A multiplayer party game and one of the last games to be released for the PC Engine CD-ROM. The players are ducks who have to recover eggs around a grid maze, avoiding obstacles and each other.
It's probably redundant by now to say that this is another weird game. If you took all of the text from Octurbo-CD so far and put it into one of those fancy infographic word clouds, the biggest words would be "weird", "strange" and "what am I even doing" by a considerable margin. Motteke Tamago is weird inside and outside, though, as its gameplay and its release history are equally unusual. Released as late as 1997, way into the 32-bit fifth generation, it is actually the penultimate game for the PC Engine (officially, at least), and was originally given away for free on the cover CD for the Tokuma Shoten magazine "Super PC Engine Fan Deluxe". Apparently, it was meant to be released a lot sooner during the PC Engine's heyday, but was never published for whatever reason.
Motteke Tamago (which means something like "Take It Egg", which makes sense given you're grabbing eggs) is a multiplayer grid maze game superficially similar to Hudson's Bomberman. The player is a duck who has to run around a grid maze picking up eggs which then follow the duck. As long as the player keeps moving, the eggs will eventually hatch into ducklings who then make their own way to the player's coop at the corner of the screen. The opposing ducks (which can be human or CPU controlled, and there can be up to three of them) are also trying to do the same thing. The player can also create these little fried egg blocks to trap other ducks, and perform a dash (which requires a charge up) to blast through blocks (and other ducks) in their way. In practice it sounds straightforward enough, kinda, but there's many complications that can have beneficial or adverse effects on the player's chances of winning. Let's see how many I can show off...
Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Abstruse
Welcome to Motteke Tamago! We're spared from any duck anime intros, thankfully. I don't even know what that would be like. "A Quack on Titan"?As Nerduck explains, you select the number of human players first and then CPU. Each duck here is represented by which quadrant they start in (4P is bottom right, for instance), so you can choose wherever you want to start.This screen is a little more unusual. We'll revisit it later, but it's essentially recording your single player progress.And this is what the game looks like. The game tosses a few eggs around, each within reach of the four corners to start you off gently. I'm the white duck with the blue apron, and I want to return ducklings to that top left white coop. It is highly possible that I've misconstrued things and that the ducklings can be deposited in any of these other coops.These bushes, when flashing (they look pink in these screenshots for some reason), hide power-ups, and you have to take a moment to shake them out of the bush before you can collect them. This is essentially the equivalent of blowing up blocks in Bomberman to look for power-ups. You can see one of the power-ups to the right, and that one in particular makes the eggs following you hatch sooner. I think. Honestly, the speed at which these games move makes it hard to figure out anything.The end of my first game, there's a protracted score tallying progress. If you've ever played Mario Party (or heard Jeff grouse (heh, bird puns) about how arbitrary the scoring can be), it's a little like that. You're given points for how many chicks you return to the roost, how many you get of your color, how many pink ones you get, how often you get smoked by opponents, etc. etc. It's not something you can easily keep track of in-game.Each player has a stock of lives, though there's very few scenarios in which you can lose one. The most common means of transitory demise is the "flaming duck" power-up, which makes you temporarily deadly to other ducks if you touch them. Losing lives doesn't really do much besides lose you points at the end.Yeah, I didn't do so hot the first time around. I mean, I also had no idea what I was doing. I know, I know, that's a wuss defense.Turns out if you pause the game, you can actually see how well everyone's doing. There are the four basic chick colors (which correspond to the players' ducks and will earn more if they match). There's also pink chicks, which are worth more, and black chicks, which are worth a lot more or a lot less depending on circumstances. It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but it's fairly explicable after a while.I got trounced again. The two ducks in the middle charged at each other, which means being dropped into an Andy Capp-style "fighting cloud" (if you've seen too many cartoons like I have, you'll know what I mean). I'm not sure how a winner is decided, but the loser stays stunned for several crucial seconds. You generally want to be stunned as infrequently as possible.I'm determined to win this first board. It's a matter of pride. Plus, I sorta know what I'm doing now. Sorta.We run into a major complication when this asshole shows up. I'll explain him later. Importantly......I manage to procure the most ducklings! While there's plenty of weird bonuses that can mess with the total scores and bring about upsets, generally speaking getting the most ducklings is a fairly good indicator that you've won.Finally! Human wins! Take that, robot ducks.If you spend too long on the winning score screen, this fellow pops up to remind you to stop gloating and get on with it.Some more weirdness now. This little guy with the shades is the occasional result of a chick hatching. It'll go nuts, run around the screen depositing bonus eggs while some crazy music plays. Eventually it shakes itself out of its Cool Guy reverie, look a bit confused and then continue back to the coop as per normal.You'll notice the yellow duck has a golden egg. Swan chicks hatch from those, and while they look like black chicks (which give you a penalty, for some oddly duck-racist reason), they provide huge bonuses. It's worth fighting over a golden egg if you find one.I'll return to this progress screen to show you how it's updating itself. A circle means that a human player has beaten the map. A cross means that the player has played the map, but lost. Each of the ten stages in each world are simply re-configurations using the same background and obstacles.This is World 2. There's a bit more of an urban setting here, and there's a complication in those little gray blocks on the sides of the screen. They pop up and down at intervals, blocking your way. We also see that giant manic rooster make a return.What that guy does is march across the map for a minute, dropping those little fried egg blocks everywhere he goes. You can't get past them unless you charge, and the charge can only remove a handful at a time. Eventually the big rooster decides to take a nap in front of one of the coops at random, blocking it completely and pretty much dooming that player. He's a butt.I'll show off World 3 as well, while I'm here. The little pressure plate traps at the top and bottom create a small chain of fried egg blocks somewhere at random. I am rocking this match. I was fortunate enough to grab a few speed power-ups early on, and those things are worth their weight in golden eggs. Being the fastest means getting to all the eggs first.Booya! Well, I don't think I'll be topping that decisive victory, so let's call it here. I think I've pretty much shown everything off, besides a few of the power-ups (and I'm still not entirely copacetic on what they all do anyway).
That's Motteke Tamago, and it seems pretty darn cool. There's been a resurgence of late of great local multplayer games, and Motteke Tamago seems like ideal reboot material to join in on that bandwagon. The game's an odd combination of Bomberman and ChuChu Rocket, where it's all about resource procurement and management and keeping a fairly critical eye on proceedings to ensure no-one's getting a leg up over you. You can also decide to mess with other ducks, stealing their eggs and knocking them down or screwing them over in other ways. Actually, I guess it reminded me of that battle game in Diddy Kong Racing where you're collecting/stealing pteranodon eggs in those planes. Man, was Diddy Kong Racing a great kart racer.
Anyway, since I'm already reminiscing about other games, that's probably a good time to bring today's Octurbo to a close. This doesn't seem like the most attainable game, seeing as it was a bonus disc on a fairly obscure magazine that was already late to the party as far as where PC Engine's lifespan was at in 1997. Here's hoping Naxat Soft (or Kaga Create, as they're now known) see the sound financial sense in re-releasing an incredibly obscure game that was given away in Japan for free. Aww, I just made myself sad. At least there's always Motteke Tamago Ganbare Kamonohashi.
There is really nothing out there for this game. The best I found was this 37 second trailer/demo.
I agree that this game would be a good one to bring back since when I played the sequel it seemed like a really good 4 player mutiplayer game. They even added a story mode in the sequel and its pretty silly. I'm surprised they never made more than 2 games of this since it looks like a game that would have gotten some attention.
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