Meikyuu Jiin Dababa (Famicom Disk System)

 I feel like whenever I look into the library of the Famicom Disk System, I find a lot of games that are kind of interesting as curiosities, as well as the seedy underbelly of the 1980s Famicom boom. But in Meikyuu Jiin Dababa, I've managed to find an FDS game that is actually a lot of fun to play! It being one of those rare games to be set in mythic India is a nice little bonus, too.

 

You play as a guy, in this case a monk, and like so many eighties videogame guys, you're out to rescue a girl from a demon. As generic as this premise is, it's not just the Indian flavour that gives this game life, as it plays like a kind of combination of Frogger and The Tower of Druaga. The world is made up of grids, upon which, you can only move from square to square (as well as being able to jump a distance of one square). In this world, you shoot monsters and evil wizards, and try to find power ups and the exits to the next stage.

 

That's where the Druaga stuff comes in! Power-ups will only appear when you do very specific things: shoot a certain statue eight times, jump on a specific tile three times, and so on. While the tiles will visibly crack after being jumped upon, special statues give no indication at all that they're hiding anything until it's revealed. It's not far into the game where finding secrets like these is also the only way to proceed. Each set of stages starts with an outside stage, then several stages inside a temple. To progress through the temples, you've got to find hidden mandalas under floor tiles, which will then reveal a special tablet (or maybe it's a book?), that will open the exit upon collection. 

 

Mostly, though I've compared this mechanic to the infamously obtuse Druaga, it's not too difficult to find your way through. Up to a point, though. Frustratingly, I've been unable to get past the fourth stage in the third set of stages. I can make the exist appear, I figured out that two of the exits are fake, but for some reason I can't detemine, going into the real exit just transports me back several stages. There's a longplay on Youtube, and following that exactly doesn't seem to help! To make things more frustrating, there's only four sets of stages, so I've managed to get three quarters of the way through the game before getting stuck. Tragic!

 

I should also make mention of the boss fights. Though the rest of the game is top-down, the boss fights take place in a side-on view, though you can still only move by jumping space-by-space. The fights themselves are pretty easy, though, and I don't think I ever lost a single life to either of the ones I fought. Overall, even with the mishap I suffered above, this might be the best Famicom Disk System-original game I've played so far, so obviously, I definitely recommend that you give it a try, too. And if anyone does give it a try and figures out what I'm doing wrong on stage 3-4, please let me know.

Pipe Mania (DS)

 1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, but this one (which does seem to be official) is the only one I've played. It's something of a mixed bag, being a true sequel in the sense that it builds upon the game's concept with a lot of new ideas that really add to the formula, but it also implements some more modern structural ideas of which I'm less fond. And somewhere in the middle is an idea that makes the game worse (though it's mostly optional). In case you're not familiar with the concept, you have to lay down pieces of pipe in different shapes (randomly given to you like the pieces in Tetris), to direct the flow of a liquid from one place to another, usually with a quota of spaces it has to pass through first.

 

To get the good stuff out of the way first, there's generous helpings of it. In the game's main mode, the stages are split into different areas, each with its own aesthetic and its own substance whose flow you have to direct: whether it's chemicals through pipes, trains on tracks, electricity through coils, toys on factory conveyor belts, or data through cables, they all look great, each having their own unique and appeallingly-drawn pixel art tilesets. Each area has their own set of mechanical gimmicks, too: teleporters, switches to redirect the flow, gates to split or re-combine the flow, and so on, and they all work to add variety and legitimate challenge to the stages. There were definitely a few points where I got a little frustrated, but I never felt like the game was unfairly designed, just that I was failing to solve the puzzles, and as a result: when I did get through those moments, it was as satisfying as it should be. I can't really fault this aspect of the game. Except, there's a boss fight for each area, where as well as the regular puzzle, you have a character sending various attacks to destroy or change the pipes you've laid. These parts are no fun, but luckily, you can progress through the game without bothering with them.

 

There's a couple of other modes to play, too. Arcade is one that plays with the format a little. Instead of static single-screen stages, this mode has autoscrolling stages, in which you have to keep the flow onscreen as well as in the pipes. It's an interesting idea, but I found it too stressful to really enjoy. There's also the slightly misnamed classic mode, which just has a whole bunch of traditional single screen A-to-B stages without the heavy gimmickry of the main mode. This is a perfectly decent mode to play, though it takes a more modern structure where each stage is played in isolation and also scored as such. It might sound like nitpicking to some, but the name "classic" had me hoping for a mode similar to the original game, where you play stage-to-stage until you get a game over or reach the ending, building up a singular score as you go.

 

That's a small issue, and the biggest downside of the game are the optional bossfights, but there's one more negative I have to bring up. While the game looks great while you're playing it, with the aforementioned beautiful pixels, all the menus and character designs are a world away from that. They're all this kind of incredibly cheap-looking simple vector art, that I assume were created with easy scalability in mind, since as well as the DS, there are versions of this game on PS2, PC, PSP, and Wii. Despite the few flaws I've pointed out, though, I still really enjoyed pipe Mania. I prefer the structure of the original Pipe Dream, so I'd recommend that one before Pipe Mania, but Pipe Mania is still a great time, and still worth playng.