100 Yen Disk No. 1 (PC88)

100 Yen offered a fair bit of choice to the mid-80s PC88 owner, as there were at least three series of disks on the market with that price in the title: 100 Yen Disk, 100 Yen Music Disk, and 100 Yen Soft. I've picked this one in particular to cover for a reason, though: it features early work by the legendary videogame composer Yuzo Koshiro!

Anyway, if you've read any of the Disc Station posts on this very blog before, you'll know what to expect from this: there's a few games, a text feature and a little bit of advertising. The first game on the menu is the generically-entitled Shooting Master 86, which happens to be the best game on the disk by a long way, so I'll come back to it after getting the others out of the way. A nice little touch is that the cursor on the menu is Samus Aran, and when you select an item, she turns into Takahashi Meijin for some reason.

So, the next game on the list is Graman Bee, the work of Mr. Koshiro himself! Unfortunately, it's either unfinished or for some it's not emulated well, as the graphics are glitchy, there's no music and the first boss' attacks seem completely impossible to avoid. I hope it is just unfinished and there's a full version out there somewhere, I'll keep an eye out, at least.

Following Graman Bee is Electric Novel, which isn't a game, it's a cool-looking title screen followed by a few screens full of text. Then there's The Rotten Wall, which is a spectacularly awful Breakout clone that's terrible in every aspect. There's also an option labelled "The Information of NAO Graphic Lab", which is an advert for an upcoming game called Triangle Panic, which I haven't found a disk image of, unfortunately.

Next is another game, Jumper, which must be one of the earliest examples of an endless runner. You play as a white blob thing that has to jump over a series of walls without crashing into the low, spike-covered ceiling. That's it pretty much. I wonder if it actually was the first?

Finally, we come back to Shooting Master 86, which is actually better quality and more fully-featured than a lot of standalone PC88 releases. It's a kind of hybrid shooting game/RPG thing. There's some things I haven't yet figured out, like how to buy better ships, but basically, you play a short shooting game stage, then you're dumped onto a map screen. You move a cursor (represtented literally by the word "CURSOR") around, until you meet one of the programmers, who will ask you something. Press Y on the keyboard and you'll enter another short shooting stage.

It's a pretty accomplished game that's so far beyond the others on the disk in terms of sophistication, plus, though he didn't do the programming, Yuzo Koshiro did do the soundtrack, so it sounds great too. Unquestionably the highlight of the disk, I really don't know why they chose not to package Shooting Master 86 on its own and sell it for a higher price. Maybe there's some 80s Japanese reason why they couldn't?

Sub Rebellion (PS2)

Even moreso than tanks, submarines are pretty under-represented when it comes to videogames. The only really well-known sub game I can think of is the classic arcade shooter In The Hunt, which, coincidentally, was created by Irem, in their fondly-remembered "dirty-looking pixelart" period, while Sub Rebellion was also made by Irem in their later, more tragic "weird experimental PS2 games" period. (Tragic because it was the last stage of their existence as a games company, pretty much.)

So, Sub Rebellion, then. It's set in a post-apocalyptic future (like almost every Irem game, come to think of it), in which the world has flooded, and humanity survives in underwater cities, most of which are ruled with an iron fist by an evil empire. You play as a submarine-piloting mercenary tasked with helping the resistance save humankind, and if you have time, also finding lost artifacts of an earlier age, which can be used to develop new technology to upgrade your sub. Is it a requisite that every underwater PS2 game has to have you looking for sunken treasure?

The missions are pretty much as you'd expect: find the thing (or things) and blow it (or them) up. Then, without fail, a boss will show up, and you blow them up, too. And while you're at it, keep pinging your radar to find buried artifacts, which are excavated by blowing up rocks and dirt. Though the controls use every button on the PS2 controller, plus both analogue sticks, they're very easy to get ahold of, and it won't belong before you're swoocing through the depths like a big clunky metal mermaid. You have two main weapons to facilitate your blowing up of objects: a machine gun, fired by tapping the fire button, and lock-on torpedos, targeted by holding the fire button, and fired by letting go.

Sometimes, you'll also have to surface and sail around shooting helicopters and gun turrets and the like, which is actually a lot harder, since your enemies can move around and dodge your attacks in 3D, but you're mostly confined to 2D movement in this state (though you could go the slightly unweildy route of dodging surface attacks by submerging when they get too close, I guess?), and to make things worse, you can still be fired upon by sub below you while you're surfaced, which is a bit unfair.

Sub Rebellion is a pretty great game, to be honest, though it can be frustratingly difficult, especially when you die right at the end of a mission you've spent 10-20 minutes playing through. I can only assume the reason it never got anyone's attention is it's generic-sounding name, and generic-looking boxart, and for once, the western publisher's can't take the blame, since it had the equally dull title "U:Underwater Unit" in Japan. Anyway, you can pick up a copy of this game dirt cheap, and it's definitely worth doing that.