Curiosities #20 - Wakusei Aton Gaiden (Famicom Disk System)

 The circumstances of this game's creation are somewhat similr to the MSX game The Komainu Quest, which I reviewed back in Small Games Vol. 5, in that it was created by a government agency. This time though, it's the National Tax Agency of Japan, and the aim here isn't promotional, it's educational, aiming to teach Japanese citizens of the 1980s correct tax-paying procedures.

 

It takes the form of a simple vertically-scrolling shooting game with occasional quiz segments. The quiz segments are all in Japanese, and presumably, all the questions are about Japanese tax laws in the 1980s, so I'm going to assume nobody is ever going to bother translating this game, and even if they did, most playrs wouldn't get the answers right without emplying a lot of trial and error anyway. That is, unless a passionate and very competitive high score scene suddenly springs up around the game, since correct answers score points (I managed to get a few through sheer luck).

 

The shooting parts are very simple, you just fly upwards, and every few seconds, a couple of enemies fly down from the top of the screen for you to shoot. Now and then a friendly ship will fly up from the bottom of the screen, and these act like power ups if you touch them, either killing all present enemies, increasing your speed and the power of your guns, or latching onto the front of your ship and acting as a temporary shield. That last one seems the most pointless, thank's to the game's biggest flaw: there's no real lose condition. Getting hit just reduces your speed and firepower, and you can otherwise get hit as much as you like without consequence. 

 

As a result, the only real "game" here is to try and get the highest score before it ends, by shooting every enemy and answering every question correctly. With that in mind, I can't really recommend Wakusei Aton Gaiden to anyone except those curious to see a government-commissioned shooting game about taxes.

Curiosities Vol. 19 - Gambling 2!

 It's mostly illegal in America and Japan, but gambling is a pretty big problem in the UK, with every town harbouring several bookies and seedy "arcades" filled with nothing but fruit machines, latched onto the streets like fattened ticks. So of course, these special "prize" versions of legitimate videogames were also made for the UK market, and they have an aesthetic that shows it: in the fonts and specific shades of colours used in their graphics, there is an indescribable je nais se quois that harkens back to that kind of smoky, smelly pub that dads used to love up to about the mid nineties.

 

The first of the two games I'll be reviewing in this post is also the worst of the two: Prize Space Invaders is, in every way, a completely hateful game without merit. To play costs thirty pence for a "practice" game with no prizes, or fifty pence for a full game, in which it is theoretically possible to win money. How it works is that you play Space Invaders, and you're given a score quota, which adds ten pence to your prize. If you finish the stage, you're asked if you want to cash out and receive your prize or carry on, in hopes of increasing it. You only get one life, and if you die, you lose your prize. 

 

What's really horrible about it, though, is that the UFOs that fly across the top of the screen are now constant, and if you miss one, your score resets to zero. And on top of all that, some invaders will take multiple hits to kill, or might split into multiple invaders when you shoot them, and so on. It's a cynical, horrible game, but I think if you were some kind of Space Invaders savant, you might eventually be able to make a profit off of it. Though you'd need to be lucky too, since the score quota varies from game to game, seemingly at random.

 

Second up is Prize Tetris, apparently also known as Blox and Tetris Payout, and to which I have the opposite reastion to Prize Space Invaders, in a way: though I'm fairly certain it's completely impossible to win money on it, it does at least offer a mildly interesting variation on the traditional Tetris ruleset. Once again, you're supposed to be reaching a score quota to make money, though the lowest prize here is a whole pound, and the game implies it's possible to win up to twenty pounds! It's not, though. You're playing Tetris on a very short time limit, and even if you were to play perfectly, you wouldn't be able to reach the quota. It'd take at least something like seventy lines just to get to the lowest one.

 

What's intersting about Prize Tetris though is how points are scored. Unlike most variants, there's no extra points scored for clearing multiple lines in one go, not even for a full tetris. Instead, you scorer more points for clearing a line the higher up in the well it was. So you might try a strategy of deliberately filling the bottom few rows with junk, to score the extra points available in the upper echelons. You still wouldn't make any money, since the time limit is so short, but you might get a little closer than you otherwise would have done. Finally, just like Prize Space Invaders, the quotas and the amount of points scored per line is different every time you play, and again, it seems to be totally random. Maybe it's based on some algorithm that takes into account the amount of coins in the machine and the relative skill of past players, maybe it's just another way these games are horrible parasitic nonsense, we may never know.

 

If you're curious about either of the games covered in this post, then go emulate them, I guess. You're unlikely to still find working machines anywhere in the wild, and even if you do, I wouldn't recommend feeding them.

Curosities Vol. 18! - Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen (Master System)

Game de Check! Koutsuu Anzen is an educational game that was commisionned by a Japanese insurance company, and was never actually on sale. They made a couple of hundred copies, and would lend the game, along with a Master System, to primary schools that requested it. It's also something that was pretty much completely forgotten and considered lost to the ages until very recently, when the great people at SMS Power got ahold of a copy, and not only dumped the ROM, but also simultaneously released a translation patch so more people could enjoy it! There's lots more information over there regarding the game's origins, so you should definitely go and have a look.

But I'm here to talk about the game itself! It's actually a collection of three games on one cartridge: Driving Sense Test, You're the Best Driver, and Pyonkichi's Adventure. Driving Sense Test is itself a collection of four minigames, designed to test the player's reactions and observational skills. You'll have to identify objects that fly past a window at high speed, catch animals of varying speeds by lowering your net at just the right time, follow a motorbike while weaving through traffic, and finally, walk behind a parrot, who'll warn you when to duck, jump, or speed up, o avoid obstacles. It's ok, I guess. The last of the minigames is the best, and the most videogamey in feel. At the end of all four, you get given scores in the areas each one was meant to be measuring: Driving Eye, Speed Sense, Driving Technique, and Risk Control.

Next up is the most substantial of the three games, You're the Best Driver. In this one, you drive either a car or a motorbike (though I couldn't tell any non-cosmetic difference between the two), and drive around the streets, very carefully obeying the rules of the road. Sticking to the speed limit, stopping at lights, and so on. Though I kept getting minor violations every time I turned a corner, and couldn't figure out why. Does Japan have a seperate speed limit for cornering maybe? You start the game with a hundred points, and lose some for every violation. Speeding loses seven points, hitting another car twenty-nine, and so on. Hitting a pedestrian loses all hundred points in one go! This is a decent enough educational game, I can definitely see a bunch of primary school kids in the eighties all clamouring to be the first to get to play it, like Granny's Garden in the UK during the same era, or the generic maths and French games that were on the computers at my school in the nineties.

Last, and also least, is Pyonkitchi's Adventure. By far the weakest of the three games here, it sees Pyonkitchi the Rabbit off on a walk to visit Pyonko the Rabbit. Along the way, he makes various decisions, like whether or not to look oth ways before crossing, or wait until the man turns green, and so on. Afterward, you decide whether he made the right decision or not, and the game tells you whether you were right or wrong. It's probably more educationally relvant to little kids than the other two games, but it's also by far the most boring. Very little interactivity, and it feels more than a little bit preachy and finger-wagging.

In summary, this is an interesting piece of history that's finally available for all to see, and it's actually not a bad set of games either, considering their origin. I do wonder why the insurance company chose the Master System for its host console rather than the ubiquitous-in-Japan Famicom, though. Maybe they liked the SMS' colour palette? Maybe it was cheaper? Maybe an exec was friends with one of SEGA's execs? We'll probably never know.

Curiosities Vol. 17 - Blaze

So, back in the ancient mists of time, there was a preview in issue #115 (June 1991) of CVG of an Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog that never came into being. The reasons why such a game might have been cancelled are obvious: as soon as it was released in the UK, the first Sonic game, and Sonic in general launched a kind of SEGA-mania that would last for almost half a decade, and the Amiga was, in mid-1991, the only major 16-bit competition to the Mega Drive in the UK that didn't have to be imported. Sonic appearing on the Amiga might have hampered sales of the Mega Drive, which was in the UK, almost monolithic in a way that the NES/Famicom was in the US and Japan in the 1980s.

Some might have said that the Amiga just couldn't do everything that the Mega Drive did, and a substandard port might also damage the brand. Blaze, a fanmade demo for an Amiga Sonic-alike could be used as evidence for and against this theory. On the surface, it does do a lot of the fancy tricks seen in Mega Drive Sonic: high-speed scrolling, loop-the-loops, water-surface reflections, and so on. However, it came out in 1993, not 1991. And, to the best of my knowledge, no commercially released Amiga platformers attempted any of this stuff, despite how poentially lucrative it might have been.

It does as decent a job as you might expect of emulating the feel of a genuine Sonic game, too. Not only does it have loops, but one particular highlight is a massive series of five linked loops in quick succession. There's also robot crabs and hornets, and gems to collect in lieu of rings. Blaze even curls into a ball to attck when he jumps! Interestingly, though, if you press down while running, he doesn't curl into a ball, but goes into a Splatterhouse-esque sliding kick.

The physics do occasionally feel a little off, particularly with regards to running up and jumping off of quarter pipes. This can be forgiven, though, by that fact that this was made in an age before widespread internet access, and long before there was the meticulous observation and analysis of Sonic phyisics that there is today. In fact, it's obviously impossible to be totally one hundred percent certain about this, but I think Blaze might be the first ever Sonic fangame!

So, that's Blaze. An interesting thing in many ways. It's a shame it never got fleshed out into a full game. It would obviously have been too late to have saved the Amiga from its inevitable doom, but it would at least have freed Amiga fans from decades of pretending Zool was as good as any platform game that originated on consoles.

Curiosities Vol. 16 - Zero no Tsukaima Fantasy Force

This post is also about that game's sequel, Zero no Tsukaima Fantasy Force 2nd Impact, since they're both a little off the beaten track, but I didn't think they were interesting enough to warrant a whole post each. The most interesting thing about them really is their method of distribution: they were never actually available to buy, but were extras included with the limited editions of the PS2 visual novels Zero no Tsukaima: Muma ga Tsumugu Yokaze no Nocturne and Zero no Tsukaima: Maigo no Period to Ikusen no Symphony, respectively. Because they were limited edition extras, that means they have their own discs and PS2 game ID numbers, so they can be counted as games in their own right, and not the kind of thing I covered all the way back in Curiosities Vol. 8.

Are they any good, though? Well, they're alright. The first game is a horizontal scroller that's easy enough that I one credit cleared the first loop on my second attempt. It's got some cute little touches, though, like how your charge attack extends a line of text from your character's mouth that damages enemies, in a nice little homage to the Parodius games. The second loop is a lot tougher, too, with a greater number of enemies acting more aggressively and even shooting revenge bullets right from the start. Maybe they should have included the option to start there as a hard mode?

The second game is a vertical scroller, and it takes a big step up in quality. There's two characters to choose from, each with their own sets of weapons, and there's even a two-player co-op option! The RPG-like backdrops and the fact that one of the characters rides a dragon really bring to mind Namco's Dragon Spirit/Saber duology, which is definitely no bad thing. Again, it's a little easy, though I only got as far as what appears to be the final boss this time round. One weird thing they included is a bad powerup that reduces your bomb stock by one. I don't understand that at all.

Both games are pretty fun diversions, but not much more than that, and definitely not worth tracking down what are probably now rare and valuable Japan-only visual novels from over a decade ago. There's no real scoring systems in them, which is fair enough, since they're deliberately evoking an oldschool feel, but I think what really kills them for me is that they don't save high scores, which was an annoyingly common problem with PS2 shooting games, as I remember. In summary, emulate them if you're curious, but otherwise you're not missing out on anything special.

Curiosites Vol. 15 - Ohenro-san (Gamecube)

"Walking Simulator" is a disparaging name often given to non-violent, narrative-driven games, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. Though the term didn't really exist in 2003 when Ohenro-san Hosshin no Dojo was released, it's a mantle that fits the game perfectly. Ohenro-san is literally a game about walking across Japan and visiting temples and that's it. It's meant to come with a special controller with buttons for left and right steps, as well as a pedometer so the walking you do in your day-to-day life can be transferred into the game, but I had neither of those things, so I was just pushing forward on the analogue stick to progress.

Because this was meant as a substitute for a real pilgrimage, aimed at the old and infirm who couldn't make the journey themselves, everything is represented as a slide show of photos of the real locations, rather than being a polygonal rendering for you to walk through and explore in real time. Of course I understand why it was done in this way, but it's not very impressive, and it really doesn't give the impression of walking from place to place: when I say it's a slideshow, that's all it feels like, there's no sensation of movement at all.

Once you're at a temple, you can do various things like light a candle, get a talisman, do some reading, and so on, but really, that's all there is to this. It's not a game, and it's not intended to be played like one, and so it wouldn't be fair to judge it as one, either. I'm just posting about it because it's weird and obscure and there's probably not many people who know about it.

The nature of this thing is that recommending it or not recommending it is kind of meaningless, though I will say this: unless you can read Japanese and you really, really love seeing photos of Japanese temples, I can't imagine how you'd get anything out of this at all.

Curiosities Vol. 14 - SEGA Saturn Sample Program Ver. 1.00

So, this interesting piece of history was recently found and released by someone over at the segaxtreme.net forums. It is as the title suggests: a sample program for the Saturn that shows various different graphical tricks it can do. It starts with a menu featuring items such as "Scroll Sample", "Sprite Sample", and so on, and most of them have several options inside them.

First up is Scroll Sample, which lets you see various kinds of scrolling, obviously. You can have a bunch of random garbage scrolling across the screen, numerous blocks of letters scrolling around in layers, a kind of distorted blob moving over a picture of sonic and tails, and so on. The most interesting part of this menu is the option that has a seemingly infinite field of textured cubes floating in a heavenly white background.

Next there's Sprite Sample, which as a little more interactivity. In here, there are options that let you spin various simple shapes around, you can move an Opa Opa sprite around to see how the Saturn handles shadows, you can distort and warp an enemy sprite from Fantasy Zone, and you can spin and rotate a little polygon gem thing. Oh, and look at some spinning cubes demonstrating different kinds of shading the Saturn can do, too.

Window Sample is probably the least interesting menu, as it just lets you see sprites moving inside transparent windows, so we'll move straight on to Game Sample, which is a simple little 2D shooting game where you avoid bullets and shoot red triangles and sonic sprites for points. Nothing spectacular, obviously, but it is a thing that exists, at least. It's just a sample, showing that the Saturn can indeed keep track of things and allow players to control objects and generally all the bare minimum things expected of a games console.

Finally, there's the enigmatically named 2/14 Demo (which is presumably a demo, made on the fourteenth of February). This shows a cube thing with SEGA-related animated textures on each side, floating above a magic carpet, with mountains in the background. It's all very ~aesthetic~.

Obviously, something like this isn't going to provide more than a few minutes of entertainment for anyone, but of course that was never its purpose. It is interesting to see these kinds of primordial test programs from consoles' development cycles, though. Even though they're only a couple of decades old, there's something about them that feels immeasurably ancient and secret. Sorry if this is a bit of a lacklustre post, but I've been slightly unwell recently and I just didn't want to go too long without posting. I'm mostly better now, though, so there'll be a proper post in a few days.

Curiosities Vol. 13: CD Battle - Hikari no Yuushitachi (PC Engine)

I'm sure anyone reading this blog is probably aware of the Monster Rancher games, especially the first one on Playstation, that did some kind of scanning thing to music CDs you put in and turned them into monsters you could train to battle other monsters. CD Battle: Hikari no Yuushatachi is essentially a kind of primitive ancestor of that game. So primitive, in fact, that it's barely a game at all.

You load the game up, then insert two CDs, which are turned into RPG parties of three members each. The two parties then fight in front of a fantasy backdrop. There's not much in the way of balance, and some CDs will generate a party member with masses of HP that can just steamroll the entire other team solo. Also, though the boxart promises robots, dragons and other cool stuff, all I ever got were archers, fighters and (very rarely) magic users. I guess the point of it is that two players put their CDs up against each other, then pass the controller back and forth, commanding their parties, to determine through combat who has the best musical taste.

It's a shame there's no kind of single player content, like a quest to send your party on or something, but as I played a few times, I begun to realise why there wasn't much to the game (and also why a game with such simple graphics requires the Super CD Rom RAM card). I noticed that to change the backdrop for your battles, you had to reset the console and load the game up again, and that's when I realised it: once the game is loaded up, you never have to put the game disc back into the console. So clearly, the entire game is loaded into RAM before you start.

I haven't been able to find any information regarding this game's price on release, but I really hope it was a budget title, since there's really nothing to it at all beyond a few minutes' mild amusement. You can find copies online for only a few pounds now, though, if you're interested. (I haven't tried to play it on an emulator, but it seems like it'd be more hassle than its worth.)

And in case anyone's interested, the CDs I used in the making of this review were Blind Guardian - Beyond the Red Mirror, Cradle of Filth - Bitter Suites to Succubi, The Offspring - Americana, Rhapsody - Rain of a Thousand Flames, and Arch Enemy - War Eternal (which defeated every opponent put in front of it).

Curiosities Vol. 12 - Ultrabox 2 (PC Engine)

It's been a long time since I've covered any discmags, hasn't it? And this oone is especially unusual, since it's for a console, not a computer! Even stranger, it seems to have been aimed at more general audience than "people who really like videogames", being a mix of nerdy stuff with some sort of vaguely lifestylish content and some stuff that's just plain inexplicable. Let's look at each thing one-by one!

First up is Cast: Epitaph from the Pale World, some kind of non-interactive story told in a similar manner to the cutscenes in a lot of PC Engine games: fullscreen pixel art with voice acting and narration. Of course, I can't tell you a lot about it, other than that it's set in 1901, and seems to be about archaeology, UFOs and an alien invasion. An interesting item, kind of a super low budget OAV on a format that couldn't (in 1990 at least) handle any kind of recorded video format. I imagine that if you were a kid with a console in their room but no VCR, this could have been quite a draw.

Next up is Mission, probably the most bizarre item on the disc. What it is, is a database of school uniforms. You pick a uniform, and you're taken to another screen, where you can see that uniform's variations for each season, as well as hear comments from a guy (who I assume is the creator of the section) or a girl (who is different for each uniform). I don't know if the uniforms are original or taken from real schools, but each one also comes with a "data" page that suggests either the creator of this section has way too mcuh time on their hands, or that they are from real schools. Either way, the inclusion of such a feature is totally bizarre.

Third on our itinerary is Kamen Victor, a weird little top-down racing game, in which you play as a parody of Kamen Rider, and ride around collecting hearts and avoiding guys, trying to find the stage's exit before the time runs out. The stages are massive and labyrinthine, so I was only able to get to the third, and it took a fair few attempts just to get past the first. It's a very simple game, but I'm sure some of the more shameless publishers at the time were releasing stuff at full price that wasn't much more filled-out.

Next, there's another game who's title I couldn't read. It's a game in which you and your opponent take turns knocking blocks away from underneath little Darumas. You can knock away as many blocks as you like in a turn, but only from beneath one Daruma. The winner is the one to knock away the last block, and after a few games, I hadn't won a single one.

The next thing is also the biggest and most time-consuming! JJB is a huge gallery of various fan-submitted works, including four-koma comic strips, fanart, letters, a top ten list of what the compilers consider the best of the fanart, with voiceover commentary and what I think is some kind of videogame Q&A advice section. In case you're wondering, the most common subjects for fanart were Dragonball Z, Valkyrie no Densetsu, Ys and Ranma 1/2. For additional context, this disc was released in September 1990.

The last big bit of original content is something just called DATE, which, as you might assume, is a little romantic minigame. It seems to be themed around speed-dating, and there are three girls, who say things to you. Then you can pick from a list of responses, hoping to woo them. At the end, there's a section that I think has you trying to ask a girl of your choice out on another date. Obviously, all the text and speech in this is in Japanese, so I had no idea what I was doing and didn't get anywhere. Never mind.

Other than that, there's a database of available PC Engine games, which includes non-playable demos for the first PCE Ranma game, Ys III and some game that looks like it's based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and an "END" option which lists credits for the disc while playing a cute animation of the Ultrabox mascot dragon flying in front of a sunrise.

Ultrabox 2 is pretty different to other discmags I've seen before, and probably had a broader appeal at the time, though the series only went on until issue 6. They're all available pretty cheap if you shop around online, though, and if you can read and speak Japanese, you could probably have hours of distraction browsing all the content on them, as if they're all like this one, they're packed full of stuff.

Curiosities Vol. 11 - Tarot Uranai (3DO)

Although they've been around since at least the mid-80s, you'd think that tarot computer programs would be pretty useless to anyone. If you don't believe in cartomancy, then any kind of tarot, digital or otherwise, is a total waste of time, and if you do, then you'd also presumably know about the various taboos and traditions regarding the touching of cards, and how they're meant to come into the posession of the reader, and so on. But they do exist, and I'm pretty sure they're still around on things like the soon-dead X Box Live Indie Games marketplace, and on mobile phones and the like, too (Though I haven't actually checked, it seems like a safe bet).

Tarot Uranai has something over any of the other tarot programs I've seen, though: production values! Every other example I've seen has either been a very low-fi pixel art dealy on 8-bit formats like the MSX or Game Gear, or maybe even just a secret mode in a proper game like the Playstation port of Puzzle Bobble 4. But Tarot Uranai is on the 3DO, and of course that means FMV and pre-rendered CGI!

So yeah, there's a nice, short CGI intro showing some trees, and then you're presented with a room with three doors, representing three different options. The left door has a cross on it, and takes you to a traditional kind of reading, where a bunch of cards are drawn and laid out in a specific pattern. The middle door has a kind of magic circle design on it, and takes you to a big crystal with the works love, money, business and health. You pick one, and the cards are shuffled, then placed in a big circle, from which you pick one, which I guess reveals your future in that aspect of your life. The final door has a book on it, and contains a little tarot database, where you can look up all the cards and their meanings and such. Whichever option you pick, everything is presented and explained by a Japanese woman with a scarf covering her face speaking in front of bluescreened-in CGI backgrounds.

Like I said earlier, Tarot Uranai is a program with no real utility to anyone, especially people who can't read or understand Japanese. But it's not completely worthless! It does have a great aesthetic that perfectly marries early 90s CGI and a kind of vague pseudo-mysticism in a nice way, that feels like it could have been used as part of the plot-of-the-week in something like the live action Eko Eko Azarak TV series.