Gaiapolis (NES)

 This is an unlicensed port of the arcade game of the same game. Double unlicensed, even, since they didn't ask Nintendo if they could make a Famicom game, nor did they get permission from Konami to make a port of their arcade game. Still, this is the game to show people when they, in their ignorance, parrot lazy old stereotypes about unlicensed Famicom games being low quality, as when it came out (circa 1994-95, according to people who probably know, like those to maintain the Bootleg Games Wiki), it might well have been the best beat em up on the console.

 

But before I get onto that, I should probably describe the arcade game for those who don't know it, and also address the inevitable differences that are going to happen in porting an arcade game to vastly underpowered hardware. The arcade Gaiapolis is a vertically-scrolling, top-down beat em up with a fantasy theme and even a little bit of RPG nonsense. The RPG stuff comes in the form of not only experience points and level ups, but also in passwords used to carry those over into future games (something Capcom would later also do in their single player-focused fighting game Red Earth/Warzard). You also get little buddies following you round to help fight enemies. A little robot knight or a little armadillo thing, etc.

 

This version is also a top-down vertically scrolling beat em up, and it does a pretty impressive job of replicating the game at this basic level. It includes all three playable characters from the original, has a simultaneous two-player mode and manages to put you up against several enemies at a time, all feats that even some SNES beat em ups famously couldn't manage. The levelling up is also present, though there's no passwords to carry it between games (and since you always fight the same enemies and get the same items, this means you always level up at the exact same rate). The little buddies are also gone, which is understandable, but still a little sad.

 

On its own terms, without compared it to the original, Gaiapolis is a good game. It looks amazing, there are very few Famicom games that can boast of such detailed backgrounds (there's some really impressive animated rivers and stuff that look amazing!), or of throwing around so many big characters around the screen all at once. There's a few points where a discerning eye can see the metaphorical strings (one big example is that your screen-clearing magic attack and the large sprites used for certain bosses are both made of background tiles, so they can only appear on alternating frames), but honestly, that kind of thing only makes it all more charming. And most importantly, it's fun to play, too.

 

Obviously, you can probably play the arcade version in 2026 just as easily as you can this one. Maybe even easier! Which does make this version a little obsolete from a totally objective standpoint, but I think it does still have some value. It's a fun game, even though it's so heavily compromised, truncated, and abridged, and more importantly: it's interesting. It's so far beyond most (maybe all) of the officially released Famicom beat em ups, and it really shows that the people at Sachen really had a handle on how to get the most out of the system, which was a decade old when this game was released. If you are interested in developers drawing miracles from ancient hardware, it's definitely worth your time.

Fighting Road (NES)

 Something that really interests me in regards to game design is iteration and evolution: adding new ideas to existing concepts, as well as early experimental steps towards what would later become popular genres. Fighting Road represents an attempt to add more complicated storytelling to an early Yie Ar Kung Fu-style fighting game. It feels like such an ecolutionary step towards the style for which SNK would later become known that I even went to check that Takashi Nishiyama wasn't involved in its creation (as far as I can tell, he wasn't).

 

The story told in Fighting Road would fit right into a 1970s kung fu movie: the protagonist goes looking for his brother, fighting various other martial artists along the way, as well as learning that his brother has joined an evil gang. It's told via some great-looking cutscenes that make use of blocks of text and still pixel art. Technological limitations do kind of dampen the excitement in that in the first six stages, you fight three different opponents, as well as recoloured versions of those same opponents meant to represent different characters. To be fair, the characters are big and well-animated for a NES game in 1988, so they probably did take up a lot of space on the cartridge, meaning that a completely new opponent for every stage would have been an expensive prospect, and may even have forced compromises in regards to the cutscene art, which seems like it was probably a big selling point for the game.

 

To make matters worse, as well as repeated opponents, each stage consists of two fights against that stage's foe, which a cutscene in the middle. Clearly, a problem with the game was that the designers had a very specific concept for it, and they were desperately trying to juggle their intentions regarding storytelling, keeping the cost of production down, and ensuring that the game wasn't so short and easy that players finishd it the same day they bought it. But thirty-seven years later, shorn of that context, what you've got in Fighting Road is a conceptually interesting game that's turned out to be more than a little bit boring in practice. 

 

Another problem is that it doesn't really feel good to play. I mentioned before that the animation was surprisingly good, but it's unfortunately too good. There's too many frames for every action you might take, meaning that there's a bit too much of a delay between you pressing the button and your character executing the action. You've also got a pretty big repetiore of moves at your disposal, and most of them are easy enough to figure out, but you've got a power meter that theoretically allows you to fire a projectile attack once it starts flashing. However, even after looking up the command for this attack online, I've not been able to successfully pull it off even once.

 

I really wish I liked Fighting Road more than I do. It's an interesting game that's a few years ahead of its time, but unfortunately those few years do make a difference, and the technology and the concepts in game design just weren't there yet to support the kind of game that it wants to be. I'd say it's worth a look out of curiosity, but not really much more than that.

Shadow Brain (NES)

 I think it's a pretty prevalent stereotype of 8-bit console RPGs that they're ugly, difficult, and just generally hostile to the player. It's not a completely unfounded stereotype, and I know there are people reading this who play those games specifically looking for those qualities. I'm not one of those players, but I do occasionally dip my toes into the genre, to seek out diamonds in the rough, and because I think the developers of games like these often came from the world of indie development on microcomputers, and there's a similar kind of creator-led energy to a lot of them to that seen in OAVs of the same era.

 

I found Shadow Brain in one such toe-dipping session, and I instantly took a liking to the way it bucks the trends in the genre at that time, both thematically and mechanically.  Thematically, it immediately stands out: it takes place in some kind of futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. There are only towns, no dungeons, but the streets of the towns are all plagued by roving criminals, rogue cyborgs, and mutated animals. The grimy look of both enemy and NPC characters juxtaposed with the incredibly sterile look of the faux-3D blobber maps really gives off the impression that this is a world that's still being maintained in terms of things being kept working, but also a world in which the actual inhabitants have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The closest thing I encountered to any kind of law enforcement are the gates between towns that require security ID to get through.

 

Mechanically, the first thing that proved promising is that while you're a solo adventurer who never gets any party members, you aren't punished harshly for dying. You're simply whisked away to the nearest ressurectionist, who provides the service you'd expect him to, and takes half of your current money as payment. Other than that, there's a lot of interesting little quirks. In battle, you have three attack options: punch, sword, and gun, and you can equip weapons to all three. There's no reason not to only buy and use the weapon that has the highest attack, but it's still a sign that the devs had a lot of ideas they wanted to include. Front Mission 3 fans might also be interested to learn that Shadow Brain also includes an in-game internet!

 

In the same way that Front Mission 3's internet reflected the real internet of 1999, featuring simple, charmingly gaudy webpages, Shadow Brain's internet reflects how things were in 1991. You can only access it via terminals that are dotted here and there around the towns, and when you do, there's a "live chat", where your character can converse with a few recurring characters, a BBS, where people post questions and information about what's going on, and an online shop where you can buy and sell things. It's very rudimentary, but it's still a fun little addition, and it really adds to the feels that this is a sci-fi game, and not just a fantasy game with a shiny metal skin. 

 

Another thing that you might be surprised to hear about is that you can go to the arcade and play minigames! In a 1991 Famicom game! There's futuristic Pong and futuristic clay pigeon shooting, and you can play them as much as you like to win money, plus there's a couple of points in the plot where you have to play special "if you die in the game, you die for real" versions to advance the plot. 

 

Anyway, though Shadow Brain is a lot more player-friendly than a lot of RPGs from that time, I'd say it's probably still a bit of an acquired taste, and while dying isn't a problem, there are still moments when it's not really clear what you have to do to progress. Still, I enjoyed the few hours I played of it (I got as far as the fourth town). I also really loved the way the game looks: the enemy and NPC sprites all look amazing, the world itself is really atmospheric, and even the UI elements feels as if they've been designed as a part of the game's world. This is a high quality work, and was clearly made with a lot of love. There's an English translation patch out there, and if this review has at all piqued your interest, you should definitely give it a try.

Venus Wars (NES)

 One of the big hits of that early era of anime movies being released in English in the early nineties, Venus Wars is about (like you might expect) various violent conflicts happening on the relatively recently colonised eponymous planet. It's one of those anime that's known more for looking really cool and having a lot of meticulously animated machinery than anything else. The most famous of those machines are the monocycles, motorbike things that only have one massive wheel, so the natural choice of genre for a videogame in 1989 would be a kind of into the screen racing/shooting game, like Mach Rider.

 

And that's half of the approach taken here! What makes it interesting, is the combination of the race-shooting with the other half of the equation: turn-based strategy! I guess it's like an ancient forebear of The Unholy War/Little Witching Mischiefs or Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki, as you move your units around a grid-based map, and when they collide with enemy units, they enter a little psuedo-3D shooting segment! You can control their speed with up and down on the d-pad, while the two face buttons fire your normal infinite shots or your very limited homing missiles, respectively.

 

While all of your units (except the two trailers that refuel all the others) are a ragtag bunch of rebels on monocycles with the same weapons (but different stats), there's a few different kinds of enemies. There's VTOL jets, a few different kinds of tanks, weird little bouncing robots, and so on. Your homing missles are best used against the flying enemies, since to hit them otherwise means shooting while pulling a wheelie (holding down on the d-pad), which is a little awkward, especially when you're also dodging enemy fire.

 

A few stages in, with almost no warning, a new enemy type appears and brings with it a new playstyle! The enemy type is gigantic tanks, and the playstyle is top-down eight-way shooting! The first time this happened, it really took me by surprise, and my poor biker was crushed almost immediately (don't worry, they just go back to the trailer and they're fine again once the next stage starts). Every time after that, though, these giant tanks are a lot easier and quicker to beat than the normal units, and that's even taking into account that they don't have the sixty second time limit that battles against the regualr units have.

 

Venus Wars (which is listed in some places as "The Venus Wars: Back to the City Io") is a pretty fun game! It's a little repetitive, so I don't recommend playing more than one or two stages in a single sitting, but otherwise I've been enjoying regularly going back to it for the past week or so. There's a translation patch for it out there, with which I have been playing, but I think if you happen to find a reasonably-priced cartridge for sale, there's very little text, none of which is essential, so you can probably play this untranslated pretty easily.

Formula 1 Sensation (NES)

 Only a few weeks after Royal Stone really showed off the potential of the Game Gear, I'm writing about another game that makes its aged eight bit host hardware look amazing. Though I was initially turned off by its psuedo-realisms, F-1 Sensation's amazing graphics kept me playing, and I'm glad they did, as it turns out that the game's a lot more fun than my initial reaction made out. I'd go as far as to say that it looks as good as Final Lap Twin on the PC Engine (probably my favourite racing game on that console, and also impressive on its hardware for its speed and use of split screen multiplayer).

 

But yeah, there were a few things that almost turned me away, reminding me of games I've really disliked in the past, like the Mega Drive's Super Monaco GP, for example. There's no option to drive with an automatic transmission, you have to do a qualifying lap before each race to determine your starting position, and you have to keep track of the condition of some of your car's parts (specifically the engine, tire, and wing. Though it seems to mainly be the tires that are the problem), and go into the pits to have them changed when the condition meters get low.

 

However, these things that I'd originally perceived as negatives all turned out to be incredibly minor! THe qualifying laps aren't as boring as I'd expected, and they actually give a nice chance to figure out the hardest corners and easiest straights on the course. The gear shifting, oddly, doesn't really seem to matter at all: you have four gears, though unlike in most games, you can pretty much shift into the third gear straight away and then into fourth a couple of seconds later. The acceleration pentaly for skipping gears is almost non-existent! And finally, entering the pit comes with a cute little animation of your crew changing your car's parts, only takes a few seconds, and oddly, doesn't seem to affect your race position too much, if at all. In fact, there were a couple of times where I entered the pit while in first place, and it seemed like my lead had increased when I left the pit.

 

So it turned out that this is the fast, fun, and simple kind of racing game I like the most, despite its realist trappings. There are some negatives, though! Firstly, while it is an incredible looking game for the NES/Famicom, in terms of moving at high speed and making a decent-looking attempt at a scaling effect, it's also constrained by being a Formula 1 game. That is to say: every track looks almost exactly the same, with only a slightly different colour scheme, and different sponsor names on the buildings in the background to differentiate them. Secondly, I feel like every race being five laps long might be a little too much. It means that they're all at least five minutes long, some going over seven minutes. It's just too long to be driving around such sparsely decorated tracks!

 

Those negatives are both pretty minor, though. This is still an excellent game, and though I've only played a few Famicom racing games, I'm yet to have encountered one that comes close to rivalling F-1 Sensation (though if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, the Famicom's not a system in which I have a lot of expertise). I also want to mention that it's part of a small, exclusive club: Famicom/NES games that got released in Europe, but not North America. It wasn't a super popular system here in its heyday, so it's extra strange that a game would get released for it as late as 1993! I guess they were really hoping the popularity of Formula 1 and the NES' status as a budget console by that time would get it some sales from people who were sports fans more than they were videogame fans? Of course, its high quality, lack of language barrier, and late release make it a very rare and sought after title, and there are copies out there listed for close to an entire thousand pounds! Madness.

Maharaja (NES)

 Pre-1990 RPGs, with a scant few exceptions, are largely considered by modern players to be unfair, hostile, boring, and borderline unplayable. And to be honest: there are a lot of games that fit that bill, plopped out onto the market in the wake of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's massive success, hoping to ride their coattails. But still, in the same way that I occasionlly play a AAA game in the interests of fairness, I do the same with old RPGs. This time, it actually paid off! A bit.

 

The setting was a big draw for me: I really like India-inspired fantasy (I might as well take the opportunity to recommend a novel I recently read in this genre: Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri). Also, once I started playing, I was hooked by the graphics. They're mostly confined to a box that takes up a quarter of the screen, and there's very little actual animation, but there's a lot of detail and charm in them. There's a lot of of points of charm in the game, too. For example, instead of just getting new magic spells automatically as you level up, the spells are called mantras, and you have to get to Shiva's palace so he can teach them to you after you've levelled up. (Luckily, the first mantra you learn lets you teleport to locations you've already been to, so it's not too much of a chore.)

 

How the game plays is a combination of the menu-based adventure games that were so common on Japanese microcomputers in the eighties, with turn-based RPG battles thrown in, too. Though both aspects are somewhat simplified from their pure forms. There's only ever a few exits, one character, and maybe one or two items to interact with in each location, and furthermore, you only ever fight one enemy at a time, and you never recruit any party members. As simplified as the game's two halves are, they both also have a foot each in oldschool eighties obtusity. 

 

The adventure part of the game includes at least one maze of identical patches of jungle, as well as characters who need to be given items to let you pass, with no clues in that direction at all. Furthermore, there's no in-game information on what items do, what stats different pieces of equipment bestow, or what effects mantras do. It's possible all this stuff was listed in the game's manual, in which case, disregard all this as an unfair criticism and blame me for playing a fan-translation via emulation. One thing that can't be so easily excused is the predicable bugbear of grinding. The game's story is actually pretty short, so the runtime is greatly padded by requiring you to grind for levels and money for new equipment to be able to survive the gauntlet of newly powerful enemies.

 

I can't really say that Maharaja is a great game, nor can I say it's a bad one. For its age and in its genre, you could even say it's an unsung classic! But unless you've got the patience for RPGs and adventures of this vintage, there's a good chance you'll hate it. Personally, I enjoyed it, and the simplicity of it all really made the game feel like a digital Fighting Fantasy book. So I guess I do recommend it, with those caveats.

Code Name: Viper (NES)

 I'm not actually sure how obscure this game will be to my North American readers, but it was so unheard of to me that I'd never heard of it before seeing the vaguely unpleasant Japanese title Dead Fox in a list of ROMs, and I had to find out what such a game could be. But the NES/Famicom is still foreign territory to me, so forgive me if this was a widely-loved clasic outside of the UK.

 

What is is, though, is a Rolling Thunder-alike, albeit one with enough of its own ideas (and twists on Rolling Thunder's ideas) to be worthwhile in its own right. You play as some guy named Mr. Smith, sent to South America to destroy the seven hideouts of a drug cartel. For some reason, you aren't sent in with any explosives or demolition equipment, and have to find a guy on-site who'll give this to you. I guess it's more interesting that finding a key to finish each stage?

 

There's lots of revolving doors around the stages, and like in Rolling thunder, some of them contain ammo and weapon upgrades, and all of them can be used as hiding places from enemies. Unlike Rolling Thunder, some of them also contain hostages, little boys and grown women. They make a satisfying BEEP-BOOP noise that kind of sounds like the words "thank you" when you find them, but they don't give you any power ups or points. The game keeps a running total of how many hostages you find as you finish each stage, so I assume it affects the ending in some way?

 

The meat of the game, though, is obviously going about killing lots of guys. I really liked this! The guys are all wearing different coloured outfits, which signify their exact behaviours and abilities. You know I love that kind of clean, pure game design by now, don't you? There's something about shooting them that feels really satisfying, too. I can't explain it, it's like how shooting guys at point blank range in Elevator Action EX on Game Boy Color feels like it's much more violent and gory than it actually is for some reason. The only big flaw relates to the fact that, like Rolling Thunder, you can take a melee attack before dying, while a bullet takes you down instantly. However, while Rolling Thunder has unarmed enemies that stop to punch you whe you let them get up close, the unarmed enemies in Code Name: Viper hurt you by just walking into you. It really is a tiny little nitpick, but in a game with a pseudo-realistic setting like this, it's a little disappointing.

 

So yeah, Code Name: Viper/Dead Fox is a pretty good game. As for how it compares to its inspiration, I'd say that it's a lot better than the NES port of Rolling Thunder, but it falls a long way short of matching up to the arcade original. I definitely recommend it!

Moon Crystal (NES)

 

 Moon Crystal was released in 1992, which is very late in the Famicom's original commercial lifespan, and it definitely benefits from advancements made in that time, both in terms of what could be extracted from the hardware and in terms of game design. It's a platform game with a setting that feels like it could have been taken from a classic kids' adventure anime. Future Boy Conan, Secret of Blue Water, that kind of show. An evil count wants to exploit a magic pendant (the eponymous Moon Crystal) to raise the dead, and to aid in this endeavour, he kidnaps a scientist, Dr. Slater, and kills the scientist's family. Only Dr. Slater's son Ricky escapes, and sets out on a quest to save his dad and the world.

 

Though it doesn't come across to well in still screenshots, this game is very impressive looking, considering the host hardware. It's all in the character animation, which is incredibly smooth, and Ricky especially has a ton of frames for every action he does. The colour palettes are also worthy of note, really giving a sense of atmosphere and the time of day. 

 

The game itself is pretty good too! It's not super-complex or anything: it's basically just platforming and killing enemies with your one melee attack. Though a lot of the time, it's best to just avoid the enemies, with the emphasis being heavily on platforming challenges. This is reflected in the way Ricky controls, with him being able to grab ahold and dangle from the edges of platforms (something I always like in platform games), and in the fact that one of the power ups is a double jump that lasts until the end of your current stage or until you lose a life.

 

With such a heavy emphasis on platforming, it is slightly disappointing that each stage ends in a fairly basic (though usually still difficult) boss fight, rather than something more imaginative and fitting to the way the game's designed, like some kind of special platforming challenge. The game's designers could definitely have managed it, too: the difficulty curve is steep, but fair, and the stages really do ramp up in terms of being platforming challenges themselves, with new gimmicks being brought into every stage to liven things up, too.

 

Moon Crystal is a great game, that I definitely recommend, especially if you're interested in older systems being pushed beyond what most games get out of them. It's also highly rercommended for platform fans that really want themselves to be pushed beyond what most games expect of them in terms of precision jumping and climbing and the like.

Taito Grand Prix (NES)

 This is a racing game that's impressively advanced both graphically and in terms of design. The graphics are the obvious and most immediate thing, and they are pretty impressive for a Famicom game. It's a faux-sprite scaling racer, which is impressive to begin with, but there's little touches like arches and bridges that go by overhead, that'd be impressive in a similar game on some more powerful hardware. Like, if Road Spirits or Final Lap Twin on PC Engine had an effect like that, it'd stil be impressive.

 

More impressive, though, is the game's structure. It's so much more complex than you'd expect from a racing game released in 1987! The game takes place in a region with a bunch of cities that you can travel to as you like. Each city has a parts shop selling different upgrades, and a place to register for races, with every city having its own set of three races available. Participating in races usually costs an entry fee (there is a free race in the first city that you can repeat, so you don't end up in a bankruptcy situation like in Lamborghini American Challenge), and you can win money and points. Points let you rank up, as each race also has a rank, and you can only enter races your own rank or lower.

 

The weird thing is that all the races (at least as far as I've played) aren't actually races where you beat opponents. They're more like miniature Outrun courses, where you just have to get from start to finish before time runs out. I've only been able to play races from the lowest two ranks, though, as the second rank represents a bit of a wall that I just don't have the energy or time to climb. The courses get longer, and the only way you can possibly get to the end of them within the time limit is by upgrading all the parts of your car. However, some of the parts that you need are so expensive that the only way to afford them is to play and re-play the courses you actually can finish over and over. I was enjoying the game up until this point, but I guess it's the kind of padding-out tactic that was common in longform games of the time (as opposed to the different, more subtle boring padding-out tactics that modern longform games ruin themselves with).

 

That being said, though, I know a lot of people have more patience than me for that kind of thing, so they'll probably get a lot further into Taito Grand Prix. I can't say that playing it was a totally negative experience for me, though: until I hit that wall, I actually kind of lost myself in the game for a fair few hours, and before I knew it, it was almost 4AM! So yeah, if you have the patience for it, I think you'll probably get a lot out of this game.

Curiosities #21 - Windows 98 (NES)

 One category of pirate original that always draws attention when screenshots emerge is the "fake operating system" genre. Presumably made for Famiclones that are sold with keyboards as "educational computers" (though I have to emphasise this is just a theory on my part. I have no evidence, but those machines do exist, so it'd make sense). Unfortunately, these things are also pretty elusive. None of the ROMs are in any of the big ROM collections, they're not sold on cartridge on AliExpress or any other easily-usable-in-the-west sites as far as I'm aware.

 

But I managed to track down a copy of this one, and satisfy my curiosiity. There's not really much to do in it, unfortunately. It loads up in a pretty authentic PC-like way, with a fake bios screen and a Windows 98 loading screen, then you're on your desktop. There's a few icons to click and you can also open the start menu. You can open a few folders, which might have files in, you can get a fake command line prompt, and you can open a fake web browser.

 

The only files in the folders that actually do anything are image files, that show you a nice little picture. The web browser can show you a mock up of what was probably the default page on Internet Explorer at the time, a Microsoft page, or a page that is presumably relatd to this ROM's developers. Some of the things you can click open what look like Windows dialogue boxes in Chinese, though none of the buttons in them actually do anything. I was surprised that there doesn't seem to be any actual game in here, like a super-simple Minesweeper-type thing or something. As it is, there's maybe five minutes worth of stuff to look at in the ROM, and no reason to ever go back to it after that.

 

An interesting technical note is that I think every window is a full screen back ground. You can't scroll or move anything in them, and when you open or close a window, it involves the entire screen going black for a split-second. Even just opening the start menu on the desktop does this (and you can't open it when a window is already open, lending a little more credence to my theory).

 

So that's it. my curiosity is satisfied. If I manage to get ahold of any similar ROMs (I know there's a Windows XP one out there somewhere), I might post about those too. But like I said, there's only a few minutes of stuff to do in here at most, and it's not like anything really interesting or cool is being lost by this thing being so rare and elusive.