Disc Station Vol. 17 (PC)

Ahh, it's been a long time since I did a Disc Station post, hasn't it? Well, here's one now, right after a Yaroze Round-Up post. Maybe I could come up with some other semi-regular post series someday and do three in a row? Maybe...

Anyway, it's a PC Disc Station, so you know there's going to be at least some of the following things: interesting videos, amazing pixel art and a whole bunch of games. And Puyo Puyo characters, obviously. And DS17 doesn't disappoint on any of those fronts!

First up is a game entitled "Blitz Runner", which is a kind of time trial racing platform game. You know the Vs. mode in Sonic 3, in which the players pick a character and race laps around a small, specially designed stage? Blitz Runner is like that, but it's single player only, unfortunately, so you only have time to race against. There is an internet option on the title screen, which I assume was used for uploading and downloading times, but of course, that was in late 1997 and the option is now useless. There's three stages, and two characters (though they seem to play exactly alike), and not much else to this game. It looks great, though. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, Blitz Runner refused to be screenshotted.

Next is an even smaller game, whose title I cannot read. But it's a simple badminton game, starring Carbuncle the orange star-shaped thing from the Puyo games. The side-on perspective reminds me a little of Tennis for Two, but it doesn't really play like it, obviously. The main problem with this game is the difficulty: even on the lowers setting, I never saw the CPU opponent miss a single shot, and I played a few games before giving up completely.

Third is a nice little RPG, in which a Compile employee becomes a tokusatsu-style transforming superhero. This has pretty good production values, with really nice graphics, and not-so-nice CGI cutscenes, and though exploration and such is done top-down, the battles take the form of little side-on beat-em-up segments. Unfortunately, though this game has a lot of charm, and the battles were cool, the language barrier was too high for me to really get anywhere in it. If some kind souls somewhere, someday made a translation patch for it, I'd probably make another attempt and give it its own blog post.

The last game from this volume (I'm omitting the Nazo Puyo installment on the disc, as I'm sure you all know what that's like) is Puyolympics, a collection of mini-games starring a bunch of Puyo characters, with Arle and Witch in the lead roles. The mini-games are a mix of real sports, like running and swimming, and silly videogame nonsense, like catching falling Puyos in a basket, and another one that seems to be based on the same traditional toys as Dharma Doujou. You can play through all the events in a story mode, or you can play each one indiviually. It's pretty full featured, and like all the other games, it looks pretty great, with some cool artwork of Puyo characters in sports clothes, if that's the kind of thing that would interest any of you.

Finally, as always, there's a folder of video files on the disc, too. They were the usual mix of silly animated shorts starring characters from various Compile games, TV ads for Compile games, and other Compile ephemera. I've uploaded one of the videos from the last category, a kind of highlight reel featuring footage from all the various live events Compile held over the course of 1997. It's a great little video, featuring lots of cool stuff like people playing in tournaments, 90s cosplayers, and some guy singing.

Disc Station 16 (PC)

So, the first game I played on this volume of Disc Station was a platform game called Go Go Ivan!, in which

you play as a penguin, rescuing baby penguins that are hidden around the stages. It's not anything special, though one cool point is the hiden room in one of the stages that looks like a Puyo Puyo screen. Unfortunately, none of the programs I tried would take screenshots or record video of this game, so I can't show it to you.
The rest of the games I could document for you, though! Firstly, there's Geo Conflict 3: Hell's Gate Crusaders which is, as far as I can tell some kind of Auto-RPG in which you equip your party and send them off into the dungeon. I'm not totally sure about that, since it's all in Japanese, but since the characters do seem to do their exploring and fighting without any player input, that does seem to be the case.
There's also [Something] Angler, which is like a more colourful version of the Apple Sauce Room things, where you click on objects and things

happen, but with a scenic picture of a waterfall and some mountains.
There's a puzzle game starring tanukis, who have to push cages onto foxes, but it's incredibly boring. Definitely not as good as the last tanuki puzzle game that was on one of these discs. There's also, as always, another volume of Nazo Puyo puzzles.
As well as the games, there's the usual extra movies and artwork. I've posted the most interesting of the artworks at the top of this post.
Of the videos, the most interesting were this ad for the Saturn version of Madou Monogatari

and this video show Compile recieving an award for Puyo Puyo 2 at the 1997 Tokyo Game Show

Disc Station 15 (PC)

So, most of the games on this volume were very text heavy, and as such, completely impenetrable to me. The one remaining game wasn't very good, either. But! It does has some pretty interesting extras, so I'll upload those for your viewing pleasure, starting with these two pieces of art from the disc's OMAKE folder.

There's also a whole bunch of interesting videos!

Disc Station MSX #11

I kind of got sick of doing DS posts last year, so I took a break from them. But now they're back again, until the next time I get bored of them! Also, I skipped MSX volume 10 because there wasn't anything really interesting on it.
So, the first disc of this volume has two main points of interest. The first is a playable demo of Valis II. You all know the Valis series, right? Those cutscene-heavy platform games full of transforming schoolgirl drama? It's a demo of one of those. The MSX version doesn't look as nice as the ones on Mega Drive or PC Engine, but it does have a lot of its own low-fi charm. It does, however, commit the cardinal sin of using up to jump. One of the two face buttons is used to access the pause menu, but that's not really a valid excuse for a system that has an entire keyboard to use for that kind of thing. It is just a demo, though. Maybe the full game has better controls.
The other point of interest on disc one is a little pixel animation featuring various Compile characters and employees relaxing under a cherry blossom tree as the petals fall (this volume was released in april 1990, so it's seasonal!).
Another item on disc one lets you see a few still screens from one of those graphic adventures that were so popular on the Japanese computers.
Disc two is mainly concerned with all those text-heavy magazine features that are of no use to me, being unable to read Japanese and all. But there are two full games on offer, too!
The first is Randar Burn, which is the "april fool's" edition of Disc Station's serial grinding shooter series Blaster Burn. Of course, instead of being a spaceship shooting badguys, you're Compile's spherical mascot Randar and you're shooting bits of food. Not even cartoony food with faces, just regular fruits and neopolitan ice creams and the like. Even though I'm normally an opponent of grinding, especially when it intrudes on holy genres like shooting or fighting games, I must admit that I played this for so long that I'd totally forgot all the contents of the first disc and had to go back and go through them again.
The second is what appears to be a first person dungeon crawling RPG by the name of Mystery Tower. Obviously, I couldn't really play this due to the language barrier, but what's interesting about it is that it loads up in BASIC, and is credited to someone calling themselves "miichan", rather than to a company. I wonder if it was a winner of some competition Compile ran or something?

Option Monster (PC)

This was going to be a post about all the stuff on volume thirteen of the PC Disc Station series, but for some reason, after searching all my hard drives and storage devices, I could only find an incomplete set of files for it, from whence this game was the only one i could get working. Nor could I go and re-download the disc image, since some malodourous vermin has seen fit to conspire against Underground Gamer, probably the most important resource there has ever been in preserving obscure games and their related ephemera. Luckily, I do seem to have most of the later volumes in their entirety.
Anyway, on to the game itself. There are three main qualities the PC Disc Station games tend to have in common: they're often very short, feature a score system centred around defeating multiple enemies at once and they also tend to have beautifully crafted pixel graphics.
The game takes place over three worlds, each of which contains five or six stages. The stages are all top-down mazes full of enemies, who must be dispatched by throwing your titular option monster at them.

The monster bounces off the walls (but not enemies), and after a few seconds will return to you. Obviously, the way to play is to ensure that the monster bounces around as much of the screen and hits as many enemies as possible with each throw, ensuring the maximum score.
There are power-ups on each stage, revealed when the option monster travels over them. The two main types of power-up are "non-stop", which temporarily exends the amount of time your monster can spend bouncing around the screen, and "+1", which gives you an extra monster to throw around.
As I've said before about Disc Station games, Option Monster is a lot of fun to play, the only problem being its extreme shortness, leaving interesting mechanics and ideas never to be expanded on.

Disc Station MSX #09

I've long since run out of ways to introduce these DS posts, you know by now what they're all about, right?
Disc one of this volume is slightly anemic, offering three demos, only one of which is playable. The two unplayable ones are for a "Space War Simulation" game based on the Legend of Galactic Heroes series of novels/cartoons/possibly other things. I assume even if this wwere playable, the language barrier would keep me away from it anyway. The second is something a bit strange: it appears to be just a sound test mode with music from Hertz' RPG Sword of Legend Lenam. Come to think of it, in the UK in the eighties and (very) early nineties people were buying certain C64 and Spectrum games purely for their soundtracks, so I guess if the same sort of thing was happening with computers in Japan, this is actually sort of logical.
The playable demo is of Compile's awesome shooting game Aleste 2. The demo lets you play through the entirety of the game's seventh stage. It's still as excellent as it was when there was a demo on the previous DSMSX volume, so go back and read what I said about it then, I guess?
Disc two is a bit more interesting. It has the usual magazine stuff that's of no use to me, a demo of some baseball game that I also don't care about even a tiny bit, plus a nice little animation and a complete game.
The animation is a cute story of a young boy in his room playing what appears to be a Megaman game on his Famicom, when suddenly, his room is invaded by annoying little oni-like troll things! It lasts a couple of minutes, and it's something of a step up from most of the animations on earlier volumes, since it actually tells a story, rather than just have a random thing happening on a loop.
The full game is Gulkave, a horizontally scrolling shooter, originally released by SEGA in 1986. The first thing I noticed about this game is the fact that it had parallax scrolling in the background, which is pretty impressive for such an old game.
The game itself is pretty good too, thankfully. The only major problem it has is that you get a health bar, making it a little bit easier than I'm used to. This isn't a game-ruiner though, and Gulkave manages to be good enough to save this volume from being a bit of a damp squib.

Disc Station #12 (PC)

Hooray! It's the first of the PC Disc Station volumes! And it's full of stuff! But the only parts we're interested in are the games, so let's go straight to the first one.
In this case, "the first one" refers to the excellently entitled "Bomber Through Gogo! ~Jump Hero Gaiden 2~", which is a Bubble Bobble-esque single screen platformer. You get three characters to choose from, though to be honest, you should only pick the devil-woman Linda, since she can fly. Anyway, as is the fine ancient tradition for this genre, to pass each stage, you have to defeat every enemy. Every few stages there's a boss too. Your method of attack in this game is to drop little bombs on the ground, then kick them around.
I'll admit that at first, I didn't really like this game. I thought the attack method was awkward and stupid, and you have to prss up to jump, which is always a negative. But! After I played it a few more times to get screenshots, i really started to warm up to it. Once you get used to the unusual controls, it's a ton of fun kicking bombs and having stuff exploding all over the screen. Plus, the graphics are some spectacularly luxurious pixel art, just as you'd expect from mid-90s Compile.
The second game on the disc I'm just going to refer to as "Gensei", since the full title is in Japanese and I can't read it. It's a top-down action game in which you control a tiger with a sword, going from room to room slashing monsters and stuff.
Most of the game is nothing especially original or anything, with the exception of the various gimmick rooms in each stage. These include a room where you stand in place while enemies fire elaborate and intricate bullet patterns that, provided you did stand in the right spot, pass harmlessly round you. There's also a room with a quick game of Space Invaders and one with a baseball player, against whom you have to hit a few home runs.
Gensei is an okay game, but 's not really very exciting. You'll probably get bored of it after a few plays.
The other two games on the disc I don't have much to say about. One of them, Sniper, won' go past the title screen, no matter what I do. The other is a remake of the first Madou Monogatari game, and since it's an RPG in Japanese, I don't have the patience for that sort of thing. It does have the super-cute end credits on the disc as an .avi file though, so I've uploaded that for your viewing pleasure, along with a couple of cool images from the disc's bonus folder.

Disc Station MSX #08

This volume of Disc Station is very shooting-heavy. Or at least, the parts that were useful to me were.
Disc one features a few playable demos, though most of them are for RPGs, so I didn't bother with them. One of them was for Aleste 2, though! Obviously, it's excellent, has some of the best graphics I've seen on the MSX and also is very very hard. So hard infact, that every time I tried to take a screenshot, I died. Oh no!
There's also a full game on disc one, being a very old shooter named Final Justice. Unfortunately, it really shows its age, being boring to look at and boring to play. And that's all for the first disc!
Disc two is more promising, though. It has episode one of the episodic shooting game Blaster Burn! (Episode one is actually the second installment, episode zero being the sole highlight of DSMSX#07).
Blaster Burn is pretty fun, it's a shooting game, but every time you play, the amount of enemies you shoot and the amount of power-ups you pick up each get added to two respective totals. As these totals build up, you can use the amassed points to upgrade your ship, with more lives, better weapons, faster movement, etc. So it's a shooter with RPG-style grinding, I guess. It's better than it sounds, really! There's apparently a way of carrying stats over between episodes, though I haven't yet worked that out. Does anyone reading this know how it's done, if it can be done at all?
There's also yet another shooting game entitled Sum The Forever, which is by Gamearts. This is a really strange game, featuring a crudely drawn fat guy who wears a different costume each stage shooting stuff. And that's it, really. It's not very interesting, but it is pretty strange. Plus, one of the stages has him dressed as Kamen Rider.
The last item of interest for this volume of Disc Station MSX is a christmas-themed animation, starring Santa and a whole bunch of Compile characters. It's short, but fairly cool.

Disc Station #11 (PC98)

This volume is the final Disc Station to be released for the PC98. But, Compile did at least let the system go out with a bang, as this disc is packed full of stuff!
Firstly, there's Jump Hero Gaiden, which is a turn-based strategy game starring characters from Compile's Jump Hero series of platform games. I didn't play much of this, since as regular readers will be aware, I often have very little patience for stumbling through text heavy games that are all in Japanese.I'm sure it's probably fine, though. Similarly, there's also a demo (or is it a full game?) for some RPG, called Melpool Land Stories, that I also didn't play.
There's another Apple Sauce Room-style clicking game thing, too. It's called Tanken, and it takes place in a jungle. It seems a bit more complex than previous games of this type, as there are parts of the image that, when clicked on, open up another, smaller area with stuff to click on! Plus, there seems to be an actual objective: to find three objects that will open the pyramid on the horizon.
Next up is Tanukids, which is basically a top-down version of the old SEGA arcade game Flicky. You play as a dad tanuki (who wears a tie!) who goes around the various stages gathering his many kids to fetch back home, and avoiding the various other animals of the forest who want to stop this from happening for some reason. While there's nothing terribly wrong with Tanukids, it is a little bit boring. You'll probably only play it once or twice.
The fifth game on here is Karakuri, and it's a lot better. It's another top-down action game, but this time you play as a teenage girl with a rocket launcher charged with the task of riddeing a large Japanese mansion of clockwork robots. The rockets you shoot create fairly big explosions, as do shot enemies.So, you can create chain reactions and kill multiple enemies with a single shot, and in grand old arcade traditions, your score increases exponentially the more enemies you kill in one go. The only complaint I have about this game is that it is really, really short and a little too generous with the extra lives.
The sixth (!) game is Firelive, a card game that's worth playing for the awesome character art alone! In it, you play as a guy who wants to form a band, and decides to recruit band members by beating them at a simple card game. The cards are numbered one to five, plus there are joker cards. There's three cards to choose from at a time, and two dice are rolled each turn to decide who picks first. The object is to get a hand of five cards worth more points than your opponent. Obviously, the cards are each worth the number they have on them, but you can also make poker-style hands like two pairs, full house, et cetera to score massive bonus points. The player with the lowest scoring hand has the difference deducted from their life poins, and the game ends when one player runs out of life points.
I really enjoyed playing this game, and like I said, the character art is really excellent too. Definitely my highlight for this volume of Disc Station. THe only downside is that sometimes the game randomly decides to add fifty points to one player's card, which seems pointless and unfair.
Like the previous volume, there were various promotional videos on the disc, the highlights this time being a really cool advert for the Mega CD game Shadowrun, and coverage of what appears to be a pro-Puyo Puyo tournament event.

Disc Station MSX #06

Sorry if anyone's disappointed by this, but I've skipped a couple of DSMSX volumes, simply because they have nothing interesting enough for me to write about on them. Volume 6 isn't exactly packed, either, but it'll do.
Disk one is where most of the action is for this volume. The first interesting thing is a "Kids" minigame, which has you trying to put facial features on a face. The catch is that you can't see the face or the features you've already put down. You won't get hours of fun out of this, but you will get at least a minutes or two of childish amusement when you make a horribly disfigured face.
The sole full game on this volume is Taito's Xyzolog. I really, really like this game. You control a red ball that rolls around single screen stages avoiding enemies and turning off red lights by touching them. Once all the red lights are off, you go to the next stage. Your only means of defence is to self destruct, releasing a bunch of smaller balls that destroy any enemies they hit. This takes one of your lives away, but it's better than dying by touching an enemy because you score points for the enemies you take out, the red lights don't get reset like they do when you die normally, and it gives you a few seconds until the enemies respawn. To balance things out, you get an extra life for every stage you complete. The movement of your red ball is pretty great, too: there's hills and pits in the stages, and the way you have to build up momentum to climb steeper hills feels perfect.
Another thing I like about this game is the way it looks. It has incredibly striking visuals mostly using just a few shades of blue and grey for the backgrounds. There's a nice, clean 1970s sci-fi feel to it all.
There's also the usual pixel animation, albeit an incredibly boring one this volume round: there's some fish swimming in the ocean, like a mid-90s screensaver.
Disk 2 is a bit of a wasteland, mainly containing all the magazine-related content. The only remotely interesting thing in here is a demo for some kind of Gundam strategy game. Though I couldn' even work out how to start playing, it did have some nice artwork.

Disc Station #10 (PC98)

Another Disc Station post, this time being the first DS to come with videos on the disc! Videos that came in a convenient .avi format so they can easily be uploaded to Youtube! How exciting!
But before all that, the important part: the games.
First up is Rude Breaker, a decent shooter that's highly reminiscent of the later games in Hudson's Star Soldier series. I think given the popularity of that series in Japan, it's safe to say that this game was probably a homage to them, rather than a rip off. Unfortunately, I'm not really a big fan of that series, and some of the things I dislike about them are present here: the stages feel like they're really, really long, and though you might die a lot, it also seems to take a really long time to get game over. I guess if you do like the SS games, you'll probably like this too, though. It has really nice high resolution graphics like you'd expect from a PC98 shooter, too.
The second game on the disc is Runner's High, about which I have already written. I guess the last part of that old post looks kind of silly now, as it seems that it actually was published on a Disc Station. Hmm.
Third up is Matsuri, which isn't really a game, but an interactive thing like the Apple Sauce Room things that were on the early DS98 discs. But! instead of a room, you have a whole festival of things that do weird stuff when you click them! Literally minutes of fun to be had!
Also on the disc are Kirifuda, a very very Japanese card game that seems to be based on hanafuda, and which is completely incomprehensible to me, and another set of Nazo Puyo puzzles, if you like that sort of thing. What a long sentence.
The videos include ads for the Mega Drive port of Madou Monogatari and the SNES Port of Puyo Puyo 2, a video of what appears to be some kind of compile promotional event, and, most interesting of all: a Compile recruitment ad! I've uploaded the Puyo ad and the Recruitment ad for your enjoyment: