I wish I could say Carry Lab's Daidassou was more successful at that, but it remains one of the best early puzzle action games for FM-7, PC-88, and similar Japanese PCs. It eschews realism in favor of fun farce, giving players just enough means to dash in, liberate each camp, and shoot or explode guards along the way.
Rather than playing a POW ready to break out, you're an outside operative instead, trotting into each stage with a pistol, scarce ammunition and grenades, and just a few lives. The game loop's simple: dodge or remove German troops on their patrols, nab their keys and other collectibles (either ammo or score items), and unlock cell doors to gather up GIs. Then you've got to escort one or more trails of POWs back to the starting point—think Flicky and other maze games of that vintage. Every level tries its best to iterate on this simple premise, with layouts becoming increasingly Escher-like and full of surprises. The isometric perspective both adds useful depth to the mazes and works against players in a frustrating but meaningful way. Just having the top-down view would equate this to Wolfenstein and other game center faire; this skewed angle instead makes you work to decipher these layouts, planning and improvising the further in you go.
Carry Lab usually wasn't the type to develop distinctly Golden Age-like arcade games for PC users. At most, they'd done third-person racing titles like F2 Grand Prix, or technically impressive pseudo-sprite scaling stuff a la SEGA's Buck Rogers. Nonetheless, I think Daidassou became a cult classic for good reason. It handles its fake sprites very well, with nary any slowdown nor worsening input delay. Controls are as clunky to learn and master as you'd expect from a mid-'80s numpad-based game, but the measured pace of play, and emphasis on routing to avoid enemies when reasonable, makes this easier to overlook. Whoever coded and/or designed these stages and systems had a grasp on what keeps players like me coming back. One's never powerful enough to just gun all the Nazis down, but on the flipside, a little bit of ingenuity and stealthy action goes a long way here.
This odd mashup of genres can lead to some fun scenarios. For example, the worst thing that can happen is when a guard recaptures one of The Boys you've just saved. Usually they just get thrown back in their initial quarters, but sometimes the enemy will instead place them inside a pink-doored cell which one can't just unlock. Now you gotta blow it open with a grenade you might not even have! Chasing those high scores (of which the default is already substantial) means using resources wisely and anticipating the worst, be it German reinforcements or snagging on corners long enough for them to catch you. Waves upon waves of mazes, soldiers, and wild goose chases start to blur together—the banality of war seeps into even a supposedly heroic effort. Should you finally fall in the line of duty, all one gets is a spot on the score table, nothing like a Purple Heart or Medal of Honor. But then again, it's the journey that counts, and Daidassou does well with its fundamentals no matter how slight it is elsewhere.
Many won't even touch this game once they see its art style, a garish blend of tans, browns, greens, and pinks befitting the 8-color high resolution video mode. And there's no cute, memorable audio to speak of, just tinny foot-taps, gunfire, and beeper jingles. I can describe Daidassou's aesthetic in one word: spartan. What's here is a no-frills, inglorious trudge through castles of combat and collect-a-Joe, with only these silly deformed caricatures of U.S. and German soldiers exuding any charm. The aforementioned depth-bending level designs also lend identity, but aren't as impressive as the game's pre-Cannon Fodder irreverence towards the Great War era. I can't accuse Carry Lab's product of lacking in content, as there's a huge amount of levels to complete, but I won't blame others for bouncing off once the repetition sets in. PC players back in the day got their money's worth here, assuming they weren't spending their days editing levels in Sokoban or Lode Runner, or just trying to solve the ordeals of xRPGs like Xanadu. This kind of anti-Great Escape must have seemed odd then, let alone now, yet it found an audience back when weird but compelling premises like this were commercially viable.
I'd ultimately love to say Daidassou got a worthwhile console or arcade port. Sadly it remained exclusive to these 8-bit J-PCs, with no follow-up titles to speak of. Carry Lab themselves got involved with Famicom development via their Disk System releases under Square's Disk Original Group (DOG) label, but they still didn't make a sequel while they had the chance. Like many once notable self-publishing developers of the early J-PC days, this company lasted up till the end of the '80s before financial woes led them to bankruptcy. (Entering a legal fight with dB-SOFT over plagiarizing their JET dictionary products for word processing didn't help, nor did a staff exodus around '87.) The game's designers at tabletop company Ad Technos are even more anonymous, much to my dismay. It's funny how the slow fade-out of Carry Lab and its classic games led to the founding of Alfa System, well known today for so many JRPGs, ADVs, etc. Still, I recommend this '85 prison action ditty despite getting lost in the shuffle of its creators' history and the more impressive games releasing around that time.
Rather than playing a POW ready to break out, you're an outside operative instead, trotting into each stage with a pistol, scarce ammunition and grenades, and just a few lives. The game loop's simple: dodge or remove German troops on their patrols, nab their keys and other collectibles (either ammo or score items), and unlock cell doors to gather up GIs. Then you've got to escort one or more trails of POWs back to the starting point—think Flicky and other maze games of that vintage. Every level tries its best to iterate on this simple premise, with layouts becoming increasingly Escher-like and full of surprises. The isometric perspective both adds useful depth to the mazes and works against players in a frustrating but meaningful way. Just having the top-down view would equate this to Wolfenstein and other game center faire; this skewed angle instead makes you work to decipher these layouts, planning and improvising the further in you go.
Carry Lab usually wasn't the type to develop distinctly Golden Age-like arcade games for PC users. At most, they'd done third-person racing titles like F2 Grand Prix, or technically impressive pseudo-sprite scaling stuff a la SEGA's Buck Rogers. Nonetheless, I think Daidassou became a cult classic for good reason. It handles its fake sprites very well, with nary any slowdown nor worsening input delay. Controls are as clunky to learn and master as you'd expect from a mid-'80s numpad-based game, but the measured pace of play, and emphasis on routing to avoid enemies when reasonable, makes this easier to overlook. Whoever coded and/or designed these stages and systems had a grasp on what keeps players like me coming back. One's never powerful enough to just gun all the Nazis down, but on the flipside, a little bit of ingenuity and stealthy action goes a long way here.
This odd mashup of genres can lead to some fun scenarios. For example, the worst thing that can happen is when a guard recaptures one of The Boys you've just saved. Usually they just get thrown back in their initial quarters, but sometimes the enemy will instead place them inside a pink-doored cell which one can't just unlock. Now you gotta blow it open with a grenade you might not even have! Chasing those high scores (of which the default is already substantial) means using resources wisely and anticipating the worst, be it German reinforcements or snagging on corners long enough for them to catch you. Waves upon waves of mazes, soldiers, and wild goose chases start to blur together—the banality of war seeps into even a supposedly heroic effort. Should you finally fall in the line of duty, all one gets is a spot on the score table, nothing like a Purple Heart or Medal of Honor. But then again, it's the journey that counts, and Daidassou does well with its fundamentals no matter how slight it is elsewhere.
Many won't even touch this game once they see its art style, a garish blend of tans, browns, greens, and pinks befitting the 8-color high resolution video mode. And there's no cute, memorable audio to speak of, just tinny foot-taps, gunfire, and beeper jingles. I can describe Daidassou's aesthetic in one word: spartan. What's here is a no-frills, inglorious trudge through castles of combat and collect-a-Joe, with only these silly deformed caricatures of U.S. and German soldiers exuding any charm. The aforementioned depth-bending level designs also lend identity, but aren't as impressive as the game's pre-Cannon Fodder irreverence towards the Great War era. I can't accuse Carry Lab's product of lacking in content, as there's a huge amount of levels to complete, but I won't blame others for bouncing off once the repetition sets in. PC players back in the day got their money's worth here, assuming they weren't spending their days editing levels in Sokoban or Lode Runner, or just trying to solve the ordeals of xRPGs like Xanadu. This kind of anti-Great Escape must have seemed odd then, let alone now, yet it found an audience back when weird but compelling premises like this were commercially viable.
I'd ultimately love to say Daidassou got a worthwhile console or arcade port. Sadly it remained exclusive to these 8-bit J-PCs, with no follow-up titles to speak of. Carry Lab themselves got involved with Famicom development via their Disk System releases under Square's Disk Original Group (DOG) label, but they still didn't make a sequel while they had the chance. Like many once notable self-publishing developers of the early J-PC days, this company lasted up till the end of the '80s before financial woes led them to bankruptcy. (Entering a legal fight with dB-SOFT over plagiarizing their JET dictionary products for word processing didn't help, nor did a staff exodus around '87.) The game's designers at tabletop company Ad Technos are even more anonymous, much to my dismay. It's funny how the slow fade-out of Carry Lab and its classic games led to the founding of Alfa System, well known today for so many JRPGs, ADVs, etc. Still, I recommend this '85 prison action ditty despite getting lost in the shuffle of its creators' history and the more impressive games releasing around that time.