PasokonDeacon
1999
It was only several months after the release of Half-Life in Fall 1998 that its first major fan mod went viral. As much as that was possible in a pre-social media age, of course, but USS Darkstar became the model for "breakout success" in the early days of GoldSrc. The mod first met the public at the original Half-Life Mod Expo that July, and would release a month later via publisher PC Gamer's magazine. Following in the footsteps of seminal Doom and Quake campaigns like Aliens TC and Beyond Belief, this 1-hour adventure by Neil Manke and friends showed off the potential of Valve's then new 3D engine for amateur creators. It's also a cracking good remix of HL1's tropes and encounters, styled after a certain Xenomorph-ic style of sci-fi cinema and echoing aspects that appeared in System Shock 2 that same year.
The story hasn't much concern for following canon, as we awaken as Gordon Freeman aboard the eponymous spaceship to observe and conduct experiments yet again. However, players are firmly absolved of any culpability this time, as a planetary away team returns with alien invaders in tow, including a chest-burster! There's no grand lore or plot included with USS Darkstar so much as of an Alien(s) mashup using mostly base-game assets, but it was a compelling shift in setting at the time.
Manke's level and puzzle designs also aren't sophisticated as any from the Valve team, but they're more than perfunctory. Early chapters have you procuring weapons and power-ups as expected, retaining the '98 original's survival horror bent. USS Darkstar sticks to the mold of HL1's less action-packed first half, content to work you through vents, elevator puzzles, and other kinds of industrial monkeying around. It excels most when dialing up the uneasy ennui of these degrading environments, much like what transpires on the Von Braun in SS2. There's some fun bursts of adrenaline when protecting scientists from an unexpected Xen soldier, or using low-gravity chambers to bounce around Controller crossfire like I'm playing Ziggurat Vertigo from Quake.
More conspicuous are the added voice lines, mainly to delineate level progression or add some humor where appropriate. Einstein moaning to Gordon about trying to run a PC Gamer freeware game, oblivious to the chaos and doom around them, always brings a chuckle. Sadly the voice direction and mixing are as mediocre as you'd expect from this era of mods, but it's all easy to ignore as you traverse the spider's web of corridors, lab rooms, and infrastructure comprising the Darkstar. I really enjoyed the later labs sequences, involving multiple new routes through limited real estate. And who could forget the awesome Honey I Shrunk the Kids sequence, with a miniaturized Gordon hopping across now giant office cubicles and infiltrating a microscopic computer board to disable ship security? Combined with standard Half-Life combat and mechanics, there's a lot of variety here for such a short runtime.
For as close as this gets to surpassing something like Blue Shift, it's not quite there yet. The opening minutes have you wandering a somewhat arduous maze of Xen zoos and science rooms before the plot actually begins, followed by a retread of these areas. And I don't know if any bugs or scripting errors were simply the result of Half-Life on Steam not being that compatible with old releases, but some later doors and events didn't seem to work that well. One definitely feels the lack of Valve's smooth, unobtrusive conveyance to players. For better or worse, there's more vertical platforming and puzzling here which felt curtailed for most of Black Mesa—a couple sections reminded me of the Interloper chapter, though much more palatable and interesting. I can forgive the jank, though, knowing there's a snappy battle around the corner or excellent attention to detail.
USS Darkstar starts and ends on strong footing despite some mundane or drawn out sequences in-between. It's definitely not that polished or exciting compared to modern GoldSrc projects, but the high level of ambition, design goals, and atmosphere shown here has me excited to try Black Widow's following HL1 release They Hunger. The team's model of producing cover-disc mods for PC Gamer and other outlets was only feasible from the Quake era to before Half-Life 2, but it led to cool experiences like this. It's my first go-around with a single-player HL1 fan work of such caliber, and hopefully not the last. The PS2 port of HL1's scrapped mod-loading feature really must have stung for creators like Manke in retrospect.
The story hasn't much concern for following canon, as we awaken as Gordon Freeman aboard the eponymous spaceship to observe and conduct experiments yet again. However, players are firmly absolved of any culpability this time, as a planetary away team returns with alien invaders in tow, including a chest-burster! There's no grand lore or plot included with USS Darkstar so much as of an Alien(s) mashup using mostly base-game assets, but it was a compelling shift in setting at the time.
Manke's level and puzzle designs also aren't sophisticated as any from the Valve team, but they're more than perfunctory. Early chapters have you procuring weapons and power-ups as expected, retaining the '98 original's survival horror bent. USS Darkstar sticks to the mold of HL1's less action-packed first half, content to work you through vents, elevator puzzles, and other kinds of industrial monkeying around. It excels most when dialing up the uneasy ennui of these degrading environments, much like what transpires on the Von Braun in SS2. There's some fun bursts of adrenaline when protecting scientists from an unexpected Xen soldier, or using low-gravity chambers to bounce around Controller crossfire like I'm playing Ziggurat Vertigo from Quake.
More conspicuous are the added voice lines, mainly to delineate level progression or add some humor where appropriate. Einstein moaning to Gordon about trying to run a PC Gamer freeware game, oblivious to the chaos and doom around them, always brings a chuckle. Sadly the voice direction and mixing are as mediocre as you'd expect from this era of mods, but it's all easy to ignore as you traverse the spider's web of corridors, lab rooms, and infrastructure comprising the Darkstar. I really enjoyed the later labs sequences, involving multiple new routes through limited real estate. And who could forget the awesome Honey I Shrunk the Kids sequence, with a miniaturized Gordon hopping across now giant office cubicles and infiltrating a microscopic computer board to disable ship security? Combined with standard Half-Life combat and mechanics, there's a lot of variety here for such a short runtime.
For as close as this gets to surpassing something like Blue Shift, it's not quite there yet. The opening minutes have you wandering a somewhat arduous maze of Xen zoos and science rooms before the plot actually begins, followed by a retread of these areas. And I don't know if any bugs or scripting errors were simply the result of Half-Life on Steam not being that compatible with old releases, but some later doors and events didn't seem to work that well. One definitely feels the lack of Valve's smooth, unobtrusive conveyance to players. For better or worse, there's more vertical platforming and puzzling here which felt curtailed for most of Black Mesa—a couple sections reminded me of the Interloper chapter, though much more palatable and interesting. I can forgive the jank, though, knowing there's a snappy battle around the corner or excellent attention to detail.
USS Darkstar starts and ends on strong footing despite some mundane or drawn out sequences in-between. It's definitely not that polished or exciting compared to modern GoldSrc projects, but the high level of ambition, design goals, and atmosphere shown here has me excited to try Black Widow's following HL1 release They Hunger. The team's model of producing cover-disc mods for PC Gamer and other outlets was only feasible from the Quake era to before Half-Life 2, but it led to cool experiences like this. It's my first go-around with a single-player HL1 fan work of such caliber, and hopefully not the last. The PS2 port of HL1's scrapped mod-loading feature really must have stung for creators like Manke in retrospect.
2021
Ice-cream duck unfairly named after Tories loses their cone to Insert Itch.io Scaryguy Here and ends up becoming the new Ninpen Manmaru for half an hour, 10/10 gg ez
The slow but steady low-poly revival in this industry, starting around a decade ago and now flourishing with notables like A Short Hike and Signalis, has had its share of wannabe mascots. Everyone from the heroine of Lunistice to Haunted PS1's garbed skeleton has auditioned for the role, and Toree's no different. This game's developer, Siactro, has made a small stable of mascots already, all of them suspiciously cute, identifiable, and resalable in today's nostalgia market. Disposable heroes are always in vogue, just easier to sugarcoat when hidden behind the veneer of aesthetic authenticity. So it goes. Toree 3D is exactly the kind of small, pleasing half-hour snack that game jams are known for, previously the domain of classic Flash or Shockwave releases. It's very easy to replay and a worthy title despite its shallowness. If I ain't seeing Fangamer merch for this in a year or so, then I'm going to be very confused.
Our premise doesn't get much simpler: you play the titular bird thing, flightless and defenseless save for a double jump and dash. All the player's worried about is getting from point A to B, either with all the star pickups or the fastest time possible to hit that top level rank. Toree 3D nails almost all its basics, from intuitive controls to reproducible physics and scenarios. I know, for instance, that airborne momentum is a constant, which makes jumping across icy platforms that much trickier. A lack of auto-adjusting camera means you'll need to force center or move the right stick more often than should feel necessary, though. This degree of polish is easier to achieve nowadays thanks to widely-known tricks and prefabs in middleware engines like Unity, but it still takes work and testing. So I can't hold anything against Siactro for making a solid platformer loop, one which can't rely on much content or gimmicks to distract from potentially poor playability.
Make no mistake, however. Toree 3D is proud to be derivative, following not just one but two social media bandwagons. Why develop a more distinct identity for this avian anybody and the world they're exploring when you can just slap that low-res filter atop what feel like prototype assets? And why not hastily add a so-light-it's-nothing horror/spooky theme to the opening and final stages, just so it can technically qualify alongside the other Haunted PS1 jam entries? Again, I can't blame Siactro for making these savvy decisions. They're smart compromises to spread the game way farther on Twitter, Discord, Tumblr, Backloggd, etc. than was once possible. I'm a sucker for low-poly art in general, enough to lament its popularization as a micro-trend that'll risks being recycled into meaninglessness. For 1 buck, a mini foray into this style cost me practically nothing and offered so much in return.
All nine levels are well-designed for what they are, though quick to repeat their ideas. One could argue there's only so much these simple jump and run mechanics could offer, yet I'd hoped for more puzzles and enemy variety. There was certainly room in the snow stages for less mindless auto-scrolling down slopes with fences. I'd have added sections where skillful players can quickly hop between panels to activate temporary platforms, perhaps a little icy hopscotch across lava. There's a lotta clash between the game's autopilot segments (ex. the moving scaffolds in the city) and the light speedrunning angle Siactro's going for.
The only incentives you get for pushing Toree to the finale as fast as possible are two extra characters, for that matter. It's thankfully satisfying on its own to master these obstacle courses, and I messed around with Macbat's free flight for a bit of fun. But the game's truly over by that point; we're far from a Pilotwings 64 scenario where the game's worlds remain intriguing to explore without win states. Siactro's reverence for, and ability to replicate, nostalgic echoes of '90s pop art and software also holds him back from doing anything that unique here. My favorite theme here was chaotic New Osaka, which itself teeters too close to the vaporwave Orientalism I see in other contemporaries.
Games that exist to remind me of older, more fleshed-out experiences put themselves in a tricky situation. As I played the ocean levels so obviously cribbing from Sonic Adventure (2), I couldn't help but think, "why not just go for that A rank and emblems on Metal Harbor?". Indeed, Toree 3D tends to trap itself into these comparisons. Evoking nostalgia for that era of bigger-budgeted console games runs the risk of bouncing one towards replays, assuming nothing substantially new or unique is offered. Whereas Sonic became a mascot for cool, challenging setpiece-driven adventures in his heyday, Toree feels like the runt of that litter, an adorable ode to some unreachable past. I want the best for this scrimblo, though, even if I'd rather not play something like this for more than an hour. Efficiently packing a more diverse and meaningful array of challenges into this runtime, like boss encounters or side modes leveraging the mechanics, seems like a logical next step.
A lot of my comments so far are closer to nitpicks than deep criticisms, plus expressing my regular disdain for pandemic-era trend hopping. (That behavior is itself partly excusable for a lot reasons, most of them coming back to the world likely ending as we know it, but I don't want to cramp Toree's style with that talk here.) But hey, it's hard to dislike, let alone hate this kind of game. It just doesn't compel me that much by design, as vibes...aesthetic...charm...whatever aren't enough for me. Siactro's found a place in this market no different from many other solo devs, expectedly polishing up quick prototypes into lightweight scene darlings. And this one's still a big leap forward from Kiwi 64, showing how much this guy's learned and improved upon in eight or so years. I've designed enough Doom maps to know one shouldn't be so harsh towards even the slightest works in this category, no matter how trivial or commodified.
In a sense, I think Toree 3D is well worth its price and promises, though hardly the ambassador of Three Strings and the Soul Gaming that some like to categorize it as. (Hell, I don't even lionize Cave Story to that degree, and that genuinely moved past its influences and somewhat against trends familiar to its original audience.) Here's just an inoffensive, inauspicious, Twitch-friendly ditty that plays well with just about anyone. It's like Gunman Clive back in those desperate early days of 3DS software, insofar as we've only just started to get low-poly, PS1-/Saturn-/N64-esque low-poly experiments of this quality. I'm just hoping to feel something more when I inevitable blast through Toree 2 and other games indulging this aesthetic. Nothing in this one actually feels cowardly, just missing out on its potential—my ire's saved for copycat low-poly horror games at this point. (Or that big Mega Man Legends 3 fangame which could have happened by now, given the talent and interest surrounding this style.)
Now, Toree 3D but condensed to 13kb of filesize? That would excite me. I'm not sure how one could reasonably compress the excellent poppy soundtrack into those limits, but that's one reason Pixel wrote his own sound tech for Cave Story to keep the size down. Regardless, everything I've heard about Toree 2 says I should enjoy that one a lot more on its own merits, not just as an exercise in clever imitation. Maybe I'll play that later this year when I've got nothing better to do.
The slow but steady low-poly revival in this industry, starting around a decade ago and now flourishing with notables like A Short Hike and Signalis, has had its share of wannabe mascots. Everyone from the heroine of Lunistice to Haunted PS1's garbed skeleton has auditioned for the role, and Toree's no different. This game's developer, Siactro, has made a small stable of mascots already, all of them suspiciously cute, identifiable, and resalable in today's nostalgia market. Disposable heroes are always in vogue, just easier to sugarcoat when hidden behind the veneer of aesthetic authenticity. So it goes. Toree 3D is exactly the kind of small, pleasing half-hour snack that game jams are known for, previously the domain of classic Flash or Shockwave releases. It's very easy to replay and a worthy title despite its shallowness. If I ain't seeing Fangamer merch for this in a year or so, then I'm going to be very confused.
Our premise doesn't get much simpler: you play the titular bird thing, flightless and defenseless save for a double jump and dash. All the player's worried about is getting from point A to B, either with all the star pickups or the fastest time possible to hit that top level rank. Toree 3D nails almost all its basics, from intuitive controls to reproducible physics and scenarios. I know, for instance, that airborne momentum is a constant, which makes jumping across icy platforms that much trickier. A lack of auto-adjusting camera means you'll need to force center or move the right stick more often than should feel necessary, though. This degree of polish is easier to achieve nowadays thanks to widely-known tricks and prefabs in middleware engines like Unity, but it still takes work and testing. So I can't hold anything against Siactro for making a solid platformer loop, one which can't rely on much content or gimmicks to distract from potentially poor playability.
Make no mistake, however. Toree 3D is proud to be derivative, following not just one but two social media bandwagons. Why develop a more distinct identity for this avian anybody and the world they're exploring when you can just slap that low-res filter atop what feel like prototype assets? And why not hastily add a so-light-it's-nothing horror/spooky theme to the opening and final stages, just so it can technically qualify alongside the other Haunted PS1 jam entries? Again, I can't blame Siactro for making these savvy decisions. They're smart compromises to spread the game way farther on Twitter, Discord, Tumblr, Backloggd, etc. than was once possible. I'm a sucker for low-poly art in general, enough to lament its popularization as a micro-trend that'll risks being recycled into meaninglessness. For 1 buck, a mini foray into this style cost me practically nothing and offered so much in return.
All nine levels are well-designed for what they are, though quick to repeat their ideas. One could argue there's only so much these simple jump and run mechanics could offer, yet I'd hoped for more puzzles and enemy variety. There was certainly room in the snow stages for less mindless auto-scrolling down slopes with fences. I'd have added sections where skillful players can quickly hop between panels to activate temporary platforms, perhaps a little icy hopscotch across lava. There's a lotta clash between the game's autopilot segments (ex. the moving scaffolds in the city) and the light speedrunning angle Siactro's going for.
The only incentives you get for pushing Toree to the finale as fast as possible are two extra characters, for that matter. It's thankfully satisfying on its own to master these obstacle courses, and I messed around with Macbat's free flight for a bit of fun. But the game's truly over by that point; we're far from a Pilotwings 64 scenario where the game's worlds remain intriguing to explore without win states. Siactro's reverence for, and ability to replicate, nostalgic echoes of '90s pop art and software also holds him back from doing anything that unique here. My favorite theme here was chaotic New Osaka, which itself teeters too close to the vaporwave Orientalism I see in other contemporaries.
Games that exist to remind me of older, more fleshed-out experiences put themselves in a tricky situation. As I played the ocean levels so obviously cribbing from Sonic Adventure (2), I couldn't help but think, "why not just go for that A rank and emblems on Metal Harbor?". Indeed, Toree 3D tends to trap itself into these comparisons. Evoking nostalgia for that era of bigger-budgeted console games runs the risk of bouncing one towards replays, assuming nothing substantially new or unique is offered. Whereas Sonic became a mascot for cool, challenging setpiece-driven adventures in his heyday, Toree feels like the runt of that litter, an adorable ode to some unreachable past. I want the best for this scrimblo, though, even if I'd rather not play something like this for more than an hour. Efficiently packing a more diverse and meaningful array of challenges into this runtime, like boss encounters or side modes leveraging the mechanics, seems like a logical next step.
A lot of my comments so far are closer to nitpicks than deep criticisms, plus expressing my regular disdain for pandemic-era trend hopping. (That behavior is itself partly excusable for a lot reasons, most of them coming back to the world likely ending as we know it, but I don't want to cramp Toree's style with that talk here.) But hey, it's hard to dislike, let alone hate this kind of game. It just doesn't compel me that much by design, as vibes...aesthetic...charm...whatever aren't enough for me. Siactro's found a place in this market no different from many other solo devs, expectedly polishing up quick prototypes into lightweight scene darlings. And this one's still a big leap forward from Kiwi 64, showing how much this guy's learned and improved upon in eight or so years. I've designed enough Doom maps to know one shouldn't be so harsh towards even the slightest works in this category, no matter how trivial or commodified.
In a sense, I think Toree 3D is well worth its price and promises, though hardly the ambassador of Three Strings and the Soul Gaming that some like to categorize it as. (Hell, I don't even lionize Cave Story to that degree, and that genuinely moved past its influences and somewhat against trends familiar to its original audience.) Here's just an inoffensive, inauspicious, Twitch-friendly ditty that plays well with just about anyone. It's like Gunman Clive back in those desperate early days of 3DS software, insofar as we've only just started to get low-poly, PS1-/Saturn-/N64-esque low-poly experiments of this quality. I'm just hoping to feel something more when I inevitable blast through Toree 2 and other games indulging this aesthetic. Nothing in this one actually feels cowardly, just missing out on its potential—my ire's saved for copycat low-poly horror games at this point. (Or that big Mega Man Legends 3 fangame which could have happened by now, given the talent and interest surrounding this style.)
Now, Toree 3D but condensed to 13kb of filesize? That would excite me. I'm not sure how one could reasonably compress the excellent poppy soundtrack into those limits, but that's one reason Pixel wrote his own sound tech for Cave Story to keep the size down. Regardless, everything I've heard about Toree 2 says I should enjoy that one a lot more on its own merits, not just as an exercise in clever imitation. Maybe I'll play that later this year when I've got nothing better to do.
2005
The hell's a "narbacular", anyway? It's very rare to find a word this unique which hasn't received some definition in Urban Dictionary or somewhere else. Even more bizarre since we're talking about one of the most important 2000s indie titles. Project co-lead Jeep Barnett says they invented the term to improve SEO and online virality, which is good enough for me. One wonders if "Portacular Drop" would have been more appropriate in hindsight. As the tech demo for the seminal puzzler Portal, which this team later made at Valve, Narbacular Drop mostly gets written off as an unfinished curiosity. I think it's got a bit more going on, though, once you figure community levels into the picture. This had a small but active fanbase prior to the funny fake cake game obsoleting it, which counts for something. You can still play this (and other notables borne from the DigiPen Institute's student body) for free today, albeit with some troubleshooting.
Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.
Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.
This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.
…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.
Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.
As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.
Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.
Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.
This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.
…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.
Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.
As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.
no one:
me, slicing tanks outside Polis Massa to asphyxiate those Clones, or leading scrimblo bears through Endor's undergrowth to stab some fascists: "yeah I prefer Lapti Nek, but Jedi Rocks kinda bops too"
2005, a year of great changeover in the mainstream console gaming world. HD systems are just arriving, many developers are adopting extensive middleware (think Source or Unreal Engine), and giants like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are beginning an acquisition spree. Two victims of EA's consolidation plan were first DICE, the Swedish group behind Battlefield 1942, and then Pandemic Studios of Destroy All Monsters fame, who themselves had been absorbed a couple times already. Separate from all this was LucasArts, the game software division of Lucasfilm which had juggled both Star Wars and original properties for decades. Star Wars: Battlefront and its immediate sequels sprang in some way from the influence of these companies, but its legacy has since been defined by a fanbase eager to redefine and reclaim the series' best aspects.
Battlefront II isn't quite the masterpiece my 4.5/5 rating suggests. The game loop, usually based around command point control or capture the flag, can get repetitive. Neither infantry nor vehicle controls are as polished or responsive as in the best multi-mode multiplayer military massacres. I've got more than a few nitpicks about some level and class designs, plus the instability of Pandemic's Zero Engine on modern PCs. And truth be told, its marquee single-player options, the story campaign and Galactic Conquest, aren't as in-depth as they should be. Yet this remains one of my all-time favorites not just in the genre and source franchise, but simply in general.
Pandemic found a practically perfect balance between accessible controls, involved objectives, addictive gunplay and vehicular combat...the list of "great enough" things goes on. These fundamentals which largely worked in the original Battlefront only improved after a couple more years, alongside the usual audiovisual garnishes. No longer are players stuck ambling across overly-large battlezones, also lacking in secondary items/weapons or class-based techniques with risks and rewards. This sequel delivers on the promises of its predecessor while demonstrating how ambitious a licensed take on Battlefield games can get. Being able to embody anyone from the lowliest Droid soldier to Darth Vader stomping across the hall, often within the same round of play, rarely gets better than this
Take an Imperials vs. Rebels conquest map like Death Star, for example. All these laser-congested lanes, nooks and crannies of teammates globbing into each other, and temptations of jumping over endless pits for speed—they add up into a frantic fight which one can nonetheless master. Chaining killstreaks to acquire upgrades, usually while rolling and hopping between spheres of crossfire and resource control, eventually becomes natural. I'll gladly lob 'nades into the Naboo courtyard, even as I risk drawing fire and the ire of AATs, just so I can quickly snatch those post-mortem power-ups and keep the pressure on after base capture. Wandering the backhalls of Echo Base can be tricky at first, but the end goal of taking that Rebel base from behind them justifies everything.
There's enough nuances lying beneath Battlefront II's pick-up-and-play surface, even in something as arguably tacked on as the story missions. Others have mentioned, time and again, how elegantly the Clone narrator's journey takes us from a patriotic, republican cause to fighting on the side of undeniable, structural evil. This remains fun despite the chilling themes and characters' resignation to process and subservience under Sith order. And yet this doesn't feel like glorification of the Empire because you're ultimately going through the same motions, victories, and humiliations as your opponents. There's something both mundane and admirable in retaking bastions, methodically disabling flagships, and mowing down everything in your path with saber throws and force lightning.
One of the biggest additions in Battlefront II, its space battles, illustrate this effectively. Nothing really changes between each orbital map, all consisting of two main ships flanked by frigates and supplied with endless waves of dogfighters and bombers. But the process of departing the hangar, blasting TIEs outta the skies, and then docking in hostile territory rarely gets old. Combine this with unique objectives in story mode, or modded levels adding these mechanics to otherwise earthbound combat, and you've got what feels like the full essence of Star Wars' iconic armed struggles.
What brings this indelible piece of software a half-star up is the mod scene. A cursory glance shows just the usual suspects you'd find in communities like Skyrim or Counter-Strike: player skins, new game modes, and way too much attention thrown upon the heroes and villains. (I get it, though. Playing as Jedi, Sith, and other big names in-between always feels great, especially thanks to Hero Assault extravaganzas on Mos Eisley.) Look deeper and there's almost too many custom maps and campaigns for single-player and beyond, from excellent recreations of places from the Battlefront and Jedi Knight series to all new, mechanically ambitious works like the ground-to-sky megalopolis Suun Ra. Hell, there's a whole package simply for building a brand new Galactic Conquest playlist entirely from user-added maps! It's sadly a bit fiddly to get this all working, but that's always something EA could fix if they weren't busy forcing DICE to produce disappointing new games chasing after this one.
The aforementioned Galactic Conquest points to the strategic possibilities beyond the light tactical layer already present here. Having to manage and defense multiple fleets and planets, all while balancing your per-turn income against temporary boosts for battles, makes for an engaging time...most of the time. It's when the AI wants to drown you in endless space duels, or simply fail to provide any threat to your planetary march, that I fall back into custom Instant Action sessions. Fan mods can pick up the slack, especially those which appropriate this part of the game to tell a unique plot rivaling what Pandemic made. I feel like there's still so much one can push the Zero Engine, as seen with Dark Times or the oft-discussed fan remasters full of gizmos and doodads. This scene deserves the kind of attention and critique that's benefited better-knowns like Doom for decades now.
I could go on and on and on about what Battlefront II achieves, and what it's meant to me over the years. There's a whole meta to unlocking the Elite badges and proceeding to curbstomp round after round with once puny unit classes. We could simply imbibe the bevy of memorable, often hilarious radio banter heard across each factions' grunts and officers. I have to hold myself back from doing in-depth writeups on the strats and trivia of each stage, whether original or brought forward from the original Battlefront. One cannot simply spend well over a hundred hours, part of it just fucking around on a comically huge recreation of Naboo's Theed City with all its Florentine halls and courtyards, and lack in minutiae and remembrance to share.
If you haven't yet tried classic Battlefront II for some reason or another, I hope that changes in the near-future. A few hours of trying the campaign, Galactic Conquest playthroughs, and some Instant Action will more than suffice to experience this in full. But the ease with which this remains so replayable, despite the sea of similarly invigorating big-team-battle software out there, is commendable. This remains one of my comfort food games, hardly slacking after all these years. It reminds me of a time when we got not just more Star Wars interactive media of note, but when there was still a lot of creative risk and confidence in the franchise's games. You had this, Jedi Outcast, Knights of the Old Republic, Empire at War, etc. vs. mainly Jedi Survivor and the recently middling DICE games by contrast. The era's dearly missed, but not quite missing in action, so long as we're watching those wrist rockets and 360 no-scoping Gamorreans from the depths of Jabba's Palace.
me, slicing tanks outside Polis Massa to asphyxiate those Clones, or leading scrimblo bears through Endor's undergrowth to stab some fascists: "yeah I prefer Lapti Nek, but Jedi Rocks kinda bops too"
2005, a year of great changeover in the mainstream console gaming world. HD systems are just arriving, many developers are adopting extensive middleware (think Source or Unreal Engine), and giants like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are beginning an acquisition spree. Two victims of EA's consolidation plan were first DICE, the Swedish group behind Battlefield 1942, and then Pandemic Studios of Destroy All Monsters fame, who themselves had been absorbed a couple times already. Separate from all this was LucasArts, the game software division of Lucasfilm which had juggled both Star Wars and original properties for decades. Star Wars: Battlefront and its immediate sequels sprang in some way from the influence of these companies, but its legacy has since been defined by a fanbase eager to redefine and reclaim the series' best aspects.
Battlefront II isn't quite the masterpiece my 4.5/5 rating suggests. The game loop, usually based around command point control or capture the flag, can get repetitive. Neither infantry nor vehicle controls are as polished or responsive as in the best multi-mode multiplayer military massacres. I've got more than a few nitpicks about some level and class designs, plus the instability of Pandemic's Zero Engine on modern PCs. And truth be told, its marquee single-player options, the story campaign and Galactic Conquest, aren't as in-depth as they should be. Yet this remains one of my all-time favorites not just in the genre and source franchise, but simply in general.
Pandemic found a practically perfect balance between accessible controls, involved objectives, addictive gunplay and vehicular combat...the list of "great enough" things goes on. These fundamentals which largely worked in the original Battlefront only improved after a couple more years, alongside the usual audiovisual garnishes. No longer are players stuck ambling across overly-large battlezones, also lacking in secondary items/weapons or class-based techniques with risks and rewards. This sequel delivers on the promises of its predecessor while demonstrating how ambitious a licensed take on Battlefield games can get. Being able to embody anyone from the lowliest Droid soldier to Darth Vader stomping across the hall, often within the same round of play, rarely gets better than this
Take an Imperials vs. Rebels conquest map like Death Star, for example. All these laser-congested lanes, nooks and crannies of teammates globbing into each other, and temptations of jumping over endless pits for speed—they add up into a frantic fight which one can nonetheless master. Chaining killstreaks to acquire upgrades, usually while rolling and hopping between spheres of crossfire and resource control, eventually becomes natural. I'll gladly lob 'nades into the Naboo courtyard, even as I risk drawing fire and the ire of AATs, just so I can quickly snatch those post-mortem power-ups and keep the pressure on after base capture. Wandering the backhalls of Echo Base can be tricky at first, but the end goal of taking that Rebel base from behind them justifies everything.
There's enough nuances lying beneath Battlefront II's pick-up-and-play surface, even in something as arguably tacked on as the story missions. Others have mentioned, time and again, how elegantly the Clone narrator's journey takes us from a patriotic, republican cause to fighting on the side of undeniable, structural evil. This remains fun despite the chilling themes and characters' resignation to process and subservience under Sith order. And yet this doesn't feel like glorification of the Empire because you're ultimately going through the same motions, victories, and humiliations as your opponents. There's something both mundane and admirable in retaking bastions, methodically disabling flagships, and mowing down everything in your path with saber throws and force lightning.
One of the biggest additions in Battlefront II, its space battles, illustrate this effectively. Nothing really changes between each orbital map, all consisting of two main ships flanked by frigates and supplied with endless waves of dogfighters and bombers. But the process of departing the hangar, blasting TIEs outta the skies, and then docking in hostile territory rarely gets old. Combine this with unique objectives in story mode, or modded levels adding these mechanics to otherwise earthbound combat, and you've got what feels like the full essence of Star Wars' iconic armed struggles.
What brings this indelible piece of software a half-star up is the mod scene. A cursory glance shows just the usual suspects you'd find in communities like Skyrim or Counter-Strike: player skins, new game modes, and way too much attention thrown upon the heroes and villains. (I get it, though. Playing as Jedi, Sith, and other big names in-between always feels great, especially thanks to Hero Assault extravaganzas on Mos Eisley.) Look deeper and there's almost too many custom maps and campaigns for single-player and beyond, from excellent recreations of places from the Battlefront and Jedi Knight series to all new, mechanically ambitious works like the ground-to-sky megalopolis Suun Ra. Hell, there's a whole package simply for building a brand new Galactic Conquest playlist entirely from user-added maps! It's sadly a bit fiddly to get this all working, but that's always something EA could fix if they weren't busy forcing DICE to produce disappointing new games chasing after this one.
The aforementioned Galactic Conquest points to the strategic possibilities beyond the light tactical layer already present here. Having to manage and defense multiple fleets and planets, all while balancing your per-turn income against temporary boosts for battles, makes for an engaging time...most of the time. It's when the AI wants to drown you in endless space duels, or simply fail to provide any threat to your planetary march, that I fall back into custom Instant Action sessions. Fan mods can pick up the slack, especially those which appropriate this part of the game to tell a unique plot rivaling what Pandemic made. I feel like there's still so much one can push the Zero Engine, as seen with Dark Times or the oft-discussed fan remasters full of gizmos and doodads. This scene deserves the kind of attention and critique that's benefited better-knowns like Doom for decades now.
I could go on and on and on about what Battlefront II achieves, and what it's meant to me over the years. There's a whole meta to unlocking the Elite badges and proceeding to curbstomp round after round with once puny unit classes. We could simply imbibe the bevy of memorable, often hilarious radio banter heard across each factions' grunts and officers. I have to hold myself back from doing in-depth writeups on the strats and trivia of each stage, whether original or brought forward from the original Battlefront. One cannot simply spend well over a hundred hours, part of it just fucking around on a comically huge recreation of Naboo's Theed City with all its Florentine halls and courtyards, and lack in minutiae and remembrance to share.
If you haven't yet tried classic Battlefront II for some reason or another, I hope that changes in the near-future. A few hours of trying the campaign, Galactic Conquest playthroughs, and some Instant Action will more than suffice to experience this in full. But the ease with which this remains so replayable, despite the sea of similarly invigorating big-team-battle software out there, is commendable. This remains one of my comfort food games, hardly slacking after all these years. It reminds me of a time when we got not just more Star Wars interactive media of note, but when there was still a lot of creative risk and confidence in the franchise's games. You had this, Jedi Outcast, Knights of the Old Republic, Empire at War, etc. vs. mainly Jedi Survivor and the recently middling DICE games by contrast. The era's dearly missed, but not quite missing in action, so long as we're watching those wrist rockets and 360 no-scoping Gamorreans from the depths of Jabba's Palace.
1994
The rose campion, a perennial pink-ish carnation found throughout temperate regions, has long been the study of biologists and botanists, from Darwin to Mendel. Now called silene coronaria, it formerly bore the designation lychnis, associated with a herbivorous moth of the same name, both fragile and humble. In this sense, this duo's unlikely contributions to modern life sciences mirror that of the original Korean PC platformer sharing the moniker, itself a key release for its field. I wish I could more easily recommend Softmax's first release beyond its historic significance, as the game itself is frustratingly unpolished and shows so much missed potential. But like its namesake, one shouldn't expect too much from what's just the beginnings of these ludo-scientists' forays into genres once untenable in this realm.
Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.
Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!
Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.
Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.
However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.
Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.
What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.
I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).
Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE
Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.
Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!
Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.
Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.
However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.
Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.
What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.
I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).
Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE
1981
SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD — Herbie Hopperheap
Object Class: Safe
Standard Containment Procedures: SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD is to be contained within a regular MAME installation or period-appropriate arcade video game cabinet and PCB board. This housing must always be enclosed in a small human-sized room, with all surveillance from beyond one-way mirrors to prevent radiation of vibes onto observers. All personnel must interact with and stimulate the entity via a digital-to-physical interface such as a keyboard, joystick, console controller, etc. Familiarity with similar arcade-based media from the 1970s and early 1980s is advisable. Please use remote robot arm to insert coins and otherwise tamper with specimen. As ever, we enforce these rules to protect you from dangerous hazards—even those cloaked behind the façade of an appealing interactive media apparatus like this.
[NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION: ALL NEURO-LUDOLOGICAL EXPOSURE TO THE VEHICULAR CREATURE RISKS PERMANENT MENTAL TRANSFORMATION WITH SYMPTOMS INCLUDING ADDICTION, EYE STRAIN, KINNING, MANUFACTURED NOSTALGIA, ETC. — REFRAIN FROM EXCESSIVE DURATION OF TESTING, OR "HOPPING" DURING SESSIONS, UNLESS PROPER O5 COUNCIL CLEARANCE AND SUPERVISION GRANTED]
Temporary "lives" structure of play can be bypassed for purposes of experimentation via preserving machine states in memory, but is advised against following past anomalies and accidents. Researchers and security must wear quote-unquote "Cool '80s VR Shades" when in presence of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD at any time to prevent sensory damage. Using on-site equipment ensures safety of multiple tests upon subject without damage or evidence tampering for personnel. Bear in mind that these measures are not fool-proof and remain subject to review and risk evaluation as we continue to study the subject. A prior outbreak, SCP-4163 [Not unlike the fabled "Tetris Effect", but worse — Ed.], and its transmission of sub-anomalies to similar interfaces sets precedent here, hence the supervision of all control devices and, if needed, isolation and disintegration of them.
Description: Sales sheet refers to initial development contractor, Hoei Sangyo. Creator attribution is yet unknown, but the subject was born from multiple minicomputer environments operated by Alpha Denshi Corporation on behalf of Hoei Sangyo and distributor SEGA Enterprises. This electronic printed circuit board (PCB), plus accompanying means of human interaction and presentation, was first sold to game centers, movie theaters, and other recreational venues sometime in 1981, starting in Japan. Ever since, dwindling units of "Jump Bug" have appeared in the hands of collectors, or idling and decaying within landfills or warehouses. Wherever found, the entity's reported to occasionally entice, entrance, haunt, and finally consume its players' faculties through processes still undetermined.
Upon receiving power, subject board device activates and transmits binary-encoded signals to cabinet housing and attached monitor, displaying series of vibrant, colorful animated worlds on black background. Inserting coinage of proper weight (ex. Standard U.S. quarter) into designated slot one or more times to prepare subject for testing. So far, all our tests conclude with a "Game Over" prompt on-screen, after which one can feed the thing more cupronickel currency or proceed to power it down. Successful adherence to procedures and methodology have so far spared our rotating teams from falling into purported existential traps laid out by the software and its means of conveyance.
Addendum [author's subtitle: THE ACTUAL DAMN REVIEW] The following journal from Dr. [REDACTED] is a useful summary of knowledge gained from "1CC"-ing the provided experience:
"March 26, 2023, 1732 hours: I've finished a few so-called "loops" of this odd video game, a demon in disguise if I may conjecture. The side-scrolling progression mostly resembles Konami's Scramble from earlier that year, at least until one reaches the dungeon section which doesn't auto-scroll. Because the eponymous Herbie-like vehicle can't stop bounding, the driver has to control its air velocity and direction, all while shooting down various monsters and collecting money bags for score and extra chances. In short, it's got a devilish game loop, hooking me whenever I let down my guard and haven't any TPS reports or other busywork to distract me.”
"…Wait a minute, this thing's what's been distracting me! Excuse my irreverence towards Foundation duties, but that's just one side-effect the subject can displace upon its witnesses. Other phenomena this machine expresses, like its psychedelic graphical changes demarcating new sections of the game world, threatens to overcome me with delight, a microprocessor prescribing desertion of my daily worries. Come to think of it, I don't understand why the Council keeps putting me on this project every time I politely back out and work elsewhere. Do they want me to let my guard down and become a true victim of something this fun, replayable, and unique among all those innocuous arcade pastimes?"
"Never mind that I can truly see the appeal here. It's a deft fusion of Donkey Kong and Scramble which could attain a cult-classic reputation where it re-released to market at the level of those games. This was Alpha Denshi's most notable early product, which I can both respect and disfavor given its tantalizing qualities. Reigning in this spirited VW Beetle across cityscapes, wastelands, castles, and seas takes a lot of dexterity and memorization, but gives players much reward as they uncover hidden tricks and strategies for skillful play. There's an anarchy here which dares you to get as high on life as it does, albeit a seductive, ultimately slight and repetitive reality limited by ROM storage."
"In their later ADK years, Alpha Denshi would remake a couple vintage hits like Crush Roller, but not this for some reason. Damn shame, really. The DNA of something as formative as Pac-Land or even Super Mario Bros. goes back to clever genre hybrids like this, a known quantity and charting arcade release in its era. Jump Bug is also more transparent with its challenge and means of mastery than almost all of its competitors in '81, with the bags-for-1ups system and ability to brake and reposition mid-air making this very fair for the era. Anyone prone to deeming these Golden Age cabinets as "coin-munchers" ought to give this a try and see if that generalization holds up. Well, only if they take all necessary preventative measures—I'm not suggesting one should expose their minds to this subject with such fervor as I've contemplated."
A couple days later, Dr. [REDACTED] was nowhere to be found on the containment facility premises. Our preliminary search-and-rescue operation turned up no trace of his body, belongings, or other data. CCTV facility at the site was also corrupt and unreadable, and a forensic autopsy of the entity revealed its contents had been copied to external storage. Until further notice, we are taking even stricter precautions regarding access to and use of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD, so as to prevent losses of human resources. In the subject site manager's words: "That darn Herbie Hopperheap whatchamacallit really bugged him out, 's all I can gather."
Object Class: Safe
Standard Containment Procedures: SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD is to be contained within a regular MAME installation or period-appropriate arcade video game cabinet and PCB board. This housing must always be enclosed in a small human-sized room, with all surveillance from beyond one-way mirrors to prevent radiation of vibes onto observers. All personnel must interact with and stimulate the entity via a digital-to-physical interface such as a keyboard, joystick, console controller, etc. Familiarity with similar arcade-based media from the 1970s and early 1980s is advisable. Please use remote robot arm to insert coins and otherwise tamper with specimen. As ever, we enforce these rules to protect you from dangerous hazards—even those cloaked behind the façade of an appealing interactive media apparatus like this.
[NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION: ALL NEURO-LUDOLOGICAL EXPOSURE TO THE VEHICULAR CREATURE RISKS PERMANENT MENTAL TRANSFORMATION WITH SYMPTOMS INCLUDING ADDICTION, EYE STRAIN, KINNING, MANUFACTURED NOSTALGIA, ETC. — REFRAIN FROM EXCESSIVE DURATION OF TESTING, OR "HOPPING" DURING SESSIONS, UNLESS PROPER O5 COUNCIL CLEARANCE AND SUPERVISION GRANTED]
Temporary "lives" structure of play can be bypassed for purposes of experimentation via preserving machine states in memory, but is advised against following past anomalies and accidents. Researchers and security must wear quote-unquote "Cool '80s VR Shades" when in presence of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD at any time to prevent sensory damage. Using on-site equipment ensures safety of multiple tests upon subject without damage or evidence tampering for personnel. Bear in mind that these measures are not fool-proof and remain subject to review and risk evaluation as we continue to study the subject. A prior outbreak, SCP-4163 [Not unlike the fabled "Tetris Effect", but worse — Ed.], and its transmission of sub-anomalies to similar interfaces sets precedent here, hence the supervision of all control devices and, if needed, isolation and disintegration of them.
Description: Sales sheet refers to initial development contractor, Hoei Sangyo. Creator attribution is yet unknown, but the subject was born from multiple minicomputer environments operated by Alpha Denshi Corporation on behalf of Hoei Sangyo and distributor SEGA Enterprises. This electronic printed circuit board (PCB), plus accompanying means of human interaction and presentation, was first sold to game centers, movie theaters, and other recreational venues sometime in 1981, starting in Japan. Ever since, dwindling units of "Jump Bug" have appeared in the hands of collectors, or idling and decaying within landfills or warehouses. Wherever found, the entity's reported to occasionally entice, entrance, haunt, and finally consume its players' faculties through processes still undetermined.
Upon receiving power, subject board device activates and transmits binary-encoded signals to cabinet housing and attached monitor, displaying series of vibrant, colorful animated worlds on black background. Inserting coinage of proper weight (ex. Standard U.S. quarter) into designated slot one or more times to prepare subject for testing. So far, all our tests conclude with a "Game Over" prompt on-screen, after which one can feed the thing more cupronickel currency or proceed to power it down. Successful adherence to procedures and methodology have so far spared our rotating teams from falling into purported existential traps laid out by the software and its means of conveyance.
Addendum [author's subtitle: THE ACTUAL DAMN REVIEW] The following journal from Dr. [REDACTED] is a useful summary of knowledge gained from "1CC"-ing the provided experience:
"March 26, 2023, 1732 hours: I've finished a few so-called "loops" of this odd video game, a demon in disguise if I may conjecture. The side-scrolling progression mostly resembles Konami's Scramble from earlier that year, at least until one reaches the dungeon section which doesn't auto-scroll. Because the eponymous Herbie-like vehicle can't stop bounding, the driver has to control its air velocity and direction, all while shooting down various monsters and collecting money bags for score and extra chances. In short, it's got a devilish game loop, hooking me whenever I let down my guard and haven't any TPS reports or other busywork to distract me.”
"…Wait a minute, this thing's what's been distracting me! Excuse my irreverence towards Foundation duties, but that's just one side-effect the subject can displace upon its witnesses. Other phenomena this machine expresses, like its psychedelic graphical changes demarcating new sections of the game world, threatens to overcome me with delight, a microprocessor prescribing desertion of my daily worries. Come to think of it, I don't understand why the Council keeps putting me on this project every time I politely back out and work elsewhere. Do they want me to let my guard down and become a true victim of something this fun, replayable, and unique among all those innocuous arcade pastimes?"
"Never mind that I can truly see the appeal here. It's a deft fusion of Donkey Kong and Scramble which could attain a cult-classic reputation where it re-released to market at the level of those games. This was Alpha Denshi's most notable early product, which I can both respect and disfavor given its tantalizing qualities. Reigning in this spirited VW Beetle across cityscapes, wastelands, castles, and seas takes a lot of dexterity and memorization, but gives players much reward as they uncover hidden tricks and strategies for skillful play. There's an anarchy here which dares you to get as high on life as it does, albeit a seductive, ultimately slight and repetitive reality limited by ROM storage."
"In their later ADK years, Alpha Denshi would remake a couple vintage hits like Crush Roller, but not this for some reason. Damn shame, really. The DNA of something as formative as Pac-Land or even Super Mario Bros. goes back to clever genre hybrids like this, a known quantity and charting arcade release in its era. Jump Bug is also more transparent with its challenge and means of mastery than almost all of its competitors in '81, with the bags-for-1ups system and ability to brake and reposition mid-air making this very fair for the era. Anyone prone to deeming these Golden Age cabinets as "coin-munchers" ought to give this a try and see if that generalization holds up. Well, only if they take all necessary preventative measures—I'm not suggesting one should expose their minds to this subject with such fervor as I've contemplated."
A couple days later, Dr. [REDACTED] was nowhere to be found on the containment facility premises. Our preliminary search-and-rescue operation turned up no trace of his body, belongings, or other data. CCTV facility at the site was also corrupt and unreadable, and a forensic autopsy of the entity revealed its contents had been copied to external storage. Until further notice, we are taking even stricter precautions regarding access to and use of SCP-JUMPBUG-LOGGD, so as to prevent losses of human resources. In the subject site manager's words: "That darn Herbie Hopperheap whatchamacallit really bugged him out, 's all I can gather."
2011
So, that's it for the 3DS eShop, another graveyard of cherished exclusives and flash-in-the-pan experiments which Nintendo will unceremoniously move on from. Not us who lived through it, of course (and we're still able to redownload our libraries, which means even the corp's data centers are holding on). The Big N counts on its newer audiences never fully realizing what they're deprived of, but that's where retrospectives and critical writings both on Backloggd and elsewhere can do some good. Countless years of platform history, and the less lionized parts of developers' histories, would otherwise get lost in the shuffle of countless new systems and software libraries. Pushmo is a perfect example of something once notable but now more at risk of broad indifference or revisionism than ever, aided by its publisher's aversion to curating its legacy in a post-Iwata world. And that's a damn shame because Intelligent Systems' puzzle-platformer played an important part in buoying the 3DS' launch year, with an addictive game loop and plenty of replayability even now thanks to level editing and QR codes.
Pushmo strikes me as a peek into an alternate timeline where the Fire Emblem franchise simply didn't recover from its downturn. Int-Sys likely saw the writing on the wall, given all their staff interviews expressing a real fear of, and resignation to, Awakening being the last true entry in that series. They needed what Jupiter Corp. has with its endless Picross series, a forever repeatable puzzle concept appealing to just about everyone in just about any context, keeping their paychecks secure despite the seemingly inevitable death of their prestige IP. So we got this, a modest but meaty killer app which the eShop sorely needed in lieu of upcoming blockbusters. All seemed going to plan, with critical acclaim and constant word of mouth giving Crashmo and Pushmo World on Wii U the greenlight. But then a funny thing happened: that 3DS Fire Emblem game Int-Sys doubted could resurrect that series? It outperformed the previous FE releases combined, setting a new mandate for the company. The Puzzlemo segue suddenly looked a lot more out of place (alarmist, even) than anticipated.
So today we have seemingly no end of Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare goodness from this long-time Nintendo partner, but nothing like their mid-2010s experiments with these cute block-em-ups, let alone anything as out there as Code Name S.T.E.A.M.. It sucks because, unless you're willing to sail the high seas, this part of Int-Sys' back catalog might as well not exist. What precisely does a spate of throwback logic and jumping exercises, set to orchestral chiptunes and a family-friendly exterior, offer to anyone better acquainted with Three Houses or The Origami King? I'd argue that Pushmo represents the developer's talents in their most pure form, though. It's that very lack of frills, thrills, bombast, and grandiosity which this small series proved it could do without, squaring up to the tentpole stuff with such ease and elegance. One might argue there's not much new here beyond the 3D gimmick, but I digress.
The player's goals of rescuing little sumo wrestlers from sabotaged contraptions in a park is simple enough for Int-Sys to launch players through tutorials before they get bored. Yet it's still flexible by the time this game reaches its proper tier of challenge—those later rounds where one must carefully view the puzzle, backtrack from mistakes, and think multiple steps ahead of danger. I definitely wish all of these Puzzlemo installments offered experienced users the ability to skip earlier worlds via some kind of test/exam mode, just to save me some time on replays, but I don't mind the early stages. They stimulate my small pathetic monkey brain every time I hear that wonderful "clear!" jingle, after all. My main issue with Pushmo comes from the lack of added mechanics towards the end, which lets repetition and a feeling of sameness creep in. Solving pixel art murals is fun much like in Jupiter's nonogram paradigm, but not quite enough.
Even with its limited scope and novelty, I find it super rewarding to revisit Pushmo on Citra today. Quite a few WarioWare staffers led development on this and the rest of the series, hence its ease in activating that "one more turn!" sensation. Each world's paced and sequenced appropriately, feeling like a gentle upward climb vs. the difficulty cliffside that Crashmo provides. This linear mastery of pushing and pulling, navigating tight jumps, cutting off your escape to proceed higher…it all adds up once you reach the bonus worlds, full of homage to Nintendo icons and classic puzzling. Another important piece of the progression is unlocking new options in the level editor, a very relevant feature given how well the game teaches you to recognize and reproduce smart designs. I never got the full experience of building puzzles and sharing them with friends via QRs, sadly, but I can't imagine the lack of said feature here and in the sequels. That same joy that kids made and shared with Lode Runner and Excitebike in the '80s lives on in forms like this, all true to that Family Computer and Game Boy ethos of uncomplicated play.
Much of the game's appeal to me now comes from the aesthetic it promotes. Now, I'm typically not a fella with a penchant for twee or adulterated audiovisuals in my media diet. Anything that feels desperately cuddly, or unwilling to settle on a distinct audience, just seems cowardly to me most of the time. Pushmo avoids this by pairing its Saturday-morning-edutainment look with unassuming but involving brain-teasers, the kind that even adults can sink effort into. This visual style accomplishes a couple things: (a) keeping all elements distinct and readable even when complex, and (b) making me feel like a dumb lil' kindergartner again when I eventually mess up. Some other Nintendo releases from this period went too far in acting cute and patronizing to players—think Skyward Sword or Freakyforms—which is why I think Int-Sys' success here is commendable. Shout-outs to those lovely melodies, too! They're an effortless mind-meld of Famicom-era bleepity bloops and lush orchestration that complement each other maybe too well.
Questions like "where did Puzzlemo go?" bug me for lack of an easy answer. Maybe it's simply the sequels being either too hard for most (Crashmo) or too blithely derivative (Pushmo Worlds). Perhaps the glorious revival of Fire Emblem has shareholders far more excited than safe, profitable but unexciting puzzle ditties. Or it could just be a matter of key people leaving Int-Sys, i.e. the Chao Garden programmers no longer at Sonic Team, and now the developer can't trust itself to live up to this series' high standards. I doubt there's anything nefarious behind them abandoning these scrimblos to the eShop wastes, though it's examples like this which add credence to fan theories about Humble vs. Arrogant Nintendo. Whatever the case, I still hold out some hope for anything that can recapture the impact this underdog achieved. Some will say Pushmo only did so for lack of anything better at the time, but the series' absence on Switch feels like a gaping wound. Nintendo's big enough to shove endless employee prototypes into the trash, yet they somehow can't produce any meaningful iterations of this, or Pilotwings, or F-Zero like they once did? Things aren't adding up, and that wouldn't make Mallo or Papa Blox happy. Until this issue's resolved with more 'mo, I'm just glad to find the originals so approachable now. There's always indie-scene puzzlers if I really need something new, albeit rarely as polished and fine-tuned as this.
Pushmo strikes me as a peek into an alternate timeline where the Fire Emblem franchise simply didn't recover from its downturn. Int-Sys likely saw the writing on the wall, given all their staff interviews expressing a real fear of, and resignation to, Awakening being the last true entry in that series. They needed what Jupiter Corp. has with its endless Picross series, a forever repeatable puzzle concept appealing to just about everyone in just about any context, keeping their paychecks secure despite the seemingly inevitable death of their prestige IP. So we got this, a modest but meaty killer app which the eShop sorely needed in lieu of upcoming blockbusters. All seemed going to plan, with critical acclaim and constant word of mouth giving Crashmo and Pushmo World on Wii U the greenlight. But then a funny thing happened: that 3DS Fire Emblem game Int-Sys doubted could resurrect that series? It outperformed the previous FE releases combined, setting a new mandate for the company. The Puzzlemo segue suddenly looked a lot more out of place (alarmist, even) than anticipated.
So today we have seemingly no end of Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare goodness from this long-time Nintendo partner, but nothing like their mid-2010s experiments with these cute block-em-ups, let alone anything as out there as Code Name S.T.E.A.M.. It sucks because, unless you're willing to sail the high seas, this part of Int-Sys' back catalog might as well not exist. What precisely does a spate of throwback logic and jumping exercises, set to orchestral chiptunes and a family-friendly exterior, offer to anyone better acquainted with Three Houses or The Origami King? I'd argue that Pushmo represents the developer's talents in their most pure form, though. It's that very lack of frills, thrills, bombast, and grandiosity which this small series proved it could do without, squaring up to the tentpole stuff with such ease and elegance. One might argue there's not much new here beyond the 3D gimmick, but I digress.
The player's goals of rescuing little sumo wrestlers from sabotaged contraptions in a park is simple enough for Int-Sys to launch players through tutorials before they get bored. Yet it's still flexible by the time this game reaches its proper tier of challenge—those later rounds where one must carefully view the puzzle, backtrack from mistakes, and think multiple steps ahead of danger. I definitely wish all of these Puzzlemo installments offered experienced users the ability to skip earlier worlds via some kind of test/exam mode, just to save me some time on replays, but I don't mind the early stages. They stimulate my small pathetic monkey brain every time I hear that wonderful "clear!" jingle, after all. My main issue with Pushmo comes from the lack of added mechanics towards the end, which lets repetition and a feeling of sameness creep in. Solving pixel art murals is fun much like in Jupiter's nonogram paradigm, but not quite enough.
Even with its limited scope and novelty, I find it super rewarding to revisit Pushmo on Citra today. Quite a few WarioWare staffers led development on this and the rest of the series, hence its ease in activating that "one more turn!" sensation. Each world's paced and sequenced appropriately, feeling like a gentle upward climb vs. the difficulty cliffside that Crashmo provides. This linear mastery of pushing and pulling, navigating tight jumps, cutting off your escape to proceed higher…it all adds up once you reach the bonus worlds, full of homage to Nintendo icons and classic puzzling. Another important piece of the progression is unlocking new options in the level editor, a very relevant feature given how well the game teaches you to recognize and reproduce smart designs. I never got the full experience of building puzzles and sharing them with friends via QRs, sadly, but I can't imagine the lack of said feature here and in the sequels. That same joy that kids made and shared with Lode Runner and Excitebike in the '80s lives on in forms like this, all true to that Family Computer and Game Boy ethos of uncomplicated play.
Much of the game's appeal to me now comes from the aesthetic it promotes. Now, I'm typically not a fella with a penchant for twee or adulterated audiovisuals in my media diet. Anything that feels desperately cuddly, or unwilling to settle on a distinct audience, just seems cowardly to me most of the time. Pushmo avoids this by pairing its Saturday-morning-edutainment look with unassuming but involving brain-teasers, the kind that even adults can sink effort into. This visual style accomplishes a couple things: (a) keeping all elements distinct and readable even when complex, and (b) making me feel like a dumb lil' kindergartner again when I eventually mess up. Some other Nintendo releases from this period went too far in acting cute and patronizing to players—think Skyward Sword or Freakyforms—which is why I think Int-Sys' success here is commendable. Shout-outs to those lovely melodies, too! They're an effortless mind-meld of Famicom-era bleepity bloops and lush orchestration that complement each other maybe too well.
Questions like "where did Puzzlemo go?" bug me for lack of an easy answer. Maybe it's simply the sequels being either too hard for most (Crashmo) or too blithely derivative (Pushmo Worlds). Perhaps the glorious revival of Fire Emblem has shareholders far more excited than safe, profitable but unexciting puzzle ditties. Or it could just be a matter of key people leaving Int-Sys, i.e. the Chao Garden programmers no longer at Sonic Team, and now the developer can't trust itself to live up to this series' high standards. I doubt there's anything nefarious behind them abandoning these scrimblos to the eShop wastes, though it's examples like this which add credence to fan theories about Humble vs. Arrogant Nintendo. Whatever the case, I still hold out some hope for anything that can recapture the impact this underdog achieved. Some will say Pushmo only did so for lack of anything better at the time, but the series' absence on Switch feels like a gaping wound. Nintendo's big enough to shove endless employee prototypes into the trash, yet they somehow can't produce any meaningful iterations of this, or Pilotwings, or F-Zero like they once did? Things aren't adding up, and that wouldn't make Mallo or Papa Blox happy. Until this issue's resolved with more 'mo, I'm just glad to find the originals so approachable now. There's always indie-scene puzzlers if I really need something new, albeit rarely as polished and fine-tuned as this.
Signs Your Man is Gay and Does Crimes: (a) hijacks military-industrial weapons to fight the oppressors, (b) defends the marijuana anarchists of America, (c) must rescue his big '80s-haired goth boyfriend, (d) stars in three Golden Age throwback arcade games reimagining '80s classics as thinly veiled socio-political satire, and (e) was once lost to time like other Macintosh oddities (straight and otherwise), only to get re-discovered decades later
There's a lot to say about Foobar Versus the DEA, a mid-'90s Macintosh vertical shooter outweighed by its messages, subcultural themes, and historic context. Cadensia's review focused on the larger anti-Reaganite/-Clintonite background, while I'm captivated by this game's vision of an alternate history where queer super-heroics could exist in the local pizza parlor, accepted no matter if it fits our definitions of quality. In the words of developers Richard Cross and Tom Cruse: "The game plays like Xevious. We have music, sound, and fun graphics. What is the story behind Foobar? Foobar has been pushed too far. His boyfriend, Ned, has been captured by the DEA." [1] See? It's just like those arcade icons of yesterday, but with something more to say, a reflection of real-world problems that transcends the usual power fantasies. And in this earnestness, I think it mostly succeeds. Moments like grabbing the missile-shaped condom with a US flag, or our hero holding Ned in his arms like ye olde damsels in distress, put a fun, barbed spin on my shoot-'em-up expectations.
In the larger Macintosh software world, this must have felt like a kick in the pants to whoever played it. Let's recall that Apple and Macs in general were limping towards an ignominious demise at the hands of Windows hegemony. All the best shareware releases of the day, like Mighty Mike and Escape Velocity plus big-box legends like the Marathon series could only hold back the inevitable. Foobar Versus the DEA sends an extra potent message as such, a defiant assertion of pride in a dying platform and the voices it emphasized over the status-quo products making waves on most PCs of the era. Sure, I sincerely doubt Ambrosia Software would have published anything as brazen as this—look to their later Mars Rising for an example of the typical Mac retro shooter. But this kind of interactive media found a home on usergroups, newsletters, and early World Wide Web sites evangelizing the Mac experience. [2]
The word "Foobar" derives from hacker culture, a corrupt of military jargon ("FUBAR") and signal terms used at MIT's model train club starting in the late-1950s. [3] And it's fitting, if disappointing, that this game's as DIY and ersatz as the name itself. Nothing here feels good to actually play. I wouldn't call the sluggish ship movement, imprecise hitboxes, molasses scrolling, or generally repetitive game loop bad, but it's a far cry from what else had arrived in the Mac scene. You've got 4 levels of predictable, seemingly interminable waves of missiles, turrets, and weird lil' enemies gunning at you. There's just one weapon power-up, the usual extra life and score "yummies", and it's very easy to accidentally destroy these items via your own shots! Neither the comically short musical loops nor early Flash-game visual designs are distinctive or laudable, either. At least the game's nice to let you save between levels on any difficulty, plus retaining the upgraded shot speed between deaths. It's just frustrating that most of this game feels like a prototype that Cross and Cruse slapped a compelling set of themes atop, rather than something more holistic.
For all that negativity, I still think it's worth giving this a try if the idea of playing a bog standard, forgettable yet memorable Macintosh oldie fascinates you. Foobar Versus the DEA has a neat anarchic, subversive atmosphere whenever the narrative comes back into focus. Fighting supervillains like the corporate sellout scientist Marlboro Man and NSA-like mainframe AI NOSEY matches the comic-book onomatopoeia shouting at players during each level. My Camp-O-Meter hits dangerous readings whenever I look at our hero's lantern-jawed physique, or the completely sincere use of google-eyed smiley faces as enemy artillery. "Irreverent" is the best descriptor here, and I'm glad that the two-man duo behind this romp didn't take themselves too seriously. That seems to have been the goal for two yet undumped sequels—Foobar Versus the FCC & Foobar vs. His Local School Board—which each have their own evil tetrumvirates to defeat in fabulous fashion.
Sadly, this milestone in the Mac community truly almost faded into the annals of obscurity, not helped by Cruse's unfortunate death in a car accident a year after making this series. We now have projects like the LGBTQ Video Game Archive compiling primary info and resources on this, thankfully, but it remains a footnote in daily discussion of pre-Y2K indie gaming. Simply playing this at all, without compromise, takes a bit more work than giving it a glance on Internet Archive, as the game requires you to use the Apple command key, bound to Windows and other OS-specific keys in emulation, which can be a technical hassle. I ended up running the program in Mac OS 8.1 via Basilisk II just to have as pure a 68k-based environment as I can currently use! So I won't blame any of y'all for skipping over this despite its short 15-30 minute runtime (at least on Easy, the default setting).
Foobar Versus the DEA falls into something of an uncanny valley. While it's certainly queer and emblematic of late-night hacker sessions (and other precursors to game jams), there's plenty old-fashioned aspects to it as well. Multiple difficulties and lenient checkpoints clash in style against enemy spam hemming players into the middle, all while they destroy power-ups due to a lack of time and space to collect them. And though it does okay enough in most areas for me to deem it playable, there were already much better, much more impressive genre throwbacks and evolutions leading the freeware and shareware markets on Mac back in '96. Following in the wake of fully confident titles like Caper in the Castro, I just find this game lacking as a countercultural remnant of a pre-Obama milieu. Regardless, we ought not to let this early LGBTQIA+ game disappear into the word-of-mouth ether. Let's do it for Tom Cruse. Do it for Ned.
—Bibliography—
[1] Cross, Richard, and Tom Cruse. “The FOOBAR FAQ.” Foobar FAQ. Richard Cross, October 2, 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/20010823133634/http://www.desy.de/~cross/foobar/FAQ.html. Retrieved from Internet Archive via Wayback Machine, March 31, 2023.
[2] Cross, Richard. “Info-Mac Digest V14 #251.” Info-Mac. Info-Mac, October 30, 1996. https://www.info-mac.org/viewtopic.php?f=213&t=14153&p=16227&hilit=Foobar#p16227.
[3] Eastlike, Donald E., Carl-Unro Manros, and Eric S. Raymond. “Etymology of ‘Foo’ (RFC 3092).” The Internet Society, April 1, 2001, 1–14. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt. Internet Requests for Comments (RFC).
There's a lot to say about Foobar Versus the DEA, a mid-'90s Macintosh vertical shooter outweighed by its messages, subcultural themes, and historic context. Cadensia's review focused on the larger anti-Reaganite/-Clintonite background, while I'm captivated by this game's vision of an alternate history where queer super-heroics could exist in the local pizza parlor, accepted no matter if it fits our definitions of quality. In the words of developers Richard Cross and Tom Cruse: "The game plays like Xevious. We have music, sound, and fun graphics. What is the story behind Foobar? Foobar has been pushed too far. His boyfriend, Ned, has been captured by the DEA." [1] See? It's just like those arcade icons of yesterday, but with something more to say, a reflection of real-world problems that transcends the usual power fantasies. And in this earnestness, I think it mostly succeeds. Moments like grabbing the missile-shaped condom with a US flag, or our hero holding Ned in his arms like ye olde damsels in distress, put a fun, barbed spin on my shoot-'em-up expectations.
In the larger Macintosh software world, this must have felt like a kick in the pants to whoever played it. Let's recall that Apple and Macs in general were limping towards an ignominious demise at the hands of Windows hegemony. All the best shareware releases of the day, like Mighty Mike and Escape Velocity plus big-box legends like the Marathon series could only hold back the inevitable. Foobar Versus the DEA sends an extra potent message as such, a defiant assertion of pride in a dying platform and the voices it emphasized over the status-quo products making waves on most PCs of the era. Sure, I sincerely doubt Ambrosia Software would have published anything as brazen as this—look to their later Mars Rising for an example of the typical Mac retro shooter. But this kind of interactive media found a home on usergroups, newsletters, and early World Wide Web sites evangelizing the Mac experience. [2]
The word "Foobar" derives from hacker culture, a corrupt of military jargon ("FUBAR") and signal terms used at MIT's model train club starting in the late-1950s. [3] And it's fitting, if disappointing, that this game's as DIY and ersatz as the name itself. Nothing here feels good to actually play. I wouldn't call the sluggish ship movement, imprecise hitboxes, molasses scrolling, or generally repetitive game loop bad, but it's a far cry from what else had arrived in the Mac scene. You've got 4 levels of predictable, seemingly interminable waves of missiles, turrets, and weird lil' enemies gunning at you. There's just one weapon power-up, the usual extra life and score "yummies", and it's very easy to accidentally destroy these items via your own shots! Neither the comically short musical loops nor early Flash-game visual designs are distinctive or laudable, either. At least the game's nice to let you save between levels on any difficulty, plus retaining the upgraded shot speed between deaths. It's just frustrating that most of this game feels like a prototype that Cross and Cruse slapped a compelling set of themes atop, rather than something more holistic.
For all that negativity, I still think it's worth giving this a try if the idea of playing a bog standard, forgettable yet memorable Macintosh oldie fascinates you. Foobar Versus the DEA has a neat anarchic, subversive atmosphere whenever the narrative comes back into focus. Fighting supervillains like the corporate sellout scientist Marlboro Man and NSA-like mainframe AI NOSEY matches the comic-book onomatopoeia shouting at players during each level. My Camp-O-Meter hits dangerous readings whenever I look at our hero's lantern-jawed physique, or the completely sincere use of google-eyed smiley faces as enemy artillery. "Irreverent" is the best descriptor here, and I'm glad that the two-man duo behind this romp didn't take themselves too seriously. That seems to have been the goal for two yet undumped sequels—Foobar Versus the FCC & Foobar vs. His Local School Board—which each have their own evil tetrumvirates to defeat in fabulous fashion.
Sadly, this milestone in the Mac community truly almost faded into the annals of obscurity, not helped by Cruse's unfortunate death in a car accident a year after making this series. We now have projects like the LGBTQ Video Game Archive compiling primary info and resources on this, thankfully, but it remains a footnote in daily discussion of pre-Y2K indie gaming. Simply playing this at all, without compromise, takes a bit more work than giving it a glance on Internet Archive, as the game requires you to use the Apple command key, bound to Windows and other OS-specific keys in emulation, which can be a technical hassle. I ended up running the program in Mac OS 8.1 via Basilisk II just to have as pure a 68k-based environment as I can currently use! So I won't blame any of y'all for skipping over this despite its short 15-30 minute runtime (at least on Easy, the default setting).
Foobar Versus the DEA falls into something of an uncanny valley. While it's certainly queer and emblematic of late-night hacker sessions (and other precursors to game jams), there's plenty old-fashioned aspects to it as well. Multiple difficulties and lenient checkpoints clash in style against enemy spam hemming players into the middle, all while they destroy power-ups due to a lack of time and space to collect them. And though it does okay enough in most areas for me to deem it playable, there were already much better, much more impressive genre throwbacks and evolutions leading the freeware and shareware markets on Mac back in '96. Following in the wake of fully confident titles like Caper in the Castro, I just find this game lacking as a countercultural remnant of a pre-Obama milieu. Regardless, we ought not to let this early LGBTQIA+ game disappear into the word-of-mouth ether. Let's do it for Tom Cruse. Do it for Ned.
—Bibliography—
[1] Cross, Richard, and Tom Cruse. “The FOOBAR FAQ.” Foobar FAQ. Richard Cross, October 2, 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/20010823133634/http://www.desy.de/~cross/foobar/FAQ.html. Retrieved from Internet Archive via Wayback Machine, March 31, 2023.
[2] Cross, Richard. “Info-Mac Digest V14 #251.” Info-Mac. Info-Mac, October 30, 1996. https://www.info-mac.org/viewtopic.php?f=213&t=14153&p=16227&hilit=Foobar#p16227.
[3] Eastlike, Donald E., Carl-Unro Manros, and Eric S. Raymond. “Etymology of ‘Foo’ (RFC 3092).” The Internet Society, April 1, 2001, 1–14. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt. Internet Requests for Comments (RFC).
2022
Jet Set Trick-or-Treat: How the Anti-Establishment Halloween Gurrl Liberates the Means of Fun-duction via Xtreme Sports and Magic
It's a 15-to-20 minute demo of the best indie arena action-meets-skateboarding games yet to be made. That fact really doesn't mesh well with the program's filesize, a whopping ~8 GB freeware package courtesy of the DigiPen Institute. (For a student project, they've already nailed their industry's tendency towards comically unoptimized assets and downloads!) Don't be fooled or alarmed by that short runtime, however. Witchpunk comes with a simple, nifty ranking system based on how well you score against its limited waves of baddies, mini-bosses, and the big bad herself. And reaching that top rank means playing as fast, tight, and smart as one would hope for in a character action classic, now condensed into a small but expertly interwoven skate park of horrors.
The premise explains itself: a villainous girlboss has invaded your local grounds with an army of silvery Halloween battle-bots, seeking profitable victory over the festivities. It's up to our heroine to stop this uncool reign of terror, bashing the bots into junk heaps before taking on the aggressor herself. I didn't go in expecting any Trenchant Insight on class warfare, capitalism, or punk ethos and attitudes in general, but Witchpunk does a good job of embodying these themes in spirit. Your swagful attire, zesty cat familiar, and resilient set of wheels do a lot to instill confidence, as does the excellent audiovisual style found and heard all throughout. I could easily compare it to the aforementioned graffiti-spraying blockbuster from SEGA, or even something recent like Friday Night Funkin', but I think this manages to stand out on its own, even in a sea of other dalliances with cel shading and angular, colorful designs.
While I wouldn't say Witchpunk is style over substance, it can come a bit too close to that for comfort. The main issue stems from a relatively limited moveset: no button-combo tricking, advanced melee or magic options, etc. It counterbalances this with an emphasis on boosting, going faster and faster around the map to increase your damage multiplier and dodge enemy fire. This feels like a meld between precision action-platformers and the extreme sports genre, albeit a bit simplistic in areas. Controls are thankfully quite responsive and fine-tuned to make this game loop work, with tons of space to maneuver and herd squads together for juicy combos. It's always satisfying to master different racing lines and hopping between tiers of elevation, defending through evasion and attacking with just the right amount of hesitation.
A lotta love went into this undergraduate effort, but I really wish it had a level editor for us to mess with, or an outright "full" version at all. Much like Narbacular Drop oh so many years ago, this feels like an ambitious but rushed DigiPen showcase that can surely become something great, with better fleshed-out boss fights and missing essentials like gamepad controls. It's a decadent vertical slice even compared to its peers from the school, brimming with "the vibes" as some would say; I'm legit surprised there isn't a soundtrack release for this yet! We're living through a renaissance in Jet Set Radio-inspired experiences, each honing in on different strengths which that series pioneered or refined to a sheen, and I'm glad to say these guys are already mostly there.
Why this hasn't blown up on streams the way other DigiPen-borne releases like FPS Chess has is beyond me. Like, who wouldn't want to hop around, get down, bop clowns, and clean up town in an urban fantasy like this? Witchpunk answers this question quite ably, and I only wish it had more examples with which to demonstrate its proof of real skate-bonking sorcery.
It's a 15-to-20 minute demo of the best indie arena action-meets-skateboarding games yet to be made. That fact really doesn't mesh well with the program's filesize, a whopping ~8 GB freeware package courtesy of the DigiPen Institute. (For a student project, they've already nailed their industry's tendency towards comically unoptimized assets and downloads!) Don't be fooled or alarmed by that short runtime, however. Witchpunk comes with a simple, nifty ranking system based on how well you score against its limited waves of baddies, mini-bosses, and the big bad herself. And reaching that top rank means playing as fast, tight, and smart as one would hope for in a character action classic, now condensed into a small but expertly interwoven skate park of horrors.
The premise explains itself: a villainous girlboss has invaded your local grounds with an army of silvery Halloween battle-bots, seeking profitable victory over the festivities. It's up to our heroine to stop this uncool reign of terror, bashing the bots into junk heaps before taking on the aggressor herself. I didn't go in expecting any Trenchant Insight on class warfare, capitalism, or punk ethos and attitudes in general, but Witchpunk does a good job of embodying these themes in spirit. Your swagful attire, zesty cat familiar, and resilient set of wheels do a lot to instill confidence, as does the excellent audiovisual style found and heard all throughout. I could easily compare it to the aforementioned graffiti-spraying blockbuster from SEGA, or even something recent like Friday Night Funkin', but I think this manages to stand out on its own, even in a sea of other dalliances with cel shading and angular, colorful designs.
While I wouldn't say Witchpunk is style over substance, it can come a bit too close to that for comfort. The main issue stems from a relatively limited moveset: no button-combo tricking, advanced melee or magic options, etc. It counterbalances this with an emphasis on boosting, going faster and faster around the map to increase your damage multiplier and dodge enemy fire. This feels like a meld between precision action-platformers and the extreme sports genre, albeit a bit simplistic in areas. Controls are thankfully quite responsive and fine-tuned to make this game loop work, with tons of space to maneuver and herd squads together for juicy combos. It's always satisfying to master different racing lines and hopping between tiers of elevation, defending through evasion and attacking with just the right amount of hesitation.
A lotta love went into this undergraduate effort, but I really wish it had a level editor for us to mess with, or an outright "full" version at all. Much like Narbacular Drop oh so many years ago, this feels like an ambitious but rushed DigiPen showcase that can surely become something great, with better fleshed-out boss fights and missing essentials like gamepad controls. It's a decadent vertical slice even compared to its peers from the school, brimming with "the vibes" as some would say; I'm legit surprised there isn't a soundtrack release for this yet! We're living through a renaissance in Jet Set Radio-inspired experiences, each honing in on different strengths which that series pioneered or refined to a sheen, and I'm glad to say these guys are already mostly there.
Why this hasn't blown up on streams the way other DigiPen-borne releases like FPS Chess has is beyond me. Like, who wouldn't want to hop around, get down, bop clowns, and clean up town in an urban fantasy like this? Witchpunk answers this question quite ably, and I only wish it had more examples with which to demonstrate its proof of real skate-bonking sorcery.
1991
The stuff dreams and nightmares are made of. Earthbound's cosmic horror climax sitting right next to Mavis Beacon touch-typing exercises. A critique and celebration of Dragon Quest not unlike Itoi's Mother series, just more spartan and deadpan. And it's finally translated in English, a privilege few PC-98 games enjoy even today (let alone most '90s East Asian PC software). Kumdor no Ken, or Sword of Kumdor, was creator Michiaki Tsubaki's most popular, well-regarded work during his short stint in games development, an edutainment staple for NEC and Mac computer labs. Many kids and young adults grew up with this, a story-driven word processing trainer for the JRPG age. Its story of exploring a strange land, overcoming bizarre obstacles, and indulging the frivolous but endearing people of this planet resonates with those same players today. Just imagine if Mario Teaches Typing had earned the kind of legacy and following a 16-bit Final Fantasy entry has now. Yet, until very recently, seemingly none in the West knew or cared about this.
| A typing tutor for all seasons |
Maybe I'm just built different, but Sword of Kumdor caught my attention several years ago while I was buzzing around decaying Japanese homepages and fan sites from the pre-Facebook days. It's almost pointillist visual style, learning to touch-type through turn-based combat, and bizarre sense of place and verisimilitude (or sekaikan) beguiled me. The closest Anglosphere equivalents to something this well-made, distinctive, and beloved across demographics are classics like Oregon Trail, or The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. Whole petitions exist simply for reprints of the game for modern PCs, encased in the same unique book packaging ASCII & Tsubaki used back in 1991. Though my attempts to play through this adventure then were thwarted by the language barrier and poor keyboard skills, I could tell this was no mere fluke, forgery, or overhyped victim of nostalgia. Nothing on consoles, Western PCs, or the PC-98 and its competitors resembled Tsubaki's RPGs, almost all of which taught players about computing, typing, and other subject matter through idiosyncratic RPG stylings and structure. This was something special, and I had to know more. That's why [DISCLAIMER] I ended up being the beta tester on lynn's translation project, now having no excuse but to see this through.
Sword of Kumdor starts off unassuming, with barebones titles and a scrawly tutorial briefly going over controls. Using the F, J, and space keys to move forward, use the menu, and rotate your protagonist sounds weird and unintuitive, but comes naturally as you start the game in a galactic rest stop, waiting to board a rocket towards the titular world. Tsubaki describes our hero(ine) as a "Master of Blind Touch", a keyboard champion who's risen to the top but is bored, desperate for deeper understanding beyond their success on Earth. So we've traveled to a beleaguered, backwater planet calling for help, invaded by strange spellcasting monsters and sudden environmental disasters. It's not long before our own interplanetary trip to Kumdor goes awry, with the spacecraft malfunctioning and crash landing right into the starting town. With our keyboard keys and experience gone, no one recognizes us as the same touch-typing maestro promised to them. It's time to regain our equipment, master those typing skills once more, and figure out the cause of and solution to Kumdor's maladies!
As I've implied, most of the game loop involves exploring towns, overworlds, and dungeons, fighting random battles and collecting key items. This also entails the usual fiddling with inventory and managing your money, but Tsubaki challenges players to do something unique for a JRPG: play the whole game with touch-typing controls. I really cannot imagine how one would get through Sword of Kumdor on a gamepad, nor would it make any sense. From the most basic resting wrist fingerings to rapidly and precisely completing difficult sentences later on, this journey tries to make an avid typist out of anyone, even if its approach can get exhausting. One menu option brings you to a full keyboard HUD displaying your inputs, something I found necessary due to some PC-98 keys not natively mapping onto my US Windows layout. Another menu gives players a summary of their word-per-minute rating and trend over runtime, plus their WPM target which matters most at endgame. Teachers likely needed and asked for these tools the most, but anyone playing this to completion should find 'em useful too. I had to make a new .txt file in my Neko Project II emulator directory rebinding some keys to in-game equivalents, which made the virtual key-map important.
Forget years of button-mashing wearing out your gamepad—this game occasionally had me wondering if I'd finally feel some mushiness from my spacebar! (Not the case, thankfully, but then again my keyboard has faux Cherry Blue switches, designed to remain punchy.) I've long wondered if the Art Academy series could help me unlearn my chickenscratch handwriting and drawing, and parts of Sword of Kumdor did a lot to correct bad typing habits I've built over the ages. Everything centers around your muscle memory here, with slow and clumsy typing punished with Game Overs in combat and puzzles. Battles are all 1-on-1 affairs, as are "gates" which you unlock using the same system. Enemies shout prompts, you type them back as fast and accurate as you can, and this deals damage based on your EXP points total. Increasing max EXP requires visiting practice areas, usually within towns, which check if you've bought the right keys and then test you with them. Completing prompts fast with no errors leads to either an optional prompt at the end of fights—which reward the lion's share of an encounter's EXP as long as you don't mess up once—or a higher raise in max EXP during the aforementioned tests. These slight variations on the same repetitive exercises keeps most of the game feeling fresh despite what it demands from players.
| Old tales, new travails |
Another boon for us all is the Dragon Quest-like game progression, which involves finding and using movement items to proceed further. Though there's only one real "dungeon" stuck in the endgame, crossing each overworld section means talking to the right NPCs (which rarely feels tedious) to acquire the right stuff. For example, a mid-game fog valley barrier proves insurmountable until one locates the compass needed to navigate it. Diving into and out of lakes or ponds? Better snag a snorkel! And because there's no way to passively heal, Sword of Kumdor punishes players who forget to pack restoratives, either found throughout the realm or bought in towns. There's both consumable items with various properties and magic scrolls which only work if you have all the keys needed to type them. (Early on, you won't even have an Enter key with which to submit the spell name.) All this could easily be too simplistic or convoluted like in many contemporary JRPGs, but Tsubaki does a good job of balancing frequent typing with visiting new locations and people often.
If anything, Sword of Kumdor incentivizes its digital stenographers to chat up as many of the locals as possible. So much dialogue between villagers, scientists, and plot-critical individuals goes for light, often ironic or self-effacing conversation, the kind you'd expect from modern Earthbound-inspired xRPGs and adventure (ADV/VN) faire. Lake divers kvetch to you and one another about how the monsters plaguing their lake have left them with nothing good to do. Kumdor-ians complain endlessly about their inability to learn touch-typing and fight back, often resorting to increasingly absurd solutions. Hermits and dilapidated robots muse about the mysterious Dreampoint, which seems to be corrupted and responsible for the planet's septic response to its inhabitants. Sword of Kumdor starts you off as a detached observer of their foibles, humor, and resignation to what fate has in store for them. Only much later on do major NPCs recognize you as the purported "keyboard warrior" they asked for, and even then everybody's too busy trying to live, survive, and enjoy themselves to notice. Nothing in this pre-Mother 2 odyssey from 1991 ever gets as nakedly comical or referential as the usual suspects today, but all the signs are here from start to finish.
Most of an average playthrough (about 6-7 hours prior to endgame) goes by with little issue, intuitive and freshly paced as it is, up until endgame. Trudging through lava flows to reach safe land, or hopping across pits and solving gates, takes a bit more time, but that's far from the worst Tsubaki throws at you. It's the long-awaited final stretch, the Dreampoint, which turns Sword of Kumdor from an occasionally tricky edutainment JRPG into a brutal marathon of skill and carpal tunnel risks. The dungeon's gimmick? Find those warp points and save up enough dosh to buy the house they're hidden inside. While you can safely run from any battle elsewhere in the game, only suffering minor damage or easily healed status conditions if unlucky, most of the baddies patrolling this place can do terrifying things to players. Some render you invisible before curing, others saddle you with an unhealable darkness of vision (only fading if you can escape the Dreampoint), and a couple outright steal one or more keys if you run for it! My strategy evolved towards hoarding restoration food, saving very rare teleportation magic for emergencies, and then trying to brute-force through these oppressive mazy floors until I reached the next warp. Once I'd vanquished the "final boss", this conclusion felt more like the second half, taking as much time as events leading to it (if not more).
This difficulty and investment spike risks spurning players entirely. Indeed, I began to play less, making what progress I could in short sessions to avoid burnout. But it's also exactly the kind of grueling test that Tsubaki (and I presume his friends at ASCII Corp.) had in mind for budding touch-typists. What qualified as dungeons and side-areas before pales in comparison to this crawl, and I think it ultimately works out for the better. I'd reached just shy of 2000 EXP by the end, relying more on my typing skills than just pushing up numbers in the practice rooms when I could two-shot most enemies already. Previous emphasis on building muscle memory and character status gives way to the player themselves embodying their male or female avatar's struggle to save the world. Like the best finales in ye olde Phantasy Star or Ys saga of the era, strategy and self-pacing count more than grinding to a sure victory, and so the push-pull of tension and relief becomes so much stronger in turn. It recontextualizes most of the rest of the game as a cleverly-disguised series of quizzes and reviews, preparing us for this cram school's worth of battles, conundrums, and focused sprints to safety. And, being the masochist I am (not unlike '90s Japanese students here), I was hooked.
| Mysteries of the inner globe |
The Dreampoint itself summarizes many of the story's most interesting themes and oddities, a labyrinth of disfigured memories and boogeymen foreshadowing the big twist. So far, Sword of Kumdor has presented its planet as a microcosm of Showa-era Japan, with its polite but passive-aggressive populace and a strong bystander effect despite the unforeseen consequences of the planet's sentient core being invaded. Just like how the gravy train of real estate speculation and over-lending led to the bubble bursting not long before Tsubaki made this, Kumdor's palace royals and courtiers' fascination with the Dreampoint, a crossing point of everyone's conscious and subconscious thoughts, led to an ecological apocalypse of sorts. As a decorated yet anonymous outsider to these problems—the "Westerner" in the equation, not knowing local history, problems, etc.—it's just as problematic that we have to bail the leaders out of this predicament. Even as we help citizens and eventually the ultimate victim of the Dreampoint, what gratitude we receive comes mostly from observable touch-typing mastery. Think about whenever your boss or workplace values you most for results and business contributions, more so than just being, having that humanity and empathy we desire yet undervalue.
Beneath all the hijinks, calamities, and talking to sentient key-trees and key-fish lies a critical but optimistic set of messages for kids and adults in modern life. Through talent, determination, and side-stepping structural barriers whenever/wherever possible, one can recover from setbacks and prosper in ways previously unfathomed. By understanding one's environment and believing in your abilities—not taking things for granted or falling into impostor syndrome—you can convince the world around you of your worth, even if it shouldn't need such arguing. I appreciate what Tsubaki successfully communicates here even more because it does so without any hint of didacticism. Each ending, based on your endgame WPM target, reflects somewhat upon what comes after this arduous journey, be it the "bad" ending having Kumdor's king advocate for consuming oneself in fantasy (the book he wants to get back to instead of talking more with you), or the best ending having a couple of royals earnestly ask for you to tutor them in the touch-typing ways. Key NPCs only realize you're the Master of Blind Touch after your actions and progress prove that so, and the ancient non-Kumdorian inhabitants of the land, from wisened tree and fish folk to the mangled but salient denizens of the Dreampoint, comment on how far you've come without overselling the point. On the contrary, that "regular guy in the street" in Kumiel, the capital, doesn't pay players any mind, instead encouraging us to think about their relative privileges while other, more talkative folks escape volcanic eruptions or watch their jobs stagnate.
—————Ending spoilers below!—————
Something tells me Tsubaki was nonetheless reverent towards the principles of Yuji Horii's work on adventures like Portopia Serial Murder Case and, of course, the inescapable Dragon Quest franchise from '86 onward. Our protagonist's trip from wrecked ship to the neural nexus of this world both mirrors and reimagines Loto's quest in the original JRPG. Rather than starting in an open, hospitable castle with its jolly version of Lord British, we only reach the palace later on, just to be turned away because the real Master of Blind Touch would have solved everyone's problems already. Instead of a charismatic Dragonlord tempting players with a chance to join his side, the Dreampoint itself has parasitically merged with Mido, the prince of Kumdor whose own fears, flaws, and insecurities have bequeathed indescribable terrors upon the realm. Here the choice isn't whether or not to join evil, but to let yourself down at the bitter end, leaving this game's Loto to fester as a figurative child of Omelas.
Key moments in the original Dragon Quest's progression are rearranged, malformed, and presented to players no doubt familiar with JRPG cliches as something genuinely new. Bosses aren't cartoony Akira Toriyama drawings, but huge text prompts mixing in text from sources as wide as fairy tales (Snow White), journalism (a summary of '80s US-Japan relations and the Plaza Accord), and other unsettlingly real or familiar subject matter. Hotels go from quaint to multi-floor behemoths, medieval-garbed shopkeepers to lumpy blanks, and soundtracks from cheerful tunes to bright but ominous interludes. Even the biomes are now hostile: white fog traps you in a loop of encounters, water rapids destroy you underwater, and the undulating "void" of the Dreampoint's penultimate room can swallow you whole. In this messed-up but discernable reconfiguration of Dragon Quest-isms, much like the non sequiturs posed to players in something like Space Funeral, we're asked to rethink how much these tropes matter. After all, in a universe where the keyboard's mightier than the sword, what defines a hero's journey, the stakes in general, and how others perceive it all?
—————No more spoilers!—————
Shigesato Itoi often gets a truckload of credit in modern video games discourse for this kind of effortless, trenchant conveyance and literary game design. I think it's sobering to encounter other examples of such creators, working with their own restrictions and life stories, achieving much the same but to far less acclaim and/or recognition. Sword of Kumdor treats its participants with so much intelligence, no matter where you're from or which stage of your lifetime, that it can implicitly pass for an alternative-universe Mother series entry with such ease that I'm a little jealous. Here's exactly the kind of iterative yet unconventional trip through engaging systems, encounters, and heartwarming moments which I hoped existed somewhere in the Japanese PC games library, knowing its breadth and variety. Yes, this is far from a perfect game, what with its harsh dexterity requirements and cliff wall of an ending gauntlet. The audiovisuals, though very striking and identifiable, also play to the 16-color, high-resolution, FM-synthesized hardware in abrasive ways. Not everyone's gonna love eye-searing monsters, pulsing percussion-less and alien aural textures, or the Eisenstein-like use of strong colors to denote sleeping at inns or dying ingloriously in battle. But it all comes together to make something truly "PC-98" for me, a defining piece of entertainment which defies current assumptions about what one can and should expect.
| A sword for Kumdor, my axe for J-PC games scorned |
Years of Tumblr visual blogs, jokes about Sex 2, and the understandable but oft misleading characterization of the PC-98 as an erotic adventures platform makes Sword of Kumdor stand out that much more. It's definitely on the extreme, experimental end of the system's library, but quite the counter-example to explain how differently Japanese users perceived NEC's dominant PC up until Windows 95. True, otaku subcultures and reliable sales of horny soft to those audiences prevailed from the turn of the '90s to today, but the PC-98 catered to so many niche markets, like wargaming and fantasy JRPGs. Reductionist, convenient portrayals of this platform, both in and outside its original regions, downplay or even eliminate the chances that iconic games like Kumdor get the appreciation they deserve. And this isn't a close-and-shut case of Tsubaki's RPGs being the exception to the rule, as many other sims, ADVs, and RPGs didn't rely on any erotica to sell and stand out, ex. Yougekitai's occult detective premise or Tokio's satirical comedy of bubble-era economy and politics. It's a shame that the kind of enthusiast press and institutional promotion that all-ages games like Zoombinis gets in the US hasn't extended to Kumdor in its home country, working against all the fans' nostalgia and agitation to bring it back into the mainstream like it's the early '90s again.
For me, the critical burial and mere rumblings of relevance emanating in Sword of Kumdor's wake seems unjust. (Yes, I know life isn't fair and that these are just first-world problems, but gimme some slack here.) Writer, designer, and programmer Michiaki Tsubaki came from an outsider background in art design to iterate on the popular Dragon Quest mold in ways no one else accomplished. And it makes perfect sense he'd choose the PC-98, simultaneously a bastion for the business world and close-knit interest groups, to house these beguiling, often subversive adventures of learning. Yet so many out West (as well as in Japan, though much less so among uses/players from its heyday) can simply say "the PC-98 is for porn, or Touhou, or mahjong", etc. and leave it at that. I'm not going to say they're bad or wrong, given the large amount of eroge and "weird Japan" software you can find for the system, but Tsubaki didn't dabble in weirdness or exotica for its own sake, let alone fashion or vibes culture. His interactive media seeks to enthrall and unsettle people as much as help and inspire them, using these super-deformed, cute-yet-not elements and methods. In a sense, what he did with Kumdor, the INSIDERS duology, and Toki no Shirube adheres more to a traditional fully-fledged aesthetic than some superficial trend. And that's something I see with a general majority of PC-98 games, even some eroge ADVs.
In short, there's so much more to the PC-98 scene (and PC-88, and MSX, and…better stop here) in terms of daring, diverse, and dare I say important gaming experiences which Sword of Kumdor exemplifies. We can't settle for placing YU-NO or Rusty atop curated, canonical lists of the platform's greats and also overlook ambitious/art works like this, not unless all that matters is just ogling these games and their histories at a glance. (Again, I love quite a bit of eroge and better-known PC-X8 darlings, but they're not the end-all-be-all.) Tsubaki was just one talented bedroom-coding polymath among many in that milieu, pushing unwieldy hardware to its limits and daring players to keep up. Our unlikely Master of Blind Touch journeys from the end of one life into the beginnings of another, reassembling a broken world's hopes and dreams from above and within its core. That reconstructive mentality resonates with me, someone who's always willing to give these old, janky but often great PC games their due. You could find all kinds of ideas, stories, genre hybrids, different design paradigms, and truly unique fantasies and realities across East Asian PC games like this, complementing the console/arcade landscape with what those couldn't or didn't provide.
That said, it's not super easy for me to recommend this to anyone starting out with PC-98 emulation or using a real machine. I can think of very few notable games on the system which need this much keyboard configuration to feel all that great to play in long bouts. But it's still one of the most interesting xRPGs on the system—hell, in these genres' history! Not many stories can wield weirdness with purpose and the right amount of restraint like this. Not many edutainment titles dare their players to head into dangerous, troubling circumstances either. And not many are willing to risk players' attention and comfort for the sake of a tonally consistent, draining final act which wraps all loose ends, game loops, and story motifs into one. I have nothing but respect and admiration for Tsubaki's efforts here, and his lack of presence and biographical info even within Japan just saddens me. Regardless, I deem Sword of Kumdor the best way to get into this designer's catalog of bizarre yet relatable JRPGs, with the more computer science-based INSIDERS and Gaia-themed Stellar Sign comprising the rest of these PC-98 tomes. Of course, one might argue we're not getting the whole experience without translations of the dense hintbooks provided with each Tsubaki release, something ASCII Corporation did to help players and persuade educators to include the games in their curricula. But this first translation patch will definitely suffice!
| A typing tutor for all seasons |
Maybe I'm just built different, but Sword of Kumdor caught my attention several years ago while I was buzzing around decaying Japanese homepages and fan sites from the pre-Facebook days. It's almost pointillist visual style, learning to touch-type through turn-based combat, and bizarre sense of place and verisimilitude (or sekaikan) beguiled me. The closest Anglosphere equivalents to something this well-made, distinctive, and beloved across demographics are classics like Oregon Trail, or The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. Whole petitions exist simply for reprints of the game for modern PCs, encased in the same unique book packaging ASCII & Tsubaki used back in 1991. Though my attempts to play through this adventure then were thwarted by the language barrier and poor keyboard skills, I could tell this was no mere fluke, forgery, or overhyped victim of nostalgia. Nothing on consoles, Western PCs, or the PC-98 and its competitors resembled Tsubaki's RPGs, almost all of which taught players about computing, typing, and other subject matter through idiosyncratic RPG stylings and structure. This was something special, and I had to know more. That's why [DISCLAIMER] I ended up being the beta tester on lynn's translation project, now having no excuse but to see this through.
Sword of Kumdor starts off unassuming, with barebones titles and a scrawly tutorial briefly going over controls. Using the F, J, and space keys to move forward, use the menu, and rotate your protagonist sounds weird and unintuitive, but comes naturally as you start the game in a galactic rest stop, waiting to board a rocket towards the titular world. Tsubaki describes our hero(ine) as a "Master of Blind Touch", a keyboard champion who's risen to the top but is bored, desperate for deeper understanding beyond their success on Earth. So we've traveled to a beleaguered, backwater planet calling for help, invaded by strange spellcasting monsters and sudden environmental disasters. It's not long before our own interplanetary trip to Kumdor goes awry, with the spacecraft malfunctioning and crash landing right into the starting town. With our keyboard keys and experience gone, no one recognizes us as the same touch-typing maestro promised to them. It's time to regain our equipment, master those typing skills once more, and figure out the cause of and solution to Kumdor's maladies!
As I've implied, most of the game loop involves exploring towns, overworlds, and dungeons, fighting random battles and collecting key items. This also entails the usual fiddling with inventory and managing your money, but Tsubaki challenges players to do something unique for a JRPG: play the whole game with touch-typing controls. I really cannot imagine how one would get through Sword of Kumdor on a gamepad, nor would it make any sense. From the most basic resting wrist fingerings to rapidly and precisely completing difficult sentences later on, this journey tries to make an avid typist out of anyone, even if its approach can get exhausting. One menu option brings you to a full keyboard HUD displaying your inputs, something I found necessary due to some PC-98 keys not natively mapping onto my US Windows layout. Another menu gives players a summary of their word-per-minute rating and trend over runtime, plus their WPM target which matters most at endgame. Teachers likely needed and asked for these tools the most, but anyone playing this to completion should find 'em useful too. I had to make a new .txt file in my Neko Project II emulator directory rebinding some keys to in-game equivalents, which made the virtual key-map important.
Forget years of button-mashing wearing out your gamepad—this game occasionally had me wondering if I'd finally feel some mushiness from my spacebar! (Not the case, thankfully, but then again my keyboard has faux Cherry Blue switches, designed to remain punchy.) I've long wondered if the Art Academy series could help me unlearn my chickenscratch handwriting and drawing, and parts of Sword of Kumdor did a lot to correct bad typing habits I've built over the ages. Everything centers around your muscle memory here, with slow and clumsy typing punished with Game Overs in combat and puzzles. Battles are all 1-on-1 affairs, as are "gates" which you unlock using the same system. Enemies shout prompts, you type them back as fast and accurate as you can, and this deals damage based on your EXP points total. Increasing max EXP requires visiting practice areas, usually within towns, which check if you've bought the right keys and then test you with them. Completing prompts fast with no errors leads to either an optional prompt at the end of fights—which reward the lion's share of an encounter's EXP as long as you don't mess up once—or a higher raise in max EXP during the aforementioned tests. These slight variations on the same repetitive exercises keeps most of the game feeling fresh despite what it demands from players.
| Old tales, new travails |
Another boon for us all is the Dragon Quest-like game progression, which involves finding and using movement items to proceed further. Though there's only one real "dungeon" stuck in the endgame, crossing each overworld section means talking to the right NPCs (which rarely feels tedious) to acquire the right stuff. For example, a mid-game fog valley barrier proves insurmountable until one locates the compass needed to navigate it. Diving into and out of lakes or ponds? Better snag a snorkel! And because there's no way to passively heal, Sword of Kumdor punishes players who forget to pack restoratives, either found throughout the realm or bought in towns. There's both consumable items with various properties and magic scrolls which only work if you have all the keys needed to type them. (Early on, you won't even have an Enter key with which to submit the spell name.) All this could easily be too simplistic or convoluted like in many contemporary JRPGs, but Tsubaki does a good job of balancing frequent typing with visiting new locations and people often.
If anything, Sword of Kumdor incentivizes its digital stenographers to chat up as many of the locals as possible. So much dialogue between villagers, scientists, and plot-critical individuals goes for light, often ironic or self-effacing conversation, the kind you'd expect from modern Earthbound-inspired xRPGs and adventure (ADV/VN) faire. Lake divers kvetch to you and one another about how the monsters plaguing their lake have left them with nothing good to do. Kumdor-ians complain endlessly about their inability to learn touch-typing and fight back, often resorting to increasingly absurd solutions. Hermits and dilapidated robots muse about the mysterious Dreampoint, which seems to be corrupted and responsible for the planet's septic response to its inhabitants. Sword of Kumdor starts you off as a detached observer of their foibles, humor, and resignation to what fate has in store for them. Only much later on do major NPCs recognize you as the purported "keyboard warrior" they asked for, and even then everybody's too busy trying to live, survive, and enjoy themselves to notice. Nothing in this pre-Mother 2 odyssey from 1991 ever gets as nakedly comical or referential as the usual suspects today, but all the signs are here from start to finish.
Most of an average playthrough (about 6-7 hours prior to endgame) goes by with little issue, intuitive and freshly paced as it is, up until endgame. Trudging through lava flows to reach safe land, or hopping across pits and solving gates, takes a bit more time, but that's far from the worst Tsubaki throws at you. It's the long-awaited final stretch, the Dreampoint, which turns Sword of Kumdor from an occasionally tricky edutainment JRPG into a brutal marathon of skill and carpal tunnel risks. The dungeon's gimmick? Find those warp points and save up enough dosh to buy the house they're hidden inside. While you can safely run from any battle elsewhere in the game, only suffering minor damage or easily healed status conditions if unlucky, most of the baddies patrolling this place can do terrifying things to players. Some render you invisible before curing, others saddle you with an unhealable darkness of vision (only fading if you can escape the Dreampoint), and a couple outright steal one or more keys if you run for it! My strategy evolved towards hoarding restoration food, saving very rare teleportation magic for emergencies, and then trying to brute-force through these oppressive mazy floors until I reached the next warp. Once I'd vanquished the "final boss", this conclusion felt more like the second half, taking as much time as events leading to it (if not more).
This difficulty and investment spike risks spurning players entirely. Indeed, I began to play less, making what progress I could in short sessions to avoid burnout. But it's also exactly the kind of grueling test that Tsubaki (and I presume his friends at ASCII Corp.) had in mind for budding touch-typists. What qualified as dungeons and side-areas before pales in comparison to this crawl, and I think it ultimately works out for the better. I'd reached just shy of 2000 EXP by the end, relying more on my typing skills than just pushing up numbers in the practice rooms when I could two-shot most enemies already. Previous emphasis on building muscle memory and character status gives way to the player themselves embodying their male or female avatar's struggle to save the world. Like the best finales in ye olde Phantasy Star or Ys saga of the era, strategy and self-pacing count more than grinding to a sure victory, and so the push-pull of tension and relief becomes so much stronger in turn. It recontextualizes most of the rest of the game as a cleverly-disguised series of quizzes and reviews, preparing us for this cram school's worth of battles, conundrums, and focused sprints to safety. And, being the masochist I am (not unlike '90s Japanese students here), I was hooked.
| Mysteries of the inner globe |
The Dreampoint itself summarizes many of the story's most interesting themes and oddities, a labyrinth of disfigured memories and boogeymen foreshadowing the big twist. So far, Sword of Kumdor has presented its planet as a microcosm of Showa-era Japan, with its polite but passive-aggressive populace and a strong bystander effect despite the unforeseen consequences of the planet's sentient core being invaded. Just like how the gravy train of real estate speculation and over-lending led to the bubble bursting not long before Tsubaki made this, Kumdor's palace royals and courtiers' fascination with the Dreampoint, a crossing point of everyone's conscious and subconscious thoughts, led to an ecological apocalypse of sorts. As a decorated yet anonymous outsider to these problems—the "Westerner" in the equation, not knowing local history, problems, etc.—it's just as problematic that we have to bail the leaders out of this predicament. Even as we help citizens and eventually the ultimate victim of the Dreampoint, what gratitude we receive comes mostly from observable touch-typing mastery. Think about whenever your boss or workplace values you most for results and business contributions, more so than just being, having that humanity and empathy we desire yet undervalue.
Beneath all the hijinks, calamities, and talking to sentient key-trees and key-fish lies a critical but optimistic set of messages for kids and adults in modern life. Through talent, determination, and side-stepping structural barriers whenever/wherever possible, one can recover from setbacks and prosper in ways previously unfathomed. By understanding one's environment and believing in your abilities—not taking things for granted or falling into impostor syndrome—you can convince the world around you of your worth, even if it shouldn't need such arguing. I appreciate what Tsubaki successfully communicates here even more because it does so without any hint of didacticism. Each ending, based on your endgame WPM target, reflects somewhat upon what comes after this arduous journey, be it the "bad" ending having Kumdor's king advocate for consuming oneself in fantasy (the book he wants to get back to instead of talking more with you), or the best ending having a couple of royals earnestly ask for you to tutor them in the touch-typing ways. Key NPCs only realize you're the Master of Blind Touch after your actions and progress prove that so, and the ancient non-Kumdorian inhabitants of the land, from wisened tree and fish folk to the mangled but salient denizens of the Dreampoint, comment on how far you've come without overselling the point. On the contrary, that "regular guy in the street" in Kumiel, the capital, doesn't pay players any mind, instead encouraging us to think about their relative privileges while other, more talkative folks escape volcanic eruptions or watch their jobs stagnate.
—————Ending spoilers below!—————
Something tells me Tsubaki was nonetheless reverent towards the principles of Yuji Horii's work on adventures like Portopia Serial Murder Case and, of course, the inescapable Dragon Quest franchise from '86 onward. Our protagonist's trip from wrecked ship to the neural nexus of this world both mirrors and reimagines Loto's quest in the original JRPG. Rather than starting in an open, hospitable castle with its jolly version of Lord British, we only reach the palace later on, just to be turned away because the real Master of Blind Touch would have solved everyone's problems already. Instead of a charismatic Dragonlord tempting players with a chance to join his side, the Dreampoint itself has parasitically merged with Mido, the prince of Kumdor whose own fears, flaws, and insecurities have bequeathed indescribable terrors upon the realm. Here the choice isn't whether or not to join evil, but to let yourself down at the bitter end, leaving this game's Loto to fester as a figurative child of Omelas.
Key moments in the original Dragon Quest's progression are rearranged, malformed, and presented to players no doubt familiar with JRPG cliches as something genuinely new. Bosses aren't cartoony Akira Toriyama drawings, but huge text prompts mixing in text from sources as wide as fairy tales (Snow White), journalism (a summary of '80s US-Japan relations and the Plaza Accord), and other unsettlingly real or familiar subject matter. Hotels go from quaint to multi-floor behemoths, medieval-garbed shopkeepers to lumpy blanks, and soundtracks from cheerful tunes to bright but ominous interludes. Even the biomes are now hostile: white fog traps you in a loop of encounters, water rapids destroy you underwater, and the undulating "void" of the Dreampoint's penultimate room can swallow you whole. In this messed-up but discernable reconfiguration of Dragon Quest-isms, much like the non sequiturs posed to players in something like Space Funeral, we're asked to rethink how much these tropes matter. After all, in a universe where the keyboard's mightier than the sword, what defines a hero's journey, the stakes in general, and how others perceive it all?
—————No more spoilers!—————
Shigesato Itoi often gets a truckload of credit in modern video games discourse for this kind of effortless, trenchant conveyance and literary game design. I think it's sobering to encounter other examples of such creators, working with their own restrictions and life stories, achieving much the same but to far less acclaim and/or recognition. Sword of Kumdor treats its participants with so much intelligence, no matter where you're from or which stage of your lifetime, that it can implicitly pass for an alternative-universe Mother series entry with such ease that I'm a little jealous. Here's exactly the kind of iterative yet unconventional trip through engaging systems, encounters, and heartwarming moments which I hoped existed somewhere in the Japanese PC games library, knowing its breadth and variety. Yes, this is far from a perfect game, what with its harsh dexterity requirements and cliff wall of an ending gauntlet. The audiovisuals, though very striking and identifiable, also play to the 16-color, high-resolution, FM-synthesized hardware in abrasive ways. Not everyone's gonna love eye-searing monsters, pulsing percussion-less and alien aural textures, or the Eisenstein-like use of strong colors to denote sleeping at inns or dying ingloriously in battle. But it all comes together to make something truly "PC-98" for me, a defining piece of entertainment which defies current assumptions about what one can and should expect.
| A sword for Kumdor, my axe for J-PC games scorned |
Years of Tumblr visual blogs, jokes about Sex 2, and the understandable but oft misleading characterization of the PC-98 as an erotic adventures platform makes Sword of Kumdor stand out that much more. It's definitely on the extreme, experimental end of the system's library, but quite the counter-example to explain how differently Japanese users perceived NEC's dominant PC up until Windows 95. True, otaku subcultures and reliable sales of horny soft to those audiences prevailed from the turn of the '90s to today, but the PC-98 catered to so many niche markets, like wargaming and fantasy JRPGs. Reductionist, convenient portrayals of this platform, both in and outside its original regions, downplay or even eliminate the chances that iconic games like Kumdor get the appreciation they deserve. And this isn't a close-and-shut case of Tsubaki's RPGs being the exception to the rule, as many other sims, ADVs, and RPGs didn't rely on any erotica to sell and stand out, ex. Yougekitai's occult detective premise or Tokio's satirical comedy of bubble-era economy and politics. It's a shame that the kind of enthusiast press and institutional promotion that all-ages games like Zoombinis gets in the US hasn't extended to Kumdor in its home country, working against all the fans' nostalgia and agitation to bring it back into the mainstream like it's the early '90s again.
For me, the critical burial and mere rumblings of relevance emanating in Sword of Kumdor's wake seems unjust. (Yes, I know life isn't fair and that these are just first-world problems, but gimme some slack here.) Writer, designer, and programmer Michiaki Tsubaki came from an outsider background in art design to iterate on the popular Dragon Quest mold in ways no one else accomplished. And it makes perfect sense he'd choose the PC-98, simultaneously a bastion for the business world and close-knit interest groups, to house these beguiling, often subversive adventures of learning. Yet so many out West (as well as in Japan, though much less so among uses/players from its heyday) can simply say "the PC-98 is for porn, or Touhou, or mahjong", etc. and leave it at that. I'm not going to say they're bad or wrong, given the large amount of eroge and "weird Japan" software you can find for the system, but Tsubaki didn't dabble in weirdness or exotica for its own sake, let alone fashion or vibes culture. His interactive media seeks to enthrall and unsettle people as much as help and inspire them, using these super-deformed, cute-yet-not elements and methods. In a sense, what he did with Kumdor, the INSIDERS duology, and Toki no Shirube adheres more to a traditional fully-fledged aesthetic than some superficial trend. And that's something I see with a general majority of PC-98 games, even some eroge ADVs.
In short, there's so much more to the PC-98 scene (and PC-88, and MSX, and…better stop here) in terms of daring, diverse, and dare I say important gaming experiences which Sword of Kumdor exemplifies. We can't settle for placing YU-NO or Rusty atop curated, canonical lists of the platform's greats and also overlook ambitious/art works like this, not unless all that matters is just ogling these games and their histories at a glance. (Again, I love quite a bit of eroge and better-known PC-X8 darlings, but they're not the end-all-be-all.) Tsubaki was just one talented bedroom-coding polymath among many in that milieu, pushing unwieldy hardware to its limits and daring players to keep up. Our unlikely Master of Blind Touch journeys from the end of one life into the beginnings of another, reassembling a broken world's hopes and dreams from above and within its core. That reconstructive mentality resonates with me, someone who's always willing to give these old, janky but often great PC games their due. You could find all kinds of ideas, stories, genre hybrids, different design paradigms, and truly unique fantasies and realities across East Asian PC games like this, complementing the console/arcade landscape with what those couldn't or didn't provide.
That said, it's not super easy for me to recommend this to anyone starting out with PC-98 emulation or using a real machine. I can think of very few notable games on the system which need this much keyboard configuration to feel all that great to play in long bouts. But it's still one of the most interesting xRPGs on the system—hell, in these genres' history! Not many stories can wield weirdness with purpose and the right amount of restraint like this. Not many edutainment titles dare their players to head into dangerous, troubling circumstances either. And not many are willing to risk players' attention and comfort for the sake of a tonally consistent, draining final act which wraps all loose ends, game loops, and story motifs into one. I have nothing but respect and admiration for Tsubaki's efforts here, and his lack of presence and biographical info even within Japan just saddens me. Regardless, I deem Sword of Kumdor the best way to get into this designer's catalog of bizarre yet relatable JRPGs, with the more computer science-based INSIDERS and Gaia-themed Stellar Sign comprising the rest of these PC-98 tomes. Of course, one might argue we're not getting the whole experience without translations of the dense hintbooks provided with each Tsubaki release, something ASCII Corporation did to help players and persuade educators to include the games in their curricula. But this first translation patch will definitely suffice!
1979
The very first "realistic" arcade racing video games started off simplistic and barely evocative of what they promised players, but Speed Freak, the first example using vector graphics, does the night-racer concept best out of them all. It must have seemed like a huge leap forward upon release in 1979, three years after Atari engineer Dave Shepperd and his team used Reiner Forest's Nurburgring-1 as the basis for Night Driver (and then Midway's close competitor, 280 Zzzap). Representing the road with just scaling road markers zooming by, in and out of the vanishing point, was impressive enough in the late-'70s, yet Vectorbeam saw the potential for this concept if brought into wireframe 3D. Without changing the simple and immediate goal of driving as fast, far, and crash-less as possible, the company made what I'd tentatively call the best commercial driving sim of the decade, albeit without the fancy skeuomorphic cabinets of something like Fire Truck.
One coin nets players two minutes total of driving, dodging, shifting, and hopefully some high scorin'. Like its stylistic predecessors, the cabinet features a wheel and gated stick shift, giving you something tactile to steer and manage speed with other than the pedals. And that vector display! This expensive but awe-inspiring video tech debuted in arcade format back in '77 when Larry Rosenthal from MIT debuted a fast yet affordable Spacewar! recreation using these new screen drawing methods. Whereas Dr. Forest's early '76 German racing sim drew a basic road surface and lit up bulbs placed towards the glass to fake road edges, Atari and Midway used very early microprocessors and video ROM chips to render rasterized equivalents. Here, though, vivid scanlines of light emanated from the screen at a human-readable refresh rate, with far more on-road and off-road detail than before. Clever scaling of wiry objects on screen gives the impression of 3D perspective, and crashing leads to a broken windshield effect! All these features would have made this feel more comprehensive and immersive for arcade-goers than its peers, even compared to the most luxurious of electromechanical racing installations.
Speed Freak itself, though, isn't a big leap in complexity and depth of play, nor does it use the extended-time mechanic found in 280 Zzzap. You just have to reach and maintain max speed without crashing either off the course or into oncoming objects, like other cars or signposts. It's all about speeding down the darkness with reckless abandon, nabbing those top scores over drivers who keep bailing within this strict time limit. Momentum's a little funky at first, but no more unlifelike or difficult to work with than in Night Driver and its direct precursor. The game does let you know if you're in danger of an accident by sounding a tire squeal, among other small details that build an illusion of world-building here. I wish there was not just a way to extend play, but also see recommended cornering speeds for upcoming turns, rather than having to guess at a glance how far to brake and/or shift. That's one aspect 280 Zzzap has over this and the Atari game, for what it's worth.
Vector-based 3D driving faire like this had a brief heyday in '79 and the following year, but it wouldn't be long until both SEGA and Namco fought back. Their jaw-dropping third-person racers Turbo and Pole Position proved that colorful, "super-scaling" raster graphics were just as much a match for the relatively spartan but flexible vector stuff. In fact, more players cottoned on to these Japanese competitors, both for the added skill ceiling and game loop variety which developers at neither Cinematronic nor Vectorbeam could match. Still, despite how much more I love those Golden Age 2D and pseudo-3D skidfests from the industry titans, I think there was a lot of potential explored in Speed Freak, something more akin to military simulators but for the masses. Affordable home computers and their game creators wouldn't touch this genre for years to come, and the closest you could get on VCS and competing any-game consoles never stood a chance at reproducing this experience. Rosenthal's brief stint running Vectorbeam, a bright light of innovation and visual achievement in the industry, ended the same year this came out, all because Barrer bombed and its manufacturing costs fatally wounded the company. If they had found more market success and iterated on vector tech as fast as he'd introduced it, who knows if the Vectrex and similar projects might have fared better?
Today you can only play Speed Freak on a properly maintained real-life board or, thankfully, through MAME. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, easy to rebind for controllers and a neat subject for screenshots. Maybe the likes of Digital Eclipse, Night Dive, or another prestigious studio could figure out the licensing situation for these formative vector games and get all the experts in one room to make an Atari 50-caliber collection one day. Or maybe that window's passed, given how many industry people from the time have passed on or simply become unavailable. Give this a try regardless! It's simultaneously the start and end of an era, hiding in plain sight among its own kind.
One coin nets players two minutes total of driving, dodging, shifting, and hopefully some high scorin'. Like its stylistic predecessors, the cabinet features a wheel and gated stick shift, giving you something tactile to steer and manage speed with other than the pedals. And that vector display! This expensive but awe-inspiring video tech debuted in arcade format back in '77 when Larry Rosenthal from MIT debuted a fast yet affordable Spacewar! recreation using these new screen drawing methods. Whereas Dr. Forest's early '76 German racing sim drew a basic road surface and lit up bulbs placed towards the glass to fake road edges, Atari and Midway used very early microprocessors and video ROM chips to render rasterized equivalents. Here, though, vivid scanlines of light emanated from the screen at a human-readable refresh rate, with far more on-road and off-road detail than before. Clever scaling of wiry objects on screen gives the impression of 3D perspective, and crashing leads to a broken windshield effect! All these features would have made this feel more comprehensive and immersive for arcade-goers than its peers, even compared to the most luxurious of electromechanical racing installations.
Speed Freak itself, though, isn't a big leap in complexity and depth of play, nor does it use the extended-time mechanic found in 280 Zzzap. You just have to reach and maintain max speed without crashing either off the course or into oncoming objects, like other cars or signposts. It's all about speeding down the darkness with reckless abandon, nabbing those top scores over drivers who keep bailing within this strict time limit. Momentum's a little funky at first, but no more unlifelike or difficult to work with than in Night Driver and its direct precursor. The game does let you know if you're in danger of an accident by sounding a tire squeal, among other small details that build an illusion of world-building here. I wish there was not just a way to extend play, but also see recommended cornering speeds for upcoming turns, rather than having to guess at a glance how far to brake and/or shift. That's one aspect 280 Zzzap has over this and the Atari game, for what it's worth.
Vector-based 3D driving faire like this had a brief heyday in '79 and the following year, but it wouldn't be long until both SEGA and Namco fought back. Their jaw-dropping third-person racers Turbo and Pole Position proved that colorful, "super-scaling" raster graphics were just as much a match for the relatively spartan but flexible vector stuff. In fact, more players cottoned on to these Japanese competitors, both for the added skill ceiling and game loop variety which developers at neither Cinematronic nor Vectorbeam could match. Still, despite how much more I love those Golden Age 2D and pseudo-3D skidfests from the industry titans, I think there was a lot of potential explored in Speed Freak, something more akin to military simulators but for the masses. Affordable home computers and their game creators wouldn't touch this genre for years to come, and the closest you could get on VCS and competing any-game consoles never stood a chance at reproducing this experience. Rosenthal's brief stint running Vectorbeam, a bright light of innovation and visual achievement in the industry, ended the same year this came out, all because Barrer bombed and its manufacturing costs fatally wounded the company. If they had found more market success and iterated on vector tech as fast as he'd introduced it, who knows if the Vectrex and similar projects might have fared better?
Today you can only play Speed Freak on a properly maintained real-life board or, thankfully, through MAME. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, easy to rebind for controllers and a neat subject for screenshots. Maybe the likes of Digital Eclipse, Night Dive, or another prestigious studio could figure out the licensing situation for these formative vector games and get all the experts in one room to make an Atari 50-caliber collection one day. Or maybe that window's passed, given how many industry people from the time have passed on or simply become unavailable. Give this a try regardless! It's simultaneously the start and end of an era, hiding in plain sight among its own kind.
2014
funny how the one MOBA I've ever played only caught my eye because the devs conceived it as a modernized Herzog Zwei, except that's something they kinda got away from over time...
I played this back during its alpha phase, before Ubisoft brought it to consoles. Nothing tells me what pushed these guys into trying silly things like a VR port when they could have changed up the core modes, or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. Granted, someone more active in the beta and release periods would know more about whether or not this ended up and remained fun to play. This was also the only time I ever played a Chrome Store game, something the IGDB/Backloggd page won't tell you about its origins. That period of web-based free-to-play games seems to have waned, or just folded into the background as everyone and their mother does that stuff via Roblox instead. Funny how these trends come and go, only as prescient or permanent as the market and its manipulators demand.
Basically, imagine the aforementioned Tecno Soft RTS for Mega Drive, just with distinct factions and heroes + the usual mess of loadout management and heavy micro associated with this genre. Something tells me that I gravitated towards AirMech to fill the Battle.net gap in my soul, not having a Windows PC good enough for StarCraft II and having no idea (at the time) how to get classic Blizzard online games going. The ease of matching with relatively equally skilled players early on helped here, as I generally won and lost games in that desirable tug-of-war pattern you'd hope for. Quickly managing unit groups, keeping up pressure in lanes and the neat lil' alleys on each map, all while doing plenty of your own shooting and distraction using the hero unit-meets-cursor...this had a lot going for it.
There's a bit of a trend with very beloved and played free-to-play classics getting, erm, "classic" fan remasters years down the line, e.g. RuneScape or Team Fortress 2. But because AirMech was always closed source and never had that level of traction (some would argue distinction in this crowded genre), there's no way for me to revisit the pre-buyout era and place my memories on trial. What I've seen from AirMech Arena, meanwhile, seems more soulless and bereft of unique or meaningful mechanics and community. It's very easy to just play Herzog Zwei online via emulators or the SEGA Ages release on Switch, too, and that's held up both in legacy and playability. So the niche this web-MOBA/-RTS experiment tried to address is now flush with alternatives, let alone the origins they all point to.
Maybe this just sounds like excuses for me not to download the damn thing and give it a whirl. All I know is this led me to playing Caveman 2 Cosmos and saving up more for my 3DS library at the time. The beta didn't exactly develop that fast, and when it did, the general concept and game loop started favoring ride-or-die players over those like me who just wanted to occasionally hop in and have a blast. Balancing for both invested regulars and casual fans is a bitch and a half, yet I also can't imagine this would have been fun if imbalanced towards skilled folks constantly redefining the meta. The extensive mod-ability and "anything goes" attitude of classic Battle.net games definitely wasn't and isn't a thing for AirMech, nor do I suspect the developers ever wanted that. If it's a focused, overly polished RTS-MOBA you're looking for, I'm sure there's worse out there, but this no longer has that scrappy, Herzog-like simplicity that I crave.
The premise still has a lot of potential, even if Carbon Games seems content with where they've brought the series so far. I'd love to have a more story-focused, singleplayer-friendly variation, something which spiritual predecessors like NetStorm surely could have used. Until then, eh. This one's just here, sitting in the back of my community college neurons, taunting me with what could have been.
I played this back during its alpha phase, before Ubisoft brought it to consoles. Nothing tells me what pushed these guys into trying silly things like a VR port when they could have changed up the core modes, or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. Granted, someone more active in the beta and release periods would know more about whether or not this ended up and remained fun to play. This was also the only time I ever played a Chrome Store game, something the IGDB/Backloggd page won't tell you about its origins. That period of web-based free-to-play games seems to have waned, or just folded into the background as everyone and their mother does that stuff via Roblox instead. Funny how these trends come and go, only as prescient or permanent as the market and its manipulators demand.
Basically, imagine the aforementioned Tecno Soft RTS for Mega Drive, just with distinct factions and heroes + the usual mess of loadout management and heavy micro associated with this genre. Something tells me that I gravitated towards AirMech to fill the Battle.net gap in my soul, not having a Windows PC good enough for StarCraft II and having no idea (at the time) how to get classic Blizzard online games going. The ease of matching with relatively equally skilled players early on helped here, as I generally won and lost games in that desirable tug-of-war pattern you'd hope for. Quickly managing unit groups, keeping up pressure in lanes and the neat lil' alleys on each map, all while doing plenty of your own shooting and distraction using the hero unit-meets-cursor...this had a lot going for it.
There's a bit of a trend with very beloved and played free-to-play classics getting, erm, "classic" fan remasters years down the line, e.g. RuneScape or Team Fortress 2. But because AirMech was always closed source and never had that level of traction (some would argue distinction in this crowded genre), there's no way for me to revisit the pre-buyout era and place my memories on trial. What I've seen from AirMech Arena, meanwhile, seems more soulless and bereft of unique or meaningful mechanics and community. It's very easy to just play Herzog Zwei online via emulators or the SEGA Ages release on Switch, too, and that's held up both in legacy and playability. So the niche this web-MOBA/-RTS experiment tried to address is now flush with alternatives, let alone the origins they all point to.
Maybe this just sounds like excuses for me not to download the damn thing and give it a whirl. All I know is this led me to playing Caveman 2 Cosmos and saving up more for my 3DS library at the time. The beta didn't exactly develop that fast, and when it did, the general concept and game loop started favoring ride-or-die players over those like me who just wanted to occasionally hop in and have a blast. Balancing for both invested regulars and casual fans is a bitch and a half, yet I also can't imagine this would have been fun if imbalanced towards skilled folks constantly redefining the meta. The extensive mod-ability and "anything goes" attitude of classic Battle.net games definitely wasn't and isn't a thing for AirMech, nor do I suspect the developers ever wanted that. If it's a focused, overly polished RTS-MOBA you're looking for, I'm sure there's worse out there, but this no longer has that scrappy, Herzog-like simplicity that I crave.
The premise still has a lot of potential, even if Carbon Games seems content with where they've brought the series so far. I'd love to have a more story-focused, singleplayer-friendly variation, something which spiritual predecessors like NetStorm surely could have used. Until then, eh. This one's just here, sitting in the back of my community college neurons, taunting me with what could have been.
1980
STOP LIQUID-ING CRYSTALS
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
I love these funky little handhelds, but Ball is as basic and, frankly, redundant as they ever could have been. It exists purely as a tech & market demo for the concept, which Fire and the aforementioned Octopus effectively iterated on. Memes aside, I hardly have any strong thoughts on this inaugural Game & Watch unit, just sighs when I remember it exists for the sake of what came later.
The old twisted nematic tech for LCD displays is legit cool to read up on. Chemistry is still a lot of black magic to me, but there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ish complicated engineering behind these monochrome flat panels from the period. Miniaturizing and economizing LCD displays to the level Nintendo needed for Game & Watch in general must have been difficult. They're marvels of consumer design to this day and the necessary stepping stone towards the Famicom's own blend of capability and commodity. So all respect to Ball, its deficiencies aside. We salute those who serve.
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
2003
The chad Jakub Dvorsky and the virgin Doug TenNapel—not that I actually have anything against The Neverhood so much as its asshole director, but it's nice to know the "funny guys on forested rocks in space" sub-genre found life elsewhere. Amanita Design's first entry in the "self rust" trilogy promised, and delivered, a smaller-scale successor to the bizarre scenes and ambling of a certain mid'-90s cult classic. And unlike that bust, Samorost led to tangible influence and prestige for the bourgeoning indie games scene. This was exactly the kind of Flash-era, outsider art game happy to just invite you into its odd little world, where every screen our gnome reaches has miniature delights and obstacles to overcome. Right as the very notion of "indie game" was coming into being—a reaction against a decline in shareware and rise of industry consolidation—this became an unlikely herald for things to come.
Actually playing the original 2003 game is a bit of a task. Internet Archive's in-browser version breaks after the intro, meaning I had to run the game in Ruffle offline via command line! Otherwise it's as simple as clicking around the screen, presented first to players as a beguiling, fantastic planetoid defying physics and graphical consistency. As I watched our protagonist scope around the void before panicking at the sight of an oncoming world just like theirs, I couldn't help but notice the odd juxtaposition of, well, everything here. Low-res nature photos blown up into scenery; flat-colored munchkins living in and out of more shaded structures; very short music loops, seemingly pulled from anonymous sources and libraries like junk in orbit! Many multimedia CD-based adventures from years before this used far more space to achieve this kind of uncanny valley, yet Dvorsky triumphs in a far stricter filesize.
Our white-frocked fellow's journey from home to hell and back hardly lasts longer than 15 or 20 minutes. Patience, observing the environment, and learning each inhabitants' patterns makes for an engaging time despite its simplicity. An itinerant laborer smokes the herb before throwing away the pipe-key needed to activate a ski lift. The fisherman tosses out a skeleton which the hawk snatches, proudly exhibiting it long enough for us to climb aboard and reach the badlands. What few scenarios Samorost offers feel like forgotten or mangled tall tales, making it fun to solve each puzzle in hopes of something cool. I'll admit that the last couple of screens are less interesting, though. Dvorsky and co-creator Tomas Dvorak wring most of the potential possible from this simple click-action paradigm a bit before the game ends. I hope the sequels introduce just enough verbs and structural changes to freshen things up. Still, this remains as elegant and intuitive as it must have been back in the early-2000s, a pared-down gallery installation in LucasArts form. (Compared to The Neverhood's often overdone riddles and backtracking, something this linear isn't too unwelcome.)
Later stories by the Amanita team(s) would delve into less enigmatic, more overt themes and messaging. Here, the focus is squarely on how one can both explore and interact with alien environments without corrupting or exploiting them in the process. This little world has no prince, yet bears the burden of its own ecosystem and hierarchies which we must acknowledge and work around to save our own land. Yes, one could say it's just a whimsical avoid-the-collision plot with lots of oddities and sight gags, but there's an optimism hiding in plain sight too. Accidents will happen, but a courageous and respectful response to natural disasters like this can work out in the end. As an invisible hand of fate guiding the gnome, we play the most important part in continuing the circle of life, perpetuating predation, survival, and creation in turn.
That's a lot of words to say that I had a good laugh watching the disgruntled man-squirrel finally getting peace of mind after the worms burrowing around him fall prey to a blobby bird. Or how about spooking the goats into the chasm, over and over again, waiting for the angler and some lizards to finish their meal? Samorost indulges maybe a bit too much in these clickpoints at the expense of a meatier adventure, but the commitment to displaying this world's arch antics and irreverence is very endearing. Coupled with unsettling yet comforting library music, the lounge jazz you'd hope to hear in any Eastern European animated film, this clash of styles makes the experience unforgettable. I was sad to leave the suddenly eventful lives of this lil' fella, and everything and everything they chanced upon, but this was one surreal trip I'll think back on fondly.
Seeing as this was one of his college projects, Dvorsky likely had no reason to expect Samorost would win a Webby Award. This led to Internet advertising work, the start of a career making similarly weird but wholly considered interactive media. Amanita Design would eventually ride the wave of indie games popularity via storefronts like Steam and the Wii Shop, plus enthusiastic press coverage, driving this kind of entertainment onto peoples' screens. Machinarium and later point-and-click odysseys shared the limelight with oh so many other author-driven darlings up through the turn of the 2010s, and the rest is history. It's fun to revisit the origins of these big cultural movements, back when games like this, Seiklus, and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space were innovators and standouts in an age of crowded big-box gaming. The era of bedroom coders never truly died, transitioning into browser games and then the digital distribution market we know today. Whether we call it "homebrew", "indie", "doujin", or whatever makes more sense in context, that ineffable David vs. Goliath effort of making one's own interactive art shines through in Samorost. Labor of love indeed.
Actually playing the original 2003 game is a bit of a task. Internet Archive's in-browser version breaks after the intro, meaning I had to run the game in Ruffle offline via command line! Otherwise it's as simple as clicking around the screen, presented first to players as a beguiling, fantastic planetoid defying physics and graphical consistency. As I watched our protagonist scope around the void before panicking at the sight of an oncoming world just like theirs, I couldn't help but notice the odd juxtaposition of, well, everything here. Low-res nature photos blown up into scenery; flat-colored munchkins living in and out of more shaded structures; very short music loops, seemingly pulled from anonymous sources and libraries like junk in orbit! Many multimedia CD-based adventures from years before this used far more space to achieve this kind of uncanny valley, yet Dvorsky triumphs in a far stricter filesize.
Our white-frocked fellow's journey from home to hell and back hardly lasts longer than 15 or 20 minutes. Patience, observing the environment, and learning each inhabitants' patterns makes for an engaging time despite its simplicity. An itinerant laborer smokes the herb before throwing away the pipe-key needed to activate a ski lift. The fisherman tosses out a skeleton which the hawk snatches, proudly exhibiting it long enough for us to climb aboard and reach the badlands. What few scenarios Samorost offers feel like forgotten or mangled tall tales, making it fun to solve each puzzle in hopes of something cool. I'll admit that the last couple of screens are less interesting, though. Dvorsky and co-creator Tomas Dvorak wring most of the potential possible from this simple click-action paradigm a bit before the game ends. I hope the sequels introduce just enough verbs and structural changes to freshen things up. Still, this remains as elegant and intuitive as it must have been back in the early-2000s, a pared-down gallery installation in LucasArts form. (Compared to The Neverhood's often overdone riddles and backtracking, something this linear isn't too unwelcome.)
Later stories by the Amanita team(s) would delve into less enigmatic, more overt themes and messaging. Here, the focus is squarely on how one can both explore and interact with alien environments without corrupting or exploiting them in the process. This little world has no prince, yet bears the burden of its own ecosystem and hierarchies which we must acknowledge and work around to save our own land. Yes, one could say it's just a whimsical avoid-the-collision plot with lots of oddities and sight gags, but there's an optimism hiding in plain sight too. Accidents will happen, but a courageous and respectful response to natural disasters like this can work out in the end. As an invisible hand of fate guiding the gnome, we play the most important part in continuing the circle of life, perpetuating predation, survival, and creation in turn.
That's a lot of words to say that I had a good laugh watching the disgruntled man-squirrel finally getting peace of mind after the worms burrowing around him fall prey to a blobby bird. Or how about spooking the goats into the chasm, over and over again, waiting for the angler and some lizards to finish their meal? Samorost indulges maybe a bit too much in these clickpoints at the expense of a meatier adventure, but the commitment to displaying this world's arch antics and irreverence is very endearing. Coupled with unsettling yet comforting library music, the lounge jazz you'd hope to hear in any Eastern European animated film, this clash of styles makes the experience unforgettable. I was sad to leave the suddenly eventful lives of this lil' fella, and everything and everything they chanced upon, but this was one surreal trip I'll think back on fondly.
Seeing as this was one of his college projects, Dvorsky likely had no reason to expect Samorost would win a Webby Award. This led to Internet advertising work, the start of a career making similarly weird but wholly considered interactive media. Amanita Design would eventually ride the wave of indie games popularity via storefronts like Steam and the Wii Shop, plus enthusiastic press coverage, driving this kind of entertainment onto peoples' screens. Machinarium and later point-and-click odysseys shared the limelight with oh so many other author-driven darlings up through the turn of the 2010s, and the rest is history. It's fun to revisit the origins of these big cultural movements, back when games like this, Seiklus, and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space were innovators and standouts in an age of crowded big-box gaming. The era of bedroom coders never truly died, transitioning into browser games and then the digital distribution market we know today. Whether we call it "homebrew", "indie", "doujin", or whatever makes more sense in context, that ineffable David vs. Goliath effort of making one's own interactive art shines through in Samorost. Labor of love indeed.
1999
ngl tho, the Puyo Puyo/Madou Monogatari cast have the drip, like they actually resemble their personalities. Of course Arle wears baggy pants, Schezo is the maracas himbo, Satan's our fishnet sexyman, and Rulue hangs out at Hot Topic. I'm sure someone at Compile just got hammered one night and asked "why don't we just dress the gang in American urban wear and have them dance like PaRappa?" That's one big problem with bosses taking you out to drink: you never know what random thing you'll say that later becomes a 1999 PaRappa the Rapper-like.
| The rise and fall of Puyo, Madou, Compile, and more |
There's both little to say and so much to cover with Puyo Puyo DA!, one of Compile's final releases. It's a hastily made, simplistic rhythm title bandwagoning on the hip-hop dog's success. There's a scant eight songs for eight minimally different characters, with only the most basic single-player and multi-player modes. And the actual rhythm game part of this package isn't much to speak for, either. I can sense that the devs generally matched distinct notes, rhythms, and other musical bits to the button charts they designed, but the laggy input processing means you're always tapping a bit behind the beat. Must I explain why that's frustrating and should have gotten at least a week to test-fix? Neither are the charts and songs varied enough to compete with its direct inspiration, let alone so many BEMANI series which trounced it in content and playability. The crust is real, folks—presentation and a great soundtrack save this from the trashcan, but how'd Compile go from one of Japan's most consistent self-publishers to…whatever greenlit this?
Prior to folding and its IPs scattering to the winds, the company had dug itself into a corner in every way. Masamitsu "Moo" Niitani and other leaders had drastically shifted Compile's direction away from their varied arcade-y shooters, puzzlers, xRPGs, etc. which brought them critical and commercial success. These still existed and even thrived on Disc Station subscription disks/CDs for various PCs, but on consoles and in arcades, Puyo Puyo and its parent series Madou Monogatari were the cash crops de jour. [1] Puyo Puyo did so damn well in game centers, rivaling many popular versus fighters in popularity, that Niitani centered most of the studio's resources around sequels and spinoffs. And all those largely similar Madou remakes for different machines proved fruitful, for a time. I mean, sure, they've effectively spurned their STG developers away by throwing all their resources at excuses to spread le smug Carbuncle face everywhere, which is why talent like Yuichi Toyama left sometime in 1992 to form Raizing (8ing). That's not a bad sign, right?
You bet it was. Things went far worse in other market sectors that Compile soon targeted. Though various Puyo-Madou merch sold well during the series' heyday, like the Puyoman manju candies, the cooling (though not dead) interest in these combat puzzlers left the corporation and its partners saddled with inventory and frustrated distributors. [2] Both an ill-advised new office in Fukuoka and a dead-on-arrival business software suite called Power Acty tightened their slim wallets even further. Worst of all, though, Compile just didn't have the mainstream console and PC presence they used to. Cash-cropping Puyo-Madou to such degrees hurt not only their blockbuster action games, but even the smaller faire reserved for Disc Station and handhelds. Difficulty courting new talent, insubstantial series entries sent to die on nearly dead consoles (all those late-stage Mega Drive carts!), an unwillingness to experiment with MMOs or get more involved with their surprising Disc Station hype in South Korea…I could go on. Compile found Incredible New Ways to Bleed Money seemingly every quarter from around 1996 to 1998, which eventually had them filing for bankruptcy and promising Puyo-Madou's rights to SEGA if unable to pay them back by 2002.
With some fresh cash from restructuring, Compile had precious few years left to use the Puyo-Madou IP intact before ceding them to the new owners. So, not learning any lessons from this outcome, they doubled down on the franchise even harder. Their lack of confidence in starting new big properties, let alone bringing any non-Puyo games to the PS1 while it was hot, led to quick, often copycat products on the SEGA systems they were overly familiar with. Wait, that's a great idea: have our Puyo-Madou guys make us some hit DC software! I'll admit that a Puyo spinoff's still got more immediate appeal to our Western eyes than something wholly new or remade from the Disc Station catalog. Except the latter's what happened anyway. Puyo Puyo DA! exists partly thanks to an earlier PC-98 minigame called Broadway Legend Elena. Now both games can be done dirty for the good of getting Compile off its bruised back! And I'd even be fine with that if this GD-ROM had sold well enough to save at least the development studio. No dice. Our beleaguered company limped along until 2003, with very few games releasing that late except on PC and handhelds. Zanac X Zanac and Guru Logic Champ deserved better than this, as did Wander Wonder, After Devil Force, Geo Conflict…argh. IGDB doesn't even many of these games listed yet, a telling sign of the studio's late-stage irrelevance.
We live in one of the timelines ever, and this one sadly saddles us with Compile Heart, SEGA arguably mishandling the Puyo-Madou war chest over time, and most other IPs receiving basic re-releases by the Project EGG people. Quite the downfall from the company's mid-'90s apex, back when you could find ads and broadcasts showcasing their swag and software on major networks. [3] You'd think that a Compile flush with cash would have tried bringing way more of their products out West during this time, a wise investment that would have made banks and investors plenty happy. Of course, why take that risk when you could just hire the army of staff needed to draft up a Puyo-Madou theme park, buy the land, and start construction? [4] Genius planning there, guys. It's almost like chasing trends which were clearly fads ended up kneecapping this corp in no time flat, a pattern as old as the consumer electronics industries in Japan, the U.S., etc. going back to the '60s. Localization efforts to broaden their market beyond this domestic audience wouldn't have seemed as glamorous, sure, yet they could have kept Compile going on its own terms for a long time.
| Grooving out like there's no tomorrow |
Oh, right, where does Puyo Puyo DA! factor into all of this? I doubt this game exists in place of some unknown better project (though I won't rule it out), yet it's still bittersweet to try out today. One could get quite a bit of fun from this if they're a fan of the genre, and/or love to watch these Puyo masters dabbing on each other for an hour. There's also Elena (or Ellena, IDK), no longer having a funny story mode like in her original game. She's not even one of the easy characters to play as, getting harder charts than Arle or Suke-T despite having subtitle spotlight on the game's cover. As I booted in, skipped the minimal options menu, and started a regular game using Ellena, this was beginning to look dicey. At least the window dressing's cute; chunky lower-poly modeling on this platform almost always looks nicer than it should. Each level is colorful, readable, and thematically appropriate. Everyone on stage has a hypnotic cadence, and
I keep bringing up Ellena's game because it did, in fact, predate PaRappa and other Simon Says-style rhythm classics from that hardware cycle, a legacy which the game loop in Puyo Puyo DA! neither advances nor matches in quality. Broadway Legend Ellena didn't have the combo chaining mechanic you can mildly synergize with here, yet that still felt like a dream compared to this. Set aside the aforementioned lack of music-input sync and we're stuck with a very limited set of commands to dance with. Face buttons and that blistering DC d-pad let you tap all four colors of Puyo while shoulder buttons handle the sun Puyo—where the fuck's the analog stick?! Every instance of tapping three or more 16th-note Puyos, wondering if input lag or my fingers would mess up first, has me wishing I could instead twist quarter-circles to accomplish the same. Better yet, having to use both Puyos and analog-based dancing motions would have added something meaningful to the pace and diversity of charts. All the characters feel too same-y without that extra layer, and the most engagement I found here came from executing some downright evil split-second segments.
Puyo combos are a minor mix-up to the formula, too, which I noticed mainly when the tide of duels went against me. Like in a classic Puyo match, nailing all your inputs in a row showers the opponent's "junk" bar with evil blobs. However, this presents a false sense of strategy; either player, real or AI, will lose the match if even one junk Puyo remains on their side. Compile could have added scaling thresholds of how much trash you can take on before toggling that lose state, but no, it's truly all or nothing, and the final rounds against Satan and Rulue on Hard become needlessly evil. Hell, the main series' concept of a filling, claustrophobic playfield is absent here, which makes death-by-grey-goo feel even weirder. It really grinds my gears to witness this much potential being squandered for reasons I have no way to verify. Did the team run out of time or money later in development? Was this always a cheapie, recycling nearly its whole soundtrack from Compile's own albums while tasking their few 3D modelers to do the real work? One day we'll uncover the truth; I've known the Puyo Puyo fandom long enough to vouch for their dedication and persistence.
| When all's lost, shout from your soul! |
All these grievances haven't overshadowed the main reason I can still play this, thankfully, which is that perverse delight of watching Compile's mascots gyrating to, as the kids call them these days, Absolute Bangers. The studio's sound team, like so many from Japanese developers in this period, had their own in-house vocalists and live band, performing and recording many catchy tunes throughout the '90s. Taken this way, Puyo Puyo DA! unironically succeeds as a sampler disc and playable jukebox in one, entertaining less for how it plays and more through its curated set of discotheque-grade jams. I bring up disco because, relative to the aggressive IDM booming around Y2K, what's offered here might seem tame, cheesy, or downright laughable at times. Maybe I'm a sucker for MIDI synth-brass, karaoke bravado, and canned drum loops, though. Pair this camp soundscape with suitably stiff but charming animation and we've got a winner! Even good 'ol Niitani sings on some of the tracks—good for him.
For all its shortcomings, plus misreading a market moving on to Dance Dance Revolution and other rhythm innovators, I kind of love Puyo Puyo DA! the way only a video game historian can. This absolutely was not the kind of game that could save Compile, and I wonder if it managed to break even considering the Dreamcast's abysmal performance in Japan. Still, it's a hoot for any self-styled Puyo-Madou heads, which I am one of. From those awkwardly easy opening moments to the trial-and-error irritations later on, I still bopped along to Katsumi Tanaka's cheery vocals, no less powerful than Takenobu Mitsuyoshi when you need him. And glancing at my avatar's comical reaction to missing a chain, or the very same from an opponent, kept me going well past the point of dropping this in disgust. Little details here and there tell me that someone at Compile had fun and passion while developing this, even if it started life as yet another hail-Mary from a dying soft house trying to avert disaster. At the very least, we'll have learned more from this event than Moo Niitani ever did—seriously, does he think he can capture lightning in a bottle twice, or are Puyo-style puzzlers the only thing he has left to pitch when starting a new doomed company? What a cursed franchise. Pardon me, it's closing time and I gotta pour one out for Kazunari Yonemitsu and the gang (don't worry, he and the rest at Sting are doing alright).
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Apr. 4 - 10, 2023
| Bibliography |
[1] discstation. “コンパイル@DiscStation Wiki.” コンパイル@discstation wiki. アットウィキ, November 19, 2022. https://w.atwiki.jp/discstation/.
[2] compile.co.jp, webmaster @, ed. “Puyoman Products -FOODS-.” Compile. Compile Corporation, November 1, 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/19961101080505/http://www.compile.co.jp/puyoman/goods/foods/index2.html.
[3] Iwaki, Toshiaki, and Yoshito Onishi. “Tokyo Game Show: Puyo Puyo.” Broadcast. Tonight 2 1996, no. August 28. Tokyo, Kanto: TV Asahi, August 28, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtZB1QNdsi0&t=879s.
[4] さん blitz753challenge, ed. “貴重 ゲーム ぷよぷよ 魔導ランド 直筆絵画 コン...” ヤフオク! Yahoo! Japan, August 17, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818105430/https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d1060882018.
| The rise and fall of Puyo, Madou, Compile, and more |
There's both little to say and so much to cover with Puyo Puyo DA!, one of Compile's final releases. It's a hastily made, simplistic rhythm title bandwagoning on the hip-hop dog's success. There's a scant eight songs for eight minimally different characters, with only the most basic single-player and multi-player modes. And the actual rhythm game part of this package isn't much to speak for, either. I can sense that the devs generally matched distinct notes, rhythms, and other musical bits to the button charts they designed, but the laggy input processing means you're always tapping a bit behind the beat. Must I explain why that's frustrating and should have gotten at least a week to test-fix? Neither are the charts and songs varied enough to compete with its direct inspiration, let alone so many BEMANI series which trounced it in content and playability. The crust is real, folks—presentation and a great soundtrack save this from the trashcan, but how'd Compile go from one of Japan's most consistent self-publishers to…whatever greenlit this?
Prior to folding and its IPs scattering to the winds, the company had dug itself into a corner in every way. Masamitsu "Moo" Niitani and other leaders had drastically shifted Compile's direction away from their varied arcade-y shooters, puzzlers, xRPGs, etc. which brought them critical and commercial success. These still existed and even thrived on Disc Station subscription disks/CDs for various PCs, but on consoles and in arcades, Puyo Puyo and its parent series Madou Monogatari were the cash crops de jour. [1] Puyo Puyo did so damn well in game centers, rivaling many popular versus fighters in popularity, that Niitani centered most of the studio's resources around sequels and spinoffs. And all those largely similar Madou remakes for different machines proved fruitful, for a time. I mean, sure, they've effectively spurned their STG developers away by throwing all their resources at excuses to spread le smug Carbuncle face everywhere, which is why talent like Yuichi Toyama left sometime in 1992 to form Raizing (8ing). That's not a bad sign, right?
You bet it was. Things went far worse in other market sectors that Compile soon targeted. Though various Puyo-Madou merch sold well during the series' heyday, like the Puyoman manju candies, the cooling (though not dead) interest in these combat puzzlers left the corporation and its partners saddled with inventory and frustrated distributors. [2] Both an ill-advised new office in Fukuoka and a dead-on-arrival business software suite called Power Acty tightened their slim wallets even further. Worst of all, though, Compile just didn't have the mainstream console and PC presence they used to. Cash-cropping Puyo-Madou to such degrees hurt not only their blockbuster action games, but even the smaller faire reserved for Disc Station and handhelds. Difficulty courting new talent, insubstantial series entries sent to die on nearly dead consoles (all those late-stage Mega Drive carts!), an unwillingness to experiment with MMOs or get more involved with their surprising Disc Station hype in South Korea…I could go on. Compile found Incredible New Ways to Bleed Money seemingly every quarter from around 1996 to 1998, which eventually had them filing for bankruptcy and promising Puyo-Madou's rights to SEGA if unable to pay them back by 2002.
With some fresh cash from restructuring, Compile had precious few years left to use the Puyo-Madou IP intact before ceding them to the new owners. So, not learning any lessons from this outcome, they doubled down on the franchise even harder. Their lack of confidence in starting new big properties, let alone bringing any non-Puyo games to the PS1 while it was hot, led to quick, often copycat products on the SEGA systems they were overly familiar with. Wait, that's a great idea: have our Puyo-Madou guys make us some hit DC software! I'll admit that a Puyo spinoff's still got more immediate appeal to our Western eyes than something wholly new or remade from the Disc Station catalog. Except the latter's what happened anyway. Puyo Puyo DA! exists partly thanks to an earlier PC-98 minigame called Broadway Legend Elena. Now both games can be done dirty for the good of getting Compile off its bruised back! And I'd even be fine with that if this GD-ROM had sold well enough to save at least the development studio. No dice. Our beleaguered company limped along until 2003, with very few games releasing that late except on PC and handhelds. Zanac X Zanac and Guru Logic Champ deserved better than this, as did Wander Wonder, After Devil Force, Geo Conflict…argh. IGDB doesn't even many of these games listed yet, a telling sign of the studio's late-stage irrelevance.
We live in one of the timelines ever, and this one sadly saddles us with Compile Heart, SEGA arguably mishandling the Puyo-Madou war chest over time, and most other IPs receiving basic re-releases by the Project EGG people. Quite the downfall from the company's mid-'90s apex, back when you could find ads and broadcasts showcasing their swag and software on major networks. [3] You'd think that a Compile flush with cash would have tried bringing way more of their products out West during this time, a wise investment that would have made banks and investors plenty happy. Of course, why take that risk when you could just hire the army of staff needed to draft up a Puyo-Madou theme park, buy the land, and start construction? [4] Genius planning there, guys. It's almost like chasing trends which were clearly fads ended up kneecapping this corp in no time flat, a pattern as old as the consumer electronics industries in Japan, the U.S., etc. going back to the '60s. Localization efforts to broaden their market beyond this domestic audience wouldn't have seemed as glamorous, sure, yet they could have kept Compile going on its own terms for a long time.
| Grooving out like there's no tomorrow |
Oh, right, where does Puyo Puyo DA! factor into all of this? I doubt this game exists in place of some unknown better project (though I won't rule it out), yet it's still bittersweet to try out today. One could get quite a bit of fun from this if they're a fan of the genre, and/or love to watch these Puyo masters dabbing on each other for an hour. There's also Elena (or Ellena, IDK), no longer having a funny story mode like in her original game. She's not even one of the easy characters to play as, getting harder charts than Arle or Suke-T despite having subtitle spotlight on the game's cover. As I booted in, skipped the minimal options menu, and started a regular game using Ellena, this was beginning to look dicey. At least the window dressing's cute; chunky lower-poly modeling on this platform almost always looks nicer than it should. Each level is colorful, readable, and thematically appropriate. Everyone on stage has a hypnotic cadence, and
I keep bringing up Ellena's game because it did, in fact, predate PaRappa and other Simon Says-style rhythm classics from that hardware cycle, a legacy which the game loop in Puyo Puyo DA! neither advances nor matches in quality. Broadway Legend Ellena didn't have the combo chaining mechanic you can mildly synergize with here, yet that still felt like a dream compared to this. Set aside the aforementioned lack of music-input sync and we're stuck with a very limited set of commands to dance with. Face buttons and that blistering DC d-pad let you tap all four colors of Puyo while shoulder buttons handle the sun Puyo—where the fuck's the analog stick?! Every instance of tapping three or more 16th-note Puyos, wondering if input lag or my fingers would mess up first, has me wishing I could instead twist quarter-circles to accomplish the same. Better yet, having to use both Puyos and analog-based dancing motions would have added something meaningful to the pace and diversity of charts. All the characters feel too same-y without that extra layer, and the most engagement I found here came from executing some downright evil split-second segments.
Puyo combos are a minor mix-up to the formula, too, which I noticed mainly when the tide of duels went against me. Like in a classic Puyo match, nailing all your inputs in a row showers the opponent's "junk" bar with evil blobs. However, this presents a false sense of strategy; either player, real or AI, will lose the match if even one junk Puyo remains on their side. Compile could have added scaling thresholds of how much trash you can take on before toggling that lose state, but no, it's truly all or nothing, and the final rounds against Satan and Rulue on Hard become needlessly evil. Hell, the main series' concept of a filling, claustrophobic playfield is absent here, which makes death-by-grey-goo feel even weirder. It really grinds my gears to witness this much potential being squandered for reasons I have no way to verify. Did the team run out of time or money later in development? Was this always a cheapie, recycling nearly its whole soundtrack from Compile's own albums while tasking their few 3D modelers to do the real work? One day we'll uncover the truth; I've known the Puyo Puyo fandom long enough to vouch for their dedication and persistence.
| When all's lost, shout from your soul! |
All these grievances haven't overshadowed the main reason I can still play this, thankfully, which is that perverse delight of watching Compile's mascots gyrating to, as the kids call them these days, Absolute Bangers. The studio's sound team, like so many from Japanese developers in this period, had their own in-house vocalists and live band, performing and recording many catchy tunes throughout the '90s. Taken this way, Puyo Puyo DA! unironically succeeds as a sampler disc and playable jukebox in one, entertaining less for how it plays and more through its curated set of discotheque-grade jams. I bring up disco because, relative to the aggressive IDM booming around Y2K, what's offered here might seem tame, cheesy, or downright laughable at times. Maybe I'm a sucker for MIDI synth-brass, karaoke bravado, and canned drum loops, though. Pair this camp soundscape with suitably stiff but charming animation and we've got a winner! Even good 'ol Niitani sings on some of the tracks—good for him.
For all its shortcomings, plus misreading a market moving on to Dance Dance Revolution and other rhythm innovators, I kind of love Puyo Puyo DA! the way only a video game historian can. This absolutely was not the kind of game that could save Compile, and I wonder if it managed to break even considering the Dreamcast's abysmal performance in Japan. Still, it's a hoot for any self-styled Puyo-Madou heads, which I am one of. From those awkwardly easy opening moments to the trial-and-error irritations later on, I still bopped along to Katsumi Tanaka's cheery vocals, no less powerful than Takenobu Mitsuyoshi when you need him. And glancing at my avatar's comical reaction to missing a chain, or the very same from an opponent, kept me going well past the point of dropping this in disgust. Little details here and there tell me that someone at Compile had fun and passion while developing this, even if it started life as yet another hail-Mary from a dying soft house trying to avert disaster. At the very least, we'll have learned more from this event than Moo Niitani ever did—seriously, does he think he can capture lightning in a bottle twice, or are Puyo-style puzzlers the only thing he has left to pitch when starting a new doomed company? What a cursed franchise. Pardon me, it's closing time and I gotta pour one out for Kazunari Yonemitsu and the gang (don't worry, he and the rest at Sting are doing alright).
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Apr. 4 - 10, 2023
| Bibliography |
[1] discstation. “コンパイル@DiscStation Wiki.” コンパイル@discstation wiki. アットウィキ, November 19, 2022. https://w.atwiki.jp/discstation/.
[2] compile.co.jp, webmaster @, ed. “Puyoman Products -FOODS-.” Compile. Compile Corporation, November 1, 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/19961101080505/http://www.compile.co.jp/puyoman/goods/foods/index2.html.
[3] Iwaki, Toshiaki, and Yoshito Onishi. “Tokyo Game Show: Puyo Puyo.” Broadcast. Tonight 2 1996, no. August 28. Tokyo, Kanto: TV Asahi, August 28, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtZB1QNdsi0&t=879s.
[4] さん blitz753challenge, ed. “貴重 ゲーム ぷよぷよ 魔導ランド 直筆絵画 コン...” ヤフオク! Yahoo! Japan, August 17, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818105430/https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d1060882018.