Arc Style: San Goku Shi Pinball (3DS)

 In 2006, Nintendo released a strange samurai-themed voice-controlled pinball/strategy game called Odama. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to play Odama, but it was in my mind the whole time I was playing San Goku Shi Pinball. It doesn't have any voice controls, and it's setting is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than feudal Japan, but still: olden times battlefield pinball. I doubt it was made as a deliberate mockbuster anyway, coming out six year later than Odama, and Odama not being the kind of massive hit you'd bother mockbusting anyway.

 

That doesn't mean it's just a generic pinball game with a Three Kingdoms coat of paint, though. Instead, you go through various differnt stages, each followed by a boss. The stages are all different, though they all consist of a small battlefield area, littered with soldiers, battlements, and so on. The goal in the stages is to defeat all of the enemy officers who are commanding the endlessly respawning troops, while also lighting torches and finding hidden treasures and bonus stages to score more points. 

 

The boss fights are slightly different, and all take place in a little castle courtyard area. in that courtyard, there'll be a prominent figure from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you have to defeat them by repeadly hitting them with the ball (the one exception to this that I've ecountered was Zhang Jiao, who is defeated by extinguishing his magic purple bonfires dotted around the place. Bosses can fight back by attacking your flippers and disabling them for a couple of seconds, which is something I always hate. Taking away the player's input just seems like a cheap copout form of difficulty.

 

San Goku Shi Pinball isn't one of the greatest pinball games you'll ever seen, and it has some stiff competition on the 3DS in the form of Pinball Hall of Fame, which contains recreations of Taxi, Pinbot, and a bunch of other real-life tables. But those are recreations of real tables, and San Goku Shi is a whole new pinball videogame with all the advantages and possibilities that brings. So it's fine. If you already have Pinball Hall of Fame, and want more, less realistic pinball on your 3DS, then you wouldn't be too disappointed if you went with this one.

Other Stuff Monthly #25!

 So, Tekno Comix were a short-lived publisher in the nineties comics publisher boom that happened after Image started. Tekno had their own unique selling point, though: their comics would be created (but not actually written) by famous creators. Leonard Nimoy's Primortals was the series I used to always see copies of in back issue bargain boxes back in the day, but they also had titles created the likes of Isaac Asimov, Gene Rodenberry, and, most relevant to this post, Neil Gaiman. 

 

Relevant because the subject of the post is Wheel of Worlds, a diptych of issues released a year apart, and only slightly related to each other. The first, numbered issue zero, is like an introduction to all the Gaiman-created Tekno characters. The most interesting is the Teknophage, an immortal super-inteligent humanoid dinosaur who travels the multiverse cultivating oppressive civilisations so that they produce superpowered individuals whose souls he can consume to extend his lifespan. There's also Mr. Hero, a heroic and honourable steampunk robot made of brass who speaks with a cockney accent, and Lady Justice, who in this issue is a former slave/protoge of Teknophage who has the power to plant suggestions in people's heads, which she'd also used in the past to make a lucrative living as a findom to a bunch of rich guys on her horrible dystopian homeworld.

 

I really enjoyed this issue! Most of the page count is dedicated to a storytelling contest between Teknophage and Lady Justice, in which they both choose to tell their origin stories, along with a subplot about Mr. Hero looking for his missing hand. As evil and powerful as Teknophage is, in this story, he still feels like a fleshed out and believable character, and the rest of the cast come out of it pretty well, too. If you can get ahold of a reasonably-priced copy of Wheel of Worlds #0, I recommend you do so. Wheel of Worlds #1, however, is not a comic to which I can extend the same recommendation.

 

The main star of the show here is Lady Justice, though her origin from the previous issue seems to have been discarded, and she's now some kind of cosmic force of justice, empowering women to fight against evil. Well, in this issue, she empowers two women and a little girl. Problematically, the little girl gets temporarily aged up into an adult woman, and maybe even more problematically, one of the other women who is ugly and short, is temporarily made tall and beautiful. (It makes sense that you wouldn't send a child on a deadly mission, but what's stopping you sending a non-conventionally attractive adult?)

 

The three empowered women all get sent on seemingly unrelated quests that all converge later in the story. One women goes after her ex-husband who has a penchant for putting beautiful women in his sex/torture/molecular annihilation machine. Another goes after the scientist who apparently destroyed the man of the genius she loves, and the aged-up little girl goes after a gang of bad guys who stole her babysitter's soul so she'd take dirty photos of kidnapped underage runaways for them. 

 

The three stories converge as it turns out the evil ex-husband was sending the beautiful women's bodies to another dimension, where they'd be implanted with genius intellects stolen by the scientist, and perfect souls stolen by shock twist surprise vllain: the little girl's mother! These "perfect" women would then be sold to the highest bidder in the slave markets on a world ruled over by the Teknophage. Long story short, he eats the villains in a fit of rage, and the three heroines go back to their previous lives. The vengeful ex-wife goes back to enjoy a normal life, but Lady Justice shows her visions of the future showing her that the other two are both haunted by their experiences and end up living miserable, tragic lives.

 

So that's Neil Gaiman's Wheel of Worlds! Like I said earlier, issue zero is an entertaining, engaging story with interesting characters, and issue one is boring "dark age" nineties trash that's unpleasant seemingly just for the sake of it.