Seikima II Special: Akuma no Gyakushuu! (MSX)

You might (but probably won't) have guessed from the title that this game stars the 80s-90s metal band Seikima II. I hadn't actually heard of them before playing the game either, so don't feel too ashamed. As it turns out, they're pretty good. A bit of backstory that's (sort of) relevant to the game: the band is a group of high ranking demons sent to earth by Satan to spread his worship and also to conquer the earth through the medium of heavy metal. This is relevant to the game, as the game's villain is Zeus, king of the gods and enemy of Satan, who has kidnapped four of the band members of Seikima II, leaving only the singer, Demon Kogure to save them.
He saves them by jumping around various locations collecting stuff. Stuff like heads, ku klux klan dolls, apples and so on. The basic idea of the game reminds me of old british computer games, like Bruce Lee and Jet Set Willy, in which the goal was to explore large maps and collect all of a certain kind of item. This game doesn't have one large map, though; each missing band member is trapped in a different stage, and each stage is split into eight areas, each a few screens wide. As well as the items needed to complete the stages, there's also health increasing blood potions and money. The money is used in the shops (represented by big eyeballs) to buy extra blood potions (which should only be done in emergencies, dues to the scarcity of money), weapon upgrades and musical instruments (one per stage, they have no in-game use, but are necessary to get the best ending).
The "special" part of the game's title alludes to the fact that it's an upgraded port of a Famicom game, the most obvious changes being improved graphics and different jump physics. In the original version, there were two kinds of jump available: high jumps, done by pressing the jump button then left or right, and long jumps, done by pressing jump and left or right together. That system felt stiff and strange, and the more traditional jumping that replaces it in "special" is much preferred. Pointless semi-related trivia: I first heard of this game when I saw Arino buy a copy of the Famicom version in an episode of Game Center CX.
In conclusion, this is a pretty good game. It's nothing special (aaaahhh!), but it is definitely an improvement over the Famicom original. Plus, Seikima II are cool, so that's a bonus.

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 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 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.

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!