Devil Zone (MSX)

Since I've recently been playing more Famicom games, I've grown a strong affection towards the single-plane beat em up, as a genre. The nice thing about the genre is that it's so simple at its base that developers only need to have one or two mechanical additions to make for an interesting and worthwhile entry. The one positive thing I can say about Devil Zone is that its developers definitely weren't short on ideas, and they were actually ahead of their time in some ways! Unfortuantely, not only are the ideas they had not particularly great, they weren't really very well executed, either.

So, as expected from the genre, you walk from left to right, kicking monsters in the head, until you reach the stage's boss. Now, I have to admit that I only had the patience to get as far as the second boss, but in my defence, this is a game that relies a lot more on luck and patience than it does skill. The main ideas that the developers added to the skeleton of the single-plane beat em up are magic items and a weapons shop. The magic items can be stored until needed, and have various different effects, like invincibility, killing all onscreen enemies, stopping time, and so on. The weapons shop itself has enough weird idiosyncracies surrounding it that it gets a paragraph all of its own.

Firstly, you can access the weapons shop at any time. Secondly, the currency you use (red stars) is, like the magic items mentioned above, randomly dropped by enemies. The third, and strangest point about the weapons shop is that there's another set of randomly dropped items that cause the prices to fluctuate when collected. There's three orbs than can appear: a green one that reduces the prices, a red one that increases them, and a blue one that returns the prices to their defaults. Such a strange idea! Anyway, the weapons are completely essential to defeating the bosses.  More specifically, the last three weapons are projectile weapons, and without one of these, you'll face extreme difficulty in fighting the bosses. The best one, oddly, is the second most expensive one, while the two cheapest weapons are melee weapons, and are so slow that they'll probably get you killed rather than help you in any way.

So, to sum things up, what Devil Zone brings to the table are two things you've seen me complain about many times before: skill/weapon shops, and an emphasis on luck over skill. Another thing that kills it for me is that if you do save up enough stars to buy a decent weapon to fight the boss with, and you die, you lose your bought weapon, and with no weapon and slim chance of building up a stock of stars to buy a new one before you get back to the boss, you've probably gotten as far as you're going to get on this run. Needless to say, Devil Zone is not a game I recommend seeking out and playing yourself.

Curosities Vol. 10 - Playable Politicians

There's plenty of games starring real people, most of them being atheletes, with some musicians and actors and even the occasional comedian. Less common, though still more than you'd expect are games starring politicians, a few of which I'll be looking at today. There are actually quite a few omissions from this post, like Bill Clinton's appearance in NBA Jam, and pretty much the entire cast of the old Spitting Image fighting game, but I've tried to stick to games that are relatively obscure, and also to games where the politician in question is clearly the protagonist and/or main character.

So the first game is probably the most well-known of the ones appearing in this list, though at the same time, its star is the politician with the least fame outside his own country. SEGA's 1985 arcade game I'm Sorry is a single-screen maze game that sees Kakuei Tanaka (Prime Minister of Japan between 1972 and 1974) walking the streets of Japan collecting gold bars and avoiding sex scandals. It's got a nice risk/reward mechanic, whereby you don't get any points for the gold bars until you take them back to your mansion, but the amount of points increases greatly with each bar collected before returning home. Still, it's more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an actual good game, and even without knowledge of Tanaka's career, seeing tiny little 80s sprites engaging in BDSM and such is mildly amusing the first few times.

Next up is a politician who is, pretty prolific, as far as videogame appearances go. As well as having two otherwise unrelated games of his own, he also makes an appearance in Street Fighter II. Of course I'm talking about the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev! I can only assume that Japanese game developers saw him in the news and thought he was cute or funny-looking or something?

Anyway, the two games were released within months of each other in 1991, with Gorby no Pipline Daisakusen landing first, in April for the MSX. It's a combination of two better-known puzzle games, those being Tetris and Pipemania. There's a Tetris-style pit, lines with open pipes at each side. Blocks with pipe shapes in them fall from above, and the aim is to link the pipes on the right with the pipes on the left. There's a quota on each stage that has to be fulfilled before the pit completely fills up with pipe-bits. It's a surprisingly difficult game, and though it's fun and can hold your attention for a short time, it's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts, with both Tetris and Pipemania both being much better games than it.

Two months later, Ganbare Gorby! reached the Game Gear, and this time, it's a top down action game. In it, you play as Gorbachev, now working in some kind of distribution centre, ensuring people get the bread, medicine and Game Gears that they need, by stepping on switches to make conveyor belts point in the right direction. Obviously, there are some complications: the conveyor belts also have upon them less desirable items, like mouldy bread, poison and gears. (The gears are the unwanted item on the stage with the Game Gear as the wanted item, a joke I've only noticed now that I'm typing it out.) There's also thieves and, for some reason, armed guards wandering about the place, stealing items and beating up Mikhail, to interfere with his work. It's not a bad game, and it's also got a decent difficulty curve, with the stages gradually getting more complex, with more labyrinthine layouts of belts, and multiple different sets of switches, and so on. A de-Gorbied version was also released in the west a bit later, renamed Factory Panic.

Our last politician is a bit of a renaissance man, having also been a conspiracy theorist/TV personality, an actor, and, most impotantly, a wrestler. Of course, it's Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Governer of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003! The game that bears his name, Jesse "The Body" Ventura Wrestling Superstars, a localisation of the Mega Drive game Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden, was never actually released, and the ROM was only found and leaked publicly in 2016. Since Thunder Pro was itself a spin-off of the excellent Fire Pro Wrestling series, it's mechanically sound, and definitely a big step up from other wrestling games of the time. The only real problem it has is that the single-player game is far too easy: I managed to get to the final stage on my first play. Still, it's a fun little game, and other than Ventura himself, takes the usual Japanese wrestling game route of having oddly-named copyright-friendly clones of real wrestlers. You should at least give it a go, if only because it's a recently unearthed lost treasure.

Aquapolis SOS (MSX)

When you first start playing Aquapolis SOS, it seems like nothing more than a much easier knock-off of Taito's 1979 arcade game Lunar Rescue, but it's actually more than that: it's a much easier knock-off of Lunar Resuce with some added elements of Missile Command! Anyway, the premise is that the underwater city of Aquapolis is under seige, from missiles and floating mines, and you're charged with the task of helping evacuate the place, as well as operating the city's forcefield to protect the buildings. You can probably work out most of how this works from the screenshots, but basically, you pilot your submarine down to the city, land on top of one of the buildings to pick up an evacuee, and then go back up to the surface ship. On your way back up, you can shoot the mines for extra points, though your score actually goes down if one of your missiles hits the surface ship. I can't think of many other arcade-style games where you can actually lose points like that, the only one that immediately comes to mind is Dynamite Deka 2, in which you lose points when you lose health (and gain points when you get it back). As well as mines, there's also a seahorse, that will try to drag you around if you get too close, though it can't hurt you itself, and you can't hurt it.

As for the missiles and the force field, that's just something you have to manage as you play. At the push of a button, you can open or close a forcefield above the city which destroys anything it touches (except for that indestructible seahorse), the opening and closing is pretty slow, so once you get a few stages in, and there's more mines for you to avoid, you've really got to be skillful in balancing the tasks of avoiding mines, protecting the city and not smashing into the field yourself. Missiles that get through will destroy one of the buildings, permanenly taking away one landing spot in the city, and if all of them get destroyed, it's an instant game over (though, I had to deliberately not use the forcefield and play through several stages to confirm that this happens).

There's some other little quirks in the game too, like the end-of-stage bonus, based on how many successful rescues you get during a stage. This is interesting because a stage ends once five evacuees have left the city, and the only way to lose one is by losing a life on your way back up the screen after picking them up. I would have preferred a time bonus, but I guess the random appearence of the missiles would have added to large an element of luck to scoring.

Aquapolis SOS is a game that I can't really say is particularly good or bad. It's not very exciting or interesting, but it passes the time in a fairly unpleasant manner. The most significant thing to say about it is that it's a very early game from the team that would go on to become MSX stalwarts and Puyo Puyo creators Compile.

Yuureikun (MSX)

This is a fairly deceptive game, as though it might look like a platformer in screenshots, Yuureikun is actually more like a shooting game. Going by strict definitions, it doesn't really fit into either category perfectly, as it's fairly unique. The player controls a little boo-like ghost, who floats about, avoiding bullets, killing enemies and all that other shooting game stuff.

The main difference is in your methods of attack, of which there are two: the first and most damaging is a weird backwards thrust attack that is limited by a long meter above your health bar, and is also the only way to break blocks (which I'll come back to. The second is a small fireball that floats next to you and can be sent out in front of you to attack before slowly making its way back to you. This attack kind of reminds me of Twinbee's fists, though it's slower and less effective.

Enemies drop coins upon death, and it actually took until my second go to work out what these coins were for. As I mentioned before, your backwards thrust attack can be used to smash certain blocks, some will be obvious and some not so much. Hidden inside some of these blocks are power-ups, such as health restorers and time-stoppers, though it's not possible to simply collect them as you like, as every power up you find has a cost attatched in Yen, that gets deducted upon collection. Rarer than the power-ups are little "doorway with a staircase inside" icons, that lead to bonus stages that give the player a few seconds to quickly grab some money and try to find power-ups in the walls.

The uniqueness also applies to the boss fights, as every boss I've fought so far has had a different strategy to it, and oddly, the boss of the first stage was the most complicated so far: it's a face embedded into a cave wall, with enemies constantly coming out of its mouth. To defeat it, the player has to use their backwards thrust attack to send enemies flying into the face's eye.

Yuureikun isn't a super-exciting game, nor is it some lost, hidden classic. It is an above-average game, though, with the graphics and sound being of especially high quality, and though I wouldn't say to rush out and play it right now, I don't think you'd regret giving it a few goes if you're curious.

Andorogynous (MSX)

Obviously, the title is a mistransliteration of the word "androgynous" from English in Japanese and then back again. But since there's no obvious gender-related themes in the game, I'll just assume that the developers were just going for a word that sounded sciencey and biological and this is the one they went with.

Anyway, the game's a vertically scrolling shooter with two twists: the scrolling goes down instead of up, and the player can only shoot to the left and right. The incongruity between the shooting and scrolling axes serves two purposes: the first, and most obvious is the mechanical purpose. When your enemies mainly come from above or below, having to maneuver youself to shoot them from the sides puts you at an automatic disadvantage. The second purpose is one of atmosphere: the player character's shooting range is ill-suited for their environment. Coupled with the fact that they are some kind of humanoid slowly floating down a hostile, biological pit, this helps create a feeling that the player is a fish-out-of-water, a soldier behind enemy lines in every sense.

Atmosphere is one of Adorogynous' strongest points, and the developers ( and more specifically, the artists) have really played to the MSX's strengths and weaknesses. The graphics are just detailed enough that you can see that everything around you is a living organism, including the walls and the shots your enemies fire at you, while at the same time are just vague enough to allow the player's imagination to fill in the blanks. What this does is give the impression of descending and being surrounded by a pulsating and oozing organic hell, even though a more detailed and more animated depiction of such would be beyond the host hardware.

The game itself is fun to play, though it is also brutally, unforgivingly difficult. I've completed Mushihimesama Futari on a single credit, but even after hours of play and dozens of attempts, I've yet to even see the second boss of Andorogynous. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that it's a testament to the game's quality that I even bothered to try so long and so hard before giving up. There's a couple of specific flaws that make the game even harder than its level design intends, too. Firstly, the power-ups tend to appear in the same places, but whih power-ups appear is totally random. In one particularly absurd case, the game started the second stage by giving me two extra lives. Secondly, there's an old bugbear typical of a shooting game this old, the "slippery slope" of losing all one's power-ups on death as well as being sent back to a checkpoint, meaning the loss of one life makes progress incredibly difficult. Finally, there's a weird bug I found. The best weapon power-up is the 2-way/3-way shot offered by a white letter L. Collecting once gives you 2-way shots, collecting twice gives 3-way.Collecting a third, however, demotes the player back to a single stream of shots.

In conclusion, I can only really recommend Andorogynous if you're looking for a true challenge. It is a good game, that' high in quality in most respects, but like I said, it's brutally, insanely hard.

Hi no Tori Hououhen (MSX)

I'll admit something here before I start: despite all the critical acclaim it gets, I've never read or watched any version of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series, upon which this game is based. In fact, before playing this game, the most contact I'd had with it was the cameos in the excellent GBA game Astro Boy Omega Factor. But from what I gather, the series is some kind of great philosophical work. Though none of that gets through into the game, which is a vertically scrolling shooter, it's still pretty unique in its own right.

The unique factor is that Hi no Tori adds an element of exploration to the mix. Exploration in a scrolling shooter might be hard to fathom, but it does work fairly well. The stages only scroll upwards, but they do loop vertically, and there are exits to the left and right at certain points, essentially making each stage a collection of interlinked sub-stages.

The player spends each stage seeking out stone tablets, each marked with kanji, which open gates marked with the same kanji, until one of those gates leads to the stage's boss fight. Boss fights take place in their own seperate, non-scrolling stage, a cool-looking cave made of skulls. The game looks pretty great in general, easily one of the best-looking MSX games I've seen, up there with Aleste 2.

It's technically sound, too, with your shots coming out pretty much as fast as you can press the fire button and Takahashi Meijin-esque displays of button-hammering prowess are a skill worth developing for this game, as a fair few of the enemies are mild bullet sponges, while others might be weak, but attack in thick, aggressive formations. Most of the power-ups are typical of shooting games of the era: improving the range of the player's shots, increasing the player's movement speed, etc., but one odd point is that there's two different kinds of invincibility item: one that causes enemies to die on contact while in effect, and one that doesn't.

Hi no Tori is a pretty good game, that's unique and it looks great, though it is very difficult. Not to the sadistic level of Evil Stone, but its difficulty definitely lives up to the stereotype carried by late 80s shooting games. I'd say it's definitely worth a look if you're curious.

Zombie Hunter (MSX)

This post is going to be shorter than I'd originally planned, as I couldn't stand to play the game any more to learn more about it. This wasn't always the situation,  though. There were acually three stagfes in my appreciation of this game: at first glance, it seemed low, oring and unfairly hard. Later, I gave the game a second chance and it seemed like there might have been a fun game hiding under the rough exterior. Finally, I realised that the game was centred entirely around grinding, for both items and experience.
Zombie Hunter isn't anything to do with the Oneechanbara series (a few entries of which were released in Europe under the "Zombie Hunters" title), it's a side-scrolling action RPG with a generic fantasy setting. In each stage (there are apparently six stages, though I never got past the first boss), the player moves from left to right, fighting a group of enemies every screen or so. On the controller, you have a button for jumping and a button of attacking, while to equip and use items and check up on your stats, presing Ctrl on the keyboard opens the menu. Out of combat, everything is very slow and jerky, I assume this is down to the MSX having trouble doing the scrolling, as the scrolling stops for battles, and they run a lot smoother. Although you fight the same monsters in the same locations each time, you can walk back and forth to repeat battles (which you will need to do. A lot.)  At the end of each stage, there's a boss hiding behind a big door, that must be unlocked with a key.
Like I said before, Zombie Hunter gives the player a lot of grinding to do. Only about halfway through the first stage, there's an encounter with a group of flying squid-like creatures that are nigh-impossible to defeat without rginding another level on top of the one you hould have gained along the way. All items in the game
are acquired through random drops from enemie, including equipment, healing item and the aforementioned boss key. The item grind wouldn't be o bad were it not for the fact that the enemies will drop gold rather than items a lot of the time, and, in the first stage at least, there are no shops. So to make any kind of progress, the player has to walk up and down the stage fighting the exact same battles over and over in the hopes that they'll get strong enough to be able to progress a little further. And the enemies give less experience every time you level up, too.
Don't bother playing this game. Like I said earlier, it's a slow, repetitive slog.

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?

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 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 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.