Disc Station MSX #03

I'm running out of ways to start these DS posts. Never mind, I'm sure nobody will notice. Let's just get on with it, eh?
The first disk this time around is a bit weak, containing a small game, and another playable demo of Golvellius. The Golvellius demo features a forced scrolling top-down dungeon, that I can't get very far in at all. It's really really hard!
The game, oddly enough, is by Namco, not Compile, and claims on the title screen to be a Disc Station original! It's a really simple baseball game, in which you only play as the guy with the bat, trying to hit the ball out of the arena. There's a bunch of guys to choose from, but I can't tell any difference between any of them. It's a lot like the baseball mini-game that's in the Playstation version of Rival Schools, actually. Anyway, after a certain amount of balls have been thrown, the game ends, and you seem to get the same screen no matter how well you did. It's a bit rubbish, actually. If you'e emulating, be sure to put your emulator into MSX2+ mode for this one game.
Disc 2 has some more interesting wares to offer: two animations and a full game!
The first animation is completely bizarre, and features a photo of some guy (who I assume was an employee at Compile at the time) spinning around in front of some squiggles to classical music. The second animation is a very short, simple tale of a girl giving her boyfriend some chocolate on Valentine's Day. It's also more of a comic than an animation, to be honest.
The full game is Godzilla-kun, a platform/puzzle game inwhich you play as Godzilla, who has to shove around a bunch of rocks and smash them with his fists, while a bunch of other monsters try to stop him. The monster sprites are all small, and kind of Tamagotchi-looking, and while some of them are very easily identifiable (Rodan, Anguiras, Hedorah), others look like crap generic monsters (Varan, Baragon). That could be down to bad sprites, or it could be that some monsters just happen to be more iconic and identifiable than others. The game itself is fairly amusing, though not great. The biggest problem being that it seems to give out an extra life every time you complete a stage, which can make the game seem easy to the point of boredom. Apparently, there's a Game Boy game entitled simple "Godzilla" that's very similar to this.

Disc Station #09 (PC98)

So, after skipping the Disc Station 98 series, as well as the floppy volumes of the relaunched Disc Station series, we arrive at the first Disc Station to come on a CD! And Compile definitely weren't shy about making good use of the massively increased storage space, since this volume contains SEVEN full games! First, I'll tell you that the positions of the screenshots in this post don't necessarily coincide with which game is being talked about. Sorry!
The first of which is Madou 456. Not, as you mgiht assume part of the Madou Monogatari series of dungeon crawlers, but an RPG/board game hybrid thing, similar to the Rune Master series of games that Compile released on the MSX, but with Puyo Puyo characters as the players. I didn't get far into this, because of all the Japanese text. It has a nice looking intro, though!
Next on the list is Devil Force II, which sounds like a shooting game, but is actually a Shining Force-esque turn-based strategy game. Although there is a lot of Japanese text in this game, a lot of the commands are represented by little icons with obvious meanings, so I actually managed to get a few battles into this before I got bored and moved on to the next game. I might even go back to it at some point!
The third game, Imahori 2 is a card game that appears to be some kind of Uno variant. Not very interesting, although the cards have some nice little pixel arts of the Puyo Puyo characters on them.
Next up is Ceramic Ball, a really fun action/puzzle game. You control a very fast-moving, incredibly bouncy ball, and you have to get it to the small blue blocks to finish the stage. The game is very, very fast paced, to the point where each stage has a time limit of less than ten seconds! Not a classic for the ages, but worth a look.
Game Number 5 is a top-down action game entitled GaGaGa Sprint. In it, you run around the stages drawing lines on the ground. When the enemies touch your lines, they get stuck for a few seconds. Touch an already drawn line to create a loop, and all the enemies stuck on the looped bit of line get killed. Of course, you get more points for killing more enemies in one go. Again, not a great game, but not a particularly bad one, either. Unfortunately, the PC98 emulator I use (Anex86) has an ugly graphic glitch when running this game, though it doesn't get in the way of playing.
The sixth game on the disc is Manpuku, a strategy/card game about feeding a king that I liked so much, I'm going to give it a post of its own (eventually)!
Finally, there is Nazo Puyo Vol. 9. If you don't know, Nazo Puyo is a spin-off of Puyo Puyo, though rather being a Vs. puzzle game or an endless survial-type puzzle game, it uses the rules of Puyo Puyo in a different way.
Each stage already has some Puyos set up, and you have to arrange pre-determined falling Puyos to get rid of them all within a certain number of moves. It's okay if you like that sort of thing, I guess. I don't see why it gets to be its own series of games, rather than an extra mode in the Puyo Puyo games, though.

Disc Station MSX #02

Time for another DS post! It's been a while since the last proper one, thanks to the crapness of the DS98 series. Let's get on with it, then!
Disk one contains demos. First up is a strange playable demo of Xevious: Fardraut saga. Strange because although it's a playable demo, if you don't press anything for more than a second, the ship will start moving and firing on its own. I wonder if this was so that players could play the demo, and shop owners could have a rolling demo to put on display, without having to use up space on two seperate demos? That's the only explanation I can come up with, anyway.
Then again, the other two demos on the disk are a playable demo of the action RPG Golvellious, plus another non-interactive advert for Golvellious. The playable demo contains the opening dungeon up to the top-down boss fight. Oddly, the advert doesn't loop, so the previous "shop display" theory is out of the window.
Disk two only has two items of interest, along with the usual magzine text features. The first is a short christmas themed animation. Santa Claus is decorating a giant christmas tree while also preventing a bearded character from chopping it down. Not particularly entertaining or impressive, but it's nice, I guess.
The second item is a full game (yaay!). It's called Swing, and in it, you play the part of a guy who crawls over the sides of tall buildings, cleaning windows and avoiding the various weird creatures that are also crawling all over the buildings. Except for the creatures that are flashing different colours, collect hem for points, and also temporary invincibility and enemy-smiting power for every third one you collect. It's a fairly amusing and inoffensive game from that long-forgotten era when regular jobs could be made into videogames.
All in all, this is a pretty good volume of Disc Station MSX, though of course it doesn't meet the crazy generosity of the introductory volumes.

Disc Station 98 Title Screens

Okay, so the DS98 series was almost impossible to write about. Most of the volumes were just full of playable demos of RPGs and adventure games, neither of which are of much use or interest to JP-illiterate old me. So, I'll be skipping ahead to Disc Station (no suffix) #9, which is the first CD-based DS. 9-11 are still on PC98, and the volumes after that are for Windows. The one awesome thing the DS98 series did have, though, is really really nice art on the titles screens. It would be a shame not to show you all the amazing art, so here it is, in one post. I'll try to make the images be in the right order, but I can't promise that blogger won't mess it up.

Disc Station MSX #01

I'm loving these DS posts, aren't you? Each volume is like a little cave of videogamey treasure. Compile must have been feeling amazingly generous when they made them, they're always packed with stuff!
This volume has two discs, though most of the cool stuff is on the first.
"Cool stuff" meaning two full games, one of which is (as far as I know) exclusive to this disc station! The first game, the exclusive one, is a version of Aleste, which isn't a demo like what was on DSMSX#00, but a full game with newly arranged stages! Really hard newly arranged stages! Seriously, it makes regular Aleste look easy! The gameplay and weapons and such are the same as in the original game, of course. Just the stages are different.
Xevious also makes an appearance on this disk. I'm not sure whether it's a full game or a demo, though. If it's a demo, then I'm terrible and can't stay alive long enough to get to the cut off point. If it is a full game, then that makes three on this disk, and Compile are like 8-bit Santa Clauses.
Next up is another Last Armageddon-related item. When I saw it on the menu, I didn't know what to think! Was it the same demo again? Were they giving the game away free, but in a serialised form? It turns out to be neither of those things: It's actually a bestiary, listing all the monsters in the game and their statistics and such. Imagine if Western games magazines gave away RPG bestiaries! I would have loved that, I've had a life-long interest in such things. Unfortunately, the text is all in Japanese, and the pictures are tiny. Boo.
The last point of interest on the first disk is another full game, Megalopolis SOS. It's kind of like a mix between Missile Command and Galaga. You move your little gun/tank/base/thing along the bottom of the screen, shooting ufos and also sending out air-mines (or "floaters" as the game amusingly calls them). There's also six cities at the bottom of the screen, which you should probably protect. It's nothing special, but it's a nice little distraction for a few minutes.
On to disk 2, then! It doesn't contain any playable stuff, unfortunately. Most of the disk is taken up by the usual magazine stuff.
There are a couple of interesting things, though. Literally a couple. Two. The first is an animation featuring a girl standing in front of a taiko drum while Compile's mascot Randar bounces around and music plays.
The other thing is a non-interactive advert for Compile's action RPG Golvellius, which features some nice little pixel animations.

Disc Station 98 #00

Considering how great the first MSX Disk Station was, surely, the first volume for the much more powerful PC98 must be way better, right?
Unfortunately not. It's kind of rubbish. Well, the original content part is, at least. People who bought it at the time weren't getting ripped off: it comes on three disks, and the first two are full commercial games! Prince of Persia and Powermonger, to be specific! I won't bother writing about those though, since they're very well known, and there are probably a million other places to read about them.
Onto the third disk, then. It has a paltry four items on it.
The first is a non-playable demo/advert for a game whose title I can't read. But it does say that it's a "SPACE WAR SIMULATION", and theres a "II" in the title, so presumably it's also a sequel.
The second option is something a bit odd. It's an interactive... thing. There's a black and white drawing on the room, and clicking on items in the room makes stuff happen. The painting on the wall changes to a different picture, the cat turns into a weird alien, etc. Also, the pillow, TV and teddy bear come to life and start asking questions in Japanese. I wonder if anything happens when you answer their questions correctly. I guess we'll never know.
The third item is a long, boring and very text heavy animation about a UFO travelling the universe. In its defence, it does look very nice, though.
The fourth option is some kind of text content thing, as you usually get on these disks. I wish I could read the text content that's on the disk stations, it would be a window into a pre-internet nerd subculture in a far-off foreign land. Doesn't that kind of thing interest you? It interests me. BYE!

Disk Station MSX #00

This is the first in what will hopefully be a continuing series of posts about Compile's Disk Station series of disk magazines. It'll run until either I run out of disk stations or I get bored of it. If the latter doesn't happen, it should run a pretty long time!
I'll mostly be covering the games, because my inability to read Japanese renders the magazine features and other such things useless to me. I might also, on occasion, talk about the pixel art galleries and graphics demos the disks contain, should any of them catch my eye. I'll also be alternating between the MSX and PC98 releases, to add a bit of variety.
So, this is the very first Disk Station release ever! It contains a playable demo of the shooting game Aleste, the start of what would become a famous and revered series. The demo lets you play for a couple of minutes before fading to black and returning to the title screen. I'm sure there are many many places you can read about the Aleste games online, so I won't go into any more detail here.
There's also a non-playable demo of Brain Grey's RPG, Last Armageddon. I'm not especialy fond of RPGs at the best of times, but the fact that this game is Japanese-only, coupled with 80s computer game difficulty (at least, I assume this is the case) makes me not too bothered about playing this. It does have some really awesome artwork in the intro, though!
The only full game on the disk is the classic Hustle Chumy. This game, in case you haven't played it, concerns a sewer rat who heads to the surface to find food to bring home, while avoiding the attention of the various surface dwelling creatures. These creatures include rabbits, people, turtles, bats and an invincible robot. Unfortunately, the really cool-looking cat enemy from the SG-1000 version is absent. The game is pretty good. You wander the stages, collecting the food and shooting/avoiding the enemies. The stage is over when you collect all the food and return home. Your movement slows for every piece of food you pick up, but you can go back home to empty at any time. The disadvantage being that the stages have both a time limit and a time bonus upon completion. You'll have to choose between risking death at the hands of your various enemies due to slower movement, or sacrificing your bonus for the sake of safety.
So! There's only one disk for this DS, but they still managed to pack quite a lot in there! Just think how great the later releases with 3-5 disks will be!