Wow, it's the twelfth installment of Lunatic Obscurity's least-popular feature, Other Stuff Monthly! So why not talk about the item that inspired it, a 1980s Dragonball tabletop game, which I think is called Goku's West City Uproar? See, I bought this game on a whim after seeing it listed for one solitary Yen on Yahho Auctions Japan, and it being a piece of merch of the world's most popular cartoon that I'd never seen before, thought it mght make an interesting subject to review or at least post about somewhere at some point.
Having not yet had the idea for Other Stuff Monthly, I put it away and forgot about it, until recently! When my landlord found it as he was clearing out the spare room. Now, there's a reason this rare old toy was so cheap, and that's because it is in very poor condition. There's several parts missing, most of which are just cosmetic, but two are very much essential to play: the balls.
If you've ever seen the game that's known in the UK as Screwball Scramble, in which the player races against the clock, using switches to operate various gizmos on a board to get a ball bearing through an assault course as quickly as possible, Goku's West City Uproar is a game like that, except instead of a single player racing against the clock, it's two players racing against each other. I did try to rectify this omission though, by ordering a couple of ball bearings online, but unfortunately, they're just slightly too big to fit through the tunnels on the board, and just slightly too heavy to jump off of the little lifting pokey sticks high enough.
In testing the game with the replacement balls, I also found out another thing wrong with my copy of the game: some of the parts which are supposed to move up and down when a player pushes a lever don't do anything at all. So even if I got some more appropriately-sized orbs, it still wouldn't matter. I've taken some pictures (with the griny PS Vita camera, as always), but that's all I can really say on this post. Please look forward to many more installments of this feature, whether you want them or not!
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