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64 in 64: Episode 33

By Mento August 22, 2023 5 Comments

Welcome, all and sundry, to another episode of 64 in 64: a feature that navigates the peaks and valleys (so many valleys) of the Nintendo 64 library with a series of hour(ish)-long playthroughs. You know that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL 9000 decides to betray his human masters and strands Dave outside the ship while cutting off the other astronauts' life support? I'm not sure why that scene suddenly sprang to mind as I put the finishing touches on this month's 64 in 64 entry but maybe things will become clearer in time.

I've talked before about how I don't have a particular interest in sports games, even though I've counted over 100 in the N64 library (approximately a quarter of all its games) which is information I really should've researched before starting this project. However, what I was momentarily curious to find out was what degree of representation each sport had on the system. For instance, how does Bakalar's beloved hockey stack up to American mainstays like football and basketball? How many baseball games are there, given that's a sport Japan loves as much as the USA does? Is the overpowering global popularity of soccer enough to push it into the top position? I've arranged them thusly, including the number of games based on that sport and their percentage of the total library:

Baseball (16, 4.12%): No surprise there, I guess. There's as many "Pro Yakyuu" games as there are MLB-affiliated ones. Baseball's not really a thing in Europe but we understand it enough to see the occasional localization filter through.
Wrestling (14, 3.6%): "Sports" in quotes, perhaps, but it's considered sports entertainment and there's no doubting the level of athleticism involved. Again, a pastime popular on both sides of the Pacific and in Europe as well.
Soccer (13, 3.35%): I expected a greater showing for soccer but somehow the system only saw three FIFA games. Most of the rest were supplied by Japan by way of their J-League and its affiliated games. Hardly any Euro-centric soccer games: the only one I know about is the N64 port of Premier Manager (it's basically a spreadsheet game if you aren't familiar).
American Football (13, 3.35%): How fitting is it that both types of football have an equal amount of representation? A little incongruous, perhaps, given only one country actually plays this sport but then it never pays to underestimate the NFL.
Basketball (12, 3.09%): Bringing up the rear for the big five is basketball, again almost entirely focused on the American NBA. In fact, the only N64 basketball game that doesn't have "NBA" in its title is Fox Sports College Hoops '99.
Hockey (7, 1.8%): Well, you can't spell "niche" without "ice", but I think seven games is enough to say it's a sport popular enough to sells stacks of games. Think you have what it takes to become a hockey master? Puck around and find out.
Skiing/Snowboarding (7, 1.8%): The other major cold weather sport is skiing/snowboarding, which is the only "racing" type of genre I've included here. Sorting out the various motorsports from the futuristic racers would've been too much work, so maybe I'll save that for a future 64 in 64.
Golf (6, 1.55%): I guess the leisurely pace of golf didn't fit the kid-centric vision folks had for the Nintendo 64, Mario Golf aside, or it might be that it struggled to approach the same level of reality as its PC brethren. Either way, not a whole lot of the King's Game to be found on N64.
Tennis (3, 0.77%): A shockingly small amount of tennis on N64 given the system was built for four-player games. Not a genre well served by Nintendo's system.
Bowling (3, 0.77%): Bowling's way more obscure than tennis, I'd have thought, yet the two sports have three games apiece. Milo's Astro Lanes is the only one we've played on here so far.
Boxing (3, 0.77%): I delineated the system's history of boxing games when I covered Ready 2 Rumble Boxing last episode, but the fact that there's only three on N64 and nothing from Nintendo highlights how rocky their relationship was with the fine art of pugilism.
Olympics (3, 0.77%): Hard to categorize these as not all of them are official Olympics branded, but this slot is specifically talking about those button-mashy mini-game collections based on Olympic events. There's two for the Summer Olympics and one for the Winter.
Sumo (2, 0.52%): There's just two sumo games, Bottom Up's 64 Oozumou and 64 Oozumou 2, of which we played the latter on here to my ultimate befuddlement. There's actually no other martial arts sims on N64 besides boxing and sumo, unless you want to start counting the slightly more technical fighters like Fighters Destiny or Flying Dragon.
Horseracing (2, 0.52%): Japan loves betting on the ponies so here we have two JP-exclusive horseracing sims. I've not played them but there's a good chance that, instead of playing as the jockeys, you're just raising the horses and trying to make ends meet with judicious gambling.

OK, with all that sweaty ball-grabbing out of the way, let's start sweating the rules instead:

Each episode of 64 in 64 looks at two (occasionally three) Nintendo 64 games and plays them for sixty-four minutes exactly. Is an hour enough to fully understand a game's nuances? I've no idea, I don't write the rules.
I picked the first game from a dwindling number of N64 games I want anything to do with. The second has been left to my AI companion, who is now an anime woman who yells a lot because I cannot find the tsundere toggle in the options menu for the life of me. I don't miss the future.
With each game, we have: one introduction to its history, including my own history with it; four quarterly progress reports as my mind shatters in real-time; one rundown of how well it has held up overall; one rundown of how likely it is that Nintendo will stick it on the premium tier of its Switch Online service; and one summation of its Retro Achievements presence, since I accidentally left that activated on RetroArch. I mean, my legitimate N64 that I'm playing all these legitimate games on. Phew, salvaged.
We are not touching any game promised to the Switch Online library or those that already belong there. That would be cheating, and I don't approve of NTR (Nintendo Territory Raiding). Nintendo finally added another N64 game this month, by the by: Pokémon Stadium 2.

Here's the big ol' box of previous episodes if you're itching for more indignant sarcasm, and what red-blooded video game fan isn't?

Episode 1	Episode 2	Episode 3	Episode 4	Episode 5
Episode 6	Episode 7	Episode 8	Episode 9	Episode 10
Episode 11	Episode 12	Episode 13	Episode 14	Episode 15
Episode 16	Episode 17	Episode 18	Episode 19	Episode 20
Episode 21	Episode 22	Episode 23	Episode 24	Episode 25
Episode 26	Episode 27	Episode 28	Episode 29	Episode 30
Episode 31	Episode 32	Episode 33	Episode 34	Episode 35

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Pre-Select)

LucasArts / Nintendo
1996-12-03 (NA), 1997-03-01 (EU), 1997-06-14 (JP)
=10th N64 Game Released

History: Shadows of the Empire was an experiment by LucasArts to create a multimedia blitz around an original story set in the Star Wars universe between Episodes V (Empire Strikes Back) and VI (Return of the Jedi) in order to promote the Special Edition remasters of the first three movies. It follows a new character, the Rebel-aligned mercenary Dash Rendar (cousin of Blast Processing, who fell to the dark side (Sega)), as he helps familiar characters Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa rescue Han Solo from his capture by Boba Fett, recover the plans for the second Death Star, and foil the ambitious noble Prince Xizor who seeks to usurp Darth Vader as the Empire's second-in-command by being the one to bring Luke to the Emperor. Along with novels, comics, and its own soundtrack, Shadows of the Empire also received a video game adaptation that was arguably the most successful of the bunch: it was one of the earliest third-party N64 exclusives for a while before eventually also receiving a PC port. LucasArts would go on to develop four more games for N64: three are Star Wars-related, while the last is an Indiana Jones game. They all have reasonably good reputations (in fact, Shadows of the Empire might be the lowest rated) so I wouldn't mind including another on here in the future.

I legit figured I'd be beaten to the punch with this one given that, as an early N64 title, it was instrumental in establishing the system's identity around launch along with the likes of Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, with EB demo kiosks showing off this game's Battle of Hoth level just as often as it might a Bowser fight or some wiener flying around in a jetpack. This was a rental for me way back when; I seemed to recall beating it over a weekend and having a so-so time, and thus was never all that inclined to buy a copy. Still, as stated, it's a game I have a hard time separating from my inchoate vision of the N64 as established by its initial promotional push even with that superior PC port hanging around (which has FMV!) and figured it deserved a highlight on here before the Switch Online library got their grubby mitts all over it. (Also, if anyone's curious, yes I picked to do this one on this day of all days: August the 22nd be with you.)

16 Minutes In

I'd love if a future Star Wars movie had someone pop out of an AT-AT with a big pair of wirecutters, because how can they keep (literally) falling for this?

Like any Star Wars game on a new generation of hardware, the first thing we have to do is recreate the Battle of Hoth. Hoth is to Star Wars games what Triple H's hair was to WWE games: a means of benchmarking what was now possible with the technology of the era. It's also just one facet of the gameplay: the game's split between these flight sim stages and the third-person shooter on-foot sections, providing two mediocre flavors instead of just one. Still, if I preferred the flight parts I guess I could've just given this slot to Rogue Squadron instead: I'm a fan of SotE's ambition if nothing else. As you might expect, the Hoth battle basically boils down to destroying Imperial Probes and AT-STs with sustained fire (real easy to forget to break away in time though) while they aren't targeting you, and take down the beefier AT-ATs with the ol' tow cable trick. I'll give credit to the music and sound design that this introduction to the game felt very Star Wars-y, giving new players a familiar hook to latch onto not unlike a tow cable wrapped around an AT-AT's legs.

It took one restart—the Empire employed a sinister weapon that caused my speeder to be magnetized to enemy craft, which is why I kept flying into them if anyone asks—but I managed to complete the initial stage just as the first segment's timer concluded. I honestly played more like Trash Rendar than Dash Rendar here but I got the job done on the medium difficulty so I guess I can pat myself on the back. There, there.

32 Minutes In

What? Nobody told the Mighty Dash Rendar that there would be platforming! Time to move these meaty, blocky calves of mine.

The game's second stage sees you trapped in Hoth's Echo Base, unable to leave via your ship the Outrider until you've restarted the generators to open the hangar doors. Since the Empire's crawling all over the base by this point in the invasion, not to mention a few loose wampas, Dash must rely on his trusty blaster more than ever. The game lets you switch between first- and third-person here (I prefer the latter given there's some platforming) as you run around shooting Imperial snow-goons and the occasional probe droid and wampa. The gun combat is... well, it feels as perfunctory as the ship combat, where you're not so much aiming but spamming the fire button in the general direction of your foe and hoping your terrible accuracy is at least marginally better than theirs. Your blaster can fire endlessly but will eventually need to recharge after too many volleys; this is shown via a percentage meter.

I didn't notice any considerable drop in accuracy or power (maybe a smidge of the second) while shooting at close to 0%, so I've just been firing wildly at anything that pops into view. The galaxy of Star Wars won't invent accurate guns for another few thousand years at minimum, so at least we're all on the same playing field. I think I'm close to done with this stage, but it's real tough to avoid getting hit due to how much time it takes to bring anything down: I've been treating this game like a brawler so far, in the sense that damage is usually unavoidable so you just have to hope to hold onto your remaining lives long enough to complete the level (there's a few well-hidden extra lives though, just in case). I've also been accruing "challenge points": proto-achievements awarded for entirely obtuse goals. I got some for bringing down AT-ATs with the tow cables earlier, and now I'm finding them in random out-the-way places while roaming these icy tunnels. They also award bonus lives in the post-level rundowns, but I'm mostly just hunting around for them because I have the brain problems when it comes to arbitrary collectibles.

48 Minutes In

You can tell by the flamboyant way they die that every stormtrooper is played by a theater kid. Nice little nod to the movies.

Well, gang, things did not end well for ol' Dash Mento over here. After making a little more progress into Echo Base, activating the generators and moving through a room that was tearing itself apart as the base continuted to deteoriate, I was thrown into a sudden boss fight with an AT-ST. I thought these things were annoying to deal with when I had a speeder with a big cannon on the front. Against the AT-ST your basic blaster might as well be a laser hair removal appliance, so the only route to victory I could see was to painstakingly (and painfully) make my way around the boss room collecting the more powerful seeker ammo that dropped from crates. However, the seeker ammo has this odd quirk where it doesn't actually seek anything and just fires in a straight line very slowly, giving even the ponderously big AT-ST plenty of time to step out of the way.

I eventually ran out of lives but I did discover one curious blindspot in the AT-ST's offensive spread: directly underneath it. If I get down there and not get stomped somehow, I might be able to whittle its health down to 0% over, say, the length of an hour. As plans go I've had better but I'm really not enthused about repeating this whole stage again (there was even a mid-mission checkpoint; why have those if they don't count for anything?). Well, time to get back to whacking the wampa. And then after that maybe I'll have relieved enough stress to focus better on this damn Star War.

64 Minutes In

I ain't reading all that, but I'm happy for you. Or sorry it happened.

Shockingly, I didn't get stomped into paste by the AT-ST and even discovered that if you shoot at its cockpit from below it does a moderate amount of damage. I guess these anti-infantry walking turrets are weak to targets that are about the height of a standard human infantry unit, who would've thought. After attesting to my AT-ST besting I managed to escape Echo Base (after shooting some interlopers in the Outrider) and took off into space. However, my liberation from Hoth would not be complete until I'd destroyed enough Imperial TIE fighters waiting for any evacuating ships in orbit. This asteroid field had more TIEs than my local haberdasher and the most annoying of which were the bombers, as they would get in close and toss powerful green balls around like they were the Hulk's boxers during a workout. Honestly, though, this is the first level where I managed to get through the thing without a scratch, let alone losing all my lives which I'd done in the previous two. It certainly felt perilous with the amount of ships flying around but I guess the Outrider is made of sterner stuff.

I know, I know, "don't get cocky kid", but this was the last big hurdle for this particular portion of the game. After that I got about a minute into some cutscenes regarding Prince Xizor, the new villain. He talks briefly with his three henchmen—Kanine, Molaar, and the diabolical Bicuspid—about his plan to kill Luke (so I got that wrong) so Darth Vader looks like a bumbling idiot who cannot abduct one teenager for a creepy old man to torture, allowing Xizor to take his spot as Chief Imperial Boy-Wrangler. None of that is any concern of mine, however, as my time here is over.

How Well Has It Aged?: What a Piece of Junk. Nah, it's not so bad, but it does feel a bit half-baked. Like it's trying to be two different things and can only be half of either. That's not a terrible approach if you consider your audience are kids who can't imagine a Star Wars game where you're not blasting both stormtroopers and TIE fighters, but it did feel surprisingly rudimentary. Maybe that's also due to its age too: it's a better console FPS and flight sim than anything a 16-bit system could handle in 1996 or earlier, and that's largely because consoles had finally caught up to the level of tech that makes those genres tick. Inverted controls aside, the relative simplicity means it's still pretty accessible too. Just ignore everything happening on PC at the time and I've no doubt it was an impressive game for its era.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This. There are certainly better N64 Star Wars games out there but maybe if Dave Filoni decides to base the next D+ Star Wars TV show on Shadows of the Empire—perhaps once their eerie CGI face tech has improved enough to bring back the whole original trilogy cast—I could see a rerelease (or more likely a remake) doing the rounds. As it is, though, there's already a polished version of the PC port on GOG and I could see a Nightdive type just bringing that to the Switch instead and skipping the "Waiting Room of the Damned" that is the current state of those announced to join the N64 Switch Online library.

Retro Achievements Earned: 6 out of 38. No real surprises in the bunch besides maybe a few Hard/Jedi difficulty exclusives. Most are for completing the levels and also doing so with all available challenge points.

Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Random)

Realtime Associates / Midway (NA) & GT Interactive (EU)
1998-08-01 (NA), 1999-02-26 (EU)
=121st N64 Game Released

History: The second Gex game sees the TV-obsessed scaly hero enter the third-dimension, making the same evolution Rayman did for its sophomore incarnation. Gex jumps from TV station to TV station in order to recover the special remotes he needs to fight his nemesis Rez and save the bodacious Agent Xtra. Can Gex wisecrack his way through another adventure and make it to the end in one piece? (Do we want him to?) This would be 64 in 64's second game from Realtime Associates (they made the port instead of the original developers, Crystal Dynamics): since the first was Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey, Gex has much to live up to. Not to spoil too much, but I've already penciled in another of theirs for a 64 in 64 later this year. Our Midway counter is now at eight games, the seventh being last episode's Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, so they too have nowhere to go but up. Man, expectations really couldn't be higher, huh?

Well, it finally happened. I rolled the dice one too many times with this feature and ended up having to play a Gex game. There's two for N64—this, along with its sequel Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko—but that was still only around a 1-in-200 chance I'd ever be forced to contend with this sardonic salamander so I'll admit to deluding myself into a false sense of security. That said, of my rogue's gallery of Games I Really Did Not Want to Play on 64 in 64, Gex is at least better regarded than most of what's on there. It's also a 3D platformer, so even if it sucks I'm probably to find something about its spin on running around collecting trash fun because that's how my own particular lizard brain works. Besides, if I was that strongly averse to terrible humor, it'd make most of what write on Giant Bomb deeply hypocritical. So, taking the advice of one Mike Minotti and following the footsteps of one Jess O'Brien, I'm going to give Gex a fair tail shake. Hopefully I won't regret it.

16 Minutes In

Cool Struttin'. This is what the game looks like by the way, I didn't add a funhouse mirror filter to it or anything.

Well, we're definitely in budget 3D platformer land. Or maybe "we haven't figured out how 3D platformers work yet and we're too proud to rip off Mario wholesale" land perhaps, which is at least giving the game some credit. Thrown into a strange looking hub with no intro movie (maybe it's part of the attract mode, though I use the term very loosely here) or an explanation of the game and its rules, all there was to see are a few level entrances and some tutorial blocks that tell me how the camera's meant to work; it's still trash, mind, but in fairness this genre won't figure out cameras for quite some time yet. I entered into this Looney Tunes-inspired world of Bugs Bunny forests and Wile E. Coyote mesas and was offered three objectives: I've gone for the first, which involves climbing atop a "teetering rock". I've been wandering said level in a lost and bewildered state grabbing collectibles—which change into different collectibles once you've found a certain number—and trying not to get hit by flowers wielding enormous hammers. Meanwhile, this... loquacious lizard keeps piping up every few minutes about nonsensical bullshit like just wanting directions to the gift shop and the bathroom or being "trapped in Boy George's pants" (so what would that make you, Gex? A Coomer Chameleon?). My kingdom for a damn verbosity slider.

Honestly, putting the camera and garrulous geckos aside for a moment, it's not that bad as 3D platformers go. It's ugly as sin and has no rhyme or reason to its level design but while Gex doesn't have Mario's versatile moveset he does have useful abilities like a higher second jump (he essentially pogos off the ground with his tail), a means to hook himself onto nearby platform ledges and pull himself up (with his tongue no less, meaning there's three cunning linguist platformer heroes for N64 along with Chameleon Twist and Yoshi's Story, which is frankly three too many), and a tail swipe with not a whole lot of range but is at least broad enough to hit enemies on your periphery if, say, the camera's off pointing at something completely unrelated like a nature documentary instead of your controllable character, which might theoretically make it hard to line up attacks right. I'm about at the end of this first objective, so maybe I'll bash out the rest of this "world" and pop into the other level I saw that's instead based on horror movies.

32 Minutes In

Wait, is that a portrait of Seth MacFarlane? He's involved in this? That would explain all the reference humor.

A little breakdown of how progress works in this game: levels have the aforementioned three objectives that each award a red remote control. Collecting three of these total is necessary to open what I believe is the first compulsory level, possibly one with a boss to defeat, that'll then open a gate that leads to the rest of the game. Each level also has two bonus remote controls: one is hidden somewhere in the level (in the case of the first level, it's only hidden because the camera refuses to turn around and look at it) and the other is awarded for hitting all three collectible milestones: 30 for the first type, 40 for the second, and 50 for the third and last, making 120 all together. Collectibles aren't hard to come by at least, as most enemies and interactive objects will spit some out if you whack them. It's easy to die but extra lives are everywhere too: you'll get them for reaching the first two collectible milestones (and the third, if you've already received the remote) and from eating purple flies. I've now fully completed everything in Toon World and have moved onto the first horror level, Smellraiser. Yeah, that's... that's real clever.

The reptilian raconteur has since moved onto Cheech and Chong references (one appreciated by all the eight-year-olds playing the funny lizard game they got for Christmas) and, since starting the second level, random jabs at Joe Piscopo (after Sidekicks, hasn't that dude suffered enough?) and Rip Taylor. Just waiting for Henny Youngman and Slappy White to get their timely comeuppances next.

48 Minutes In

Sick skull flamethrower my dude. This guy's spitting more fire than [REFERENCE_19111_NOT_FOUND].

All right, we're almost an hour in, let's try a compliment sandwich. I like that the three sets of collectibles are themed to match each stage: in the Toon world they were carrots, cans of spinach, and TNT detonators, while in the horror world they're skulls, gravestones, and Jason masks. I don't like that this game is bad. I do like that they replaced the multi-purpose Mario long-jump performed with the Z+A button combo into a pointless flying kick that misses most of the enemies, because at least flying kicks look cool. There, I think that's evidence enough that I might be coming around on this game.

As a progress report, I'm about halfway done with the horror level: my current task is to destroy five office blood coolers (the previous level also had a "destroy five of something" and they take the longest to complete because the objects are often concealed around walls and such) and then there's one more goal after that. In more annoying news, the sesquipedalian squamata has been talking non-stop about the Matterhorn (he doesn't care for the place) and making Austin Powers references so I've just been trying to tune him out. I guess we're still a little too early for "my wife!" and "the cake is a lie!", but I'm sure that's something that upcoming Carbon Engine remaster can fix. After all, those references are as old now as the ones Gex was making back when this game was new.

64 Minutes In

Iguana Jones and the Not Particularly Well Hidden Emeralds

In this final block I managed to polish off the horror level Smellraiser—the last objective required pushing a random bookcase to find an elevator switch, so cheers to that nameless level designer—and was able to beat the first boss fight, Gilligex's Island (that's not even wordplay, c'mon), as well as an Indiana Jones-themed bonus level in which the goal is to collect 50 gems and the remote before the time limit expires. I'm now poised to move onto the next part of the game, but of course we won't be covering that here.

The issue with these levels is that they're very linear, so setting three different objective targets across the same path means you're going to repeating each level (or at least chunks of them) several times over. The game throws extra lives at you like they were Gex's comedy writing team feverishly tossing around cue cards with every pop culture reference from the late '80s they could recall, so the challenge level isn't particularly high. I say that having only experienced the first chapter of the game, though: once the pitfalls and other instant-death traps start showing up I'll more appreciate being able to bounce back in a hurry. The iconoclastic iguana had nothing much new to say during this stretch: in the Indiana Jones level he started talking like a trucker on a CB radio for reasons I couldn't even begin to fathom, such is my comparatively weak grasp of humor, but I did find an option in the pause menu's audio settings to turn the voices off if I ever felt like improving the game at any point. Kinda feels like easy mode though: if you're playing this game you're doing so because you have a guilty conscience about something and need to be punished, and silencing all those incessant gags won't bring you the absolution through self-flagellation you crave. I know what I crave, though, and it's to turn this game off.

How Well Has It Aged?: About as Well as These Ancient-Ass References. For any older video game player there are blindspots in their playing history borne from pure ignorance, blindspots from never finding the time to get around to the games that piqued their interest, and then there are those blindspots that exist because you've zero desire to look at them directly. I suppose the last of those is what Gex represents to me: the mascot platformer concept reaching a new acme of obnoxious by throwing in sub-MST3k namedrops on top of the usual Bubsy-tier sneering catchphrases. That said, it was never going to be as bad as I imagined it and that proved to be true: I don't think the Gex franchise is a serious contender in the 3D platformer pantheon but it's mostly unobjectionable outside of having a hero that never shuts up about Green Acres or Alan Alda in M*A*S*H or whatever random TV show or celebrity reference passes as a bon mot in these games.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: About as Likely as a Gex 4. Gex has now fallen into the safe hands of Square Enix, never one to throw their western studios under a bus for any reason, and those original three games are due to be remade and rereleased as a trilogy compilation in the near future for every current gen platform going. Since that also includes Switch, I can't picture a scenario where anyone would bother negotiating for its inclusion in the Switch Online library.

Retro Achievements Earned: 6 out of 32. Again, the majority of these are from completing the stages in full. Going by this set, the game has an impressive 25 levels between the normal ones, the boss fights, and the bonus stages. Other achievements include no-damage boss clears (possible, but still annoying) and random goals like collecting 30 extra lives (which I actually earned, as generous as the game is).

Current Ranking

Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
Wetrix (Ep. 21)
Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
40 Winks (Ep. 31)
Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)

5 Comments

Indie Game of the Week 333: Kaze and the Wild Masks

By Mento August 18, 2023 0 Comments

Given the milestone I was so tempted to just blog about Threes this week, but who and their grandmother hasn't already played that thing to death? So instead, we're back in 2D platformer territory for an unprecedented second week for Kaze and the Wild Masks, a gorgeous platformer that carefully straddles the line between unpleasantly hard and tolerably hard. Developed by Brazilian team PixelHive, Kaze and the Wild Masks sees the eponymous leporine heroine and her friend Hogo accidentally trigger the release of a villain, Typhoon, while exploring some ruins. This also transforms Hogo into a spirit, giving Kaze double the reason to fix her own mess. The game is set across four islands each with around seven normal courses, plus a boss fight and a tougher extra level that becomes available by collecting a certain amount of post-level bonus gems. Even with a smaller than average number of levels, the game makes up for it by offering a moderately high challenge level that'll keep you busy trying to master it.

The first thing that becomes apparent when starting Kaze and the Wild Masks is how much these developers were clearly pining for a new Donkey Kong Country Returns and decided to take matters into their own hands. Kaze and the Wild Masks is unapologetically aping the ape game in both its format and its mechanics, tweaking certain elements without necessarily making any significant sweeping changes to the formula. After all, Nintendo and Retro Studios are masters of their craft, and it's never a bad idea to learn at the feet of experts when starting out. Mechanically, you can see the similarities in how Kaze moves, using her ears in a manner similar to Dixie's locks to carefully control her descent or using her attack spin while moving off platforms for a bit of extra horizontal distance before applying a mid-air jump. The other half of the DKCR connection can frequently be seen in the level design, which borrows a few ideas from the older DKC games—there's at least three levels where you're constantly trying to keep the lights on to pacify some otherwise fast-moving enemies—and collectibles like a series of letters (K.A.Z.E., this time, rather than K.O.N.G.) and some well-hidden bonus challenge areas. As it's been almost ten years since the release of Giant Bomb's "Best Music of 2014" award-winner Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze (albeit only five since its Switch port), I can appreciate an Indie studio having the chutzpah to take a stab at the vacated throne, especially when that studio intends—as PixelHive has done—to pour a similar amount of polish into the finished product.

I have a soft spot for any rabbit hero game where they use their ears as hands. Man, that must hurt.

Kaze and the Wild Masks removes the animal companions of the Kong clan and instead replaces them with the titular wild masks: four masks that represent a tiger, a hawk, a shark, and a lizard. Each has a different movement set and a different environment in which they shine: the hawk mask, for instance, is a necessity for mostly aerial levels that might require threading through a course lined with brambles, while the shark offers something similar for underwater courses. The tiger, meanwhile, uses an air dash and wall climbing to greatly increase its traversal ability, allowing the game to pretend it's a different platformer for a while. Finally, the lizard is possessed with a double-jump and a fast diving attack, but is unfortunately also cursed with an uncontrollable urge to run without stopping: the lizard mask courses are subsequently auto-runners, the game's closest equivalent to DKC's notorious minecart levels. As someone who could only barely tolerate the amount of auto-scrollers in the DKC/DKCR series, it was an inauspicious realization that this game had chosen to double-down on levels with either an auto-moving feature like the lizard mask or an otherwise haste-encouraging timed element such as rising levels of lava/acid or a deadly tornado chasing you from the left side of the screen. This is especially true of the fourth and last world, Carrotland, as almost every stage had some variant of this exploration-averse timed aspect. Since the game moves pretty fast already, it meant that you either had to react to hazards and enemies at the speed of thought or else keep dying until you'd memorized all the steps—the jumps, the dives, the hovers, the spins—needed to mercifully bring the level to an end. If you're anything like the collectible nut I am, feel free to double the amount of time these levels take as you try to grab everything in addition to not dying. In the end, I'm thankful the game is as short as it is; I would've been about ready to throw in the towel regardless.

Kaze and the Wild Masks does have many strong features though. The first and most obvious are the visuals, with its characters drawn and animated with a high level of detail. Kaze is an expressive protagonist as she performs her many moves, with or without a mask, and the enemies are all vegetables mutated by magic (a relatable foe for kids and picky eaters alike) to become suitably monstrous, sporting huge grimaces and shifty eyes. The level designs look great too, even if the game's not quite as adventurous as its DKCR inspiration with all of that game's silhouettes and other flights of artistic fancy, and the unambiguous, brightly-colored sprites makes it easy to pick out valuables and other points of interest in the stage while playing. If anything's obfuscated, it's those bonus area entrances and that's largely by design. It can be a little uneven with its checkpoints—most courses only have one, and it's sometimes placed early in a level for some reason—but it does give you bonus hearts that can absorb one hit and the air control for the glide is sufficient for assisting with troublesome jumps, giving the player a handful of boons in their corner. Worth noting that it won't let you glide if you bounce off an enemy; a limitation some of the later level design often uses to trip you up. The masks, too, often take some getting used to as they'll remove the default glide and switch it with something else: I was constantly trying to hit the glide in the lizard form as a force of habit, only to suddenly divebomb into the great blue yonder.

I mean, it's possible I'm only imagining the amount of DKC influence at play here.

Though the game's difficulty is certainly higher than I'd prefer—though about right for a DKCR protégé—and there's far too much a preponderance for the aforementioned auto-scrollers (and also the load times are oddly long for a PS4 pixel art game), I had a great time with Kaze and the Wild Masks largely due to how slick it was for a smaller Indie platformer. That includes the variety in level formats and backdrops, the mess of collectibles to find (there's gems, which unlock a prize if you find at least 100 per level; the KAZE letters that reveal a part of the background story if you collect all four; and two halves of a green gem awarded in bonus areas that, once all have been found, reveals a possible sequel hook), the overall high quality of its presentation, and a svelte runtime that allows the game to gracefully bow out once it has exhausted all its ideas rather than reiterate them too often. I don't care for time trials or no-damage runs, but they're there as optional targets all the same (optional, that is, unless you're trying to Platinum this monster, in which case you have more balls than I do). If you're jonesing for another Donkey Kong Country game and/or much prefer rabbits over gorillas, Kaze seems like an easy recommend. Just keep in mind it's more reflex-intensive than most and to never underestimate how mean a platformer this cute can be.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

P.S.: I've included a short clip of one of the auto-runner stages to give you some idea of the accuracy required:

Kaze's first auto-runner level. Starting to think this game might be on the tough side.https://t.co/2x4xsNpsOl pic.twitter.com/VBpNK9SWaL
— Mento (@GBMento) August 18, 2023

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Game OVA Season 2: Episode 3 — Magical Hat

By Mento August 15, 2023 1 Comments

The Property

Magical Hat is an anime that aired at the end of the 1980s about a boy named Hat, possibly magical, who is the descendant of a great hero that once sealed the devilish kingdom of Devildom (oh, I get it) with its evil king inside. However, Hat finds himself trapped in that very same country of monsters and must use his newly awakened magical powers to stay one step ahead of his enemies and protect his friends.

I'll get more into the specifics with the "Anime" section below, but suffice it to say this is a pretty kid-oriented show and something of a departure for this feature and its emphasis on the type of violent, prurient anime that would find itself localized by something like Manga Entertainment or AD Vision. I felt like something cute and uncomplicated after the macho tokusatsu shenanigans of last episode's Armored Police Metal Jack and I'm still not ready for more R-rated highschoolers like Devil Hunter Yohko quite yet. Best to keep things somewhat varied here on Game OVA, I figure. Anyway, I have a particular reason as to why I'm curious about this anodyne magical kid show that'll become clearer once we hit the "Game" segment of this entry.

The Cast

Hat: The protagonist. A regular human kid granted the powers of the ancient hero Magical Hat through a familial connection. Ostensibly a hero himself, though as The Twilight Zone has taught us there's an inherent danger to giving godlike powers to a pre-pubescent boy ruled by his own arbitrary and cruel whims.
Hotdog: The canine Prince of the Underworld. Despite the title, and the fact his dad King Aleph is a badass, he's a meek and cowardly sort though still quick to anger whenever he gets abused or mistaken for a dog. Usually the victim of bullying, especially by Kowaru.
Jaku: The antagonist. A noble in the Underworld, he's the one most eager to take the fight back to the human race that sealed the monster kingdom so many years ago. His powers of deception make him a shrewd and dangerous foe.
Kowaru: Jaku's son, a kitsune-like monster with a bratty personality but a similar amount of cunning as his father. Harasses Hat and his party every chance he gets.
Doguu: Jaku and Kowaru's faithful servant, based on those Japanese doguu statues with the sleepy eyes. Can float and wield his paper-thin arms like whips. Ends most sentences with "doguu". Kinda reminds me of Zeruel from Evangelion.
Grampa Tau: An elderly human that becomes acquainted with Hat and Hotdog after the Underworld launches its attack on the surface. Very knowledgeable and occasionally helpful, but also has an uncomfortable weird old man vibe.
Spin: The show's heroine, introduced in the third episode. She's an independent, resourceful gal fond of sweets and unlicensed firearms that's taken it upon herself to rid her home, Rocky Island, of its sudden and deleterious fascination with gold.
Robog: A tiny robot egg thing built by Grampa Tau, also introduced in the third episode. Is capable of transforming into any mechanical object. Ends most sentences with "nya", an affectation usually reserved for anime catgirls. Deeply troubling.

The Anime

The Magical Hat anime ran for thirty-three episodes between October 1989 and July 1990, which is roughly analogous to the timeframe for the first season of The Simpsons in case, I guess, you were curious what Japan was watching around the same time. It was created by Studio Pierrot, directed by Akira Shigino, and written by one Kenji Terada.

This is the second Studio Pierrot anime we've covered on Game OVA so far, the first being Episode 5's Eien no Filena/Eternal Filena and its six OVAs. They're another major force in the anime world, being the studio behind Naruto, Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, YuYu Hakusho, and Great Teacher Onizuka (a show I love and will shamelessly reference at any opportunity). Founded in 1979, they were behind a lot of anime for younger audiences in the 1980s but eventually branched out to the more teen-focused fare above. For those outside the anime bubble, they might be best known for their work on The Legend of Korra, the successor to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the '80s French co-production The Mysterious Cities of Gold (though honestly, both are pretty anime-adjacent). As far as their video game credentials are concerned, they made the Blue Dragon, Puzzle & Dragons, and Power Stone anime adaptations (real curious about the last of those) as well as directing the cutscenes for Keio Flying Squadron for Sega CD (coming to a Mega Archive CD real soon) and its Saturn sequel.

Akira Shigino is a long-time director at Pierrot and was working on the sextuplet slice-of-life comedy Osomatsu-kun (which is another property eligible for this feature, incidentally) around the same time as Magical Hat. His most recent work is the adorable kids' show Dino Girl Gauko, about a girl that turns into a dinosaur when she gets angry, which streamed on Netflix in 2019 and 2020. Kenji Terada, meanwhile, has become somewhat of a persona non grata on Giant Bomb of late. The scenario writer for the first three Final Fantasy games and the Sega CD RPG Dark Wizard (also coming to a Mega Archive CD real soon), he's additionally responsible for writing the story for—dun, dun, duuuun!—Kemco's Batman: Dark Tomorrow for GameCube and Xbox. If half of Magical Hat's runtime is just the hero cuffing bad guys, we'll know why. Unsurprisingly, he was also a busy anime writer before and after his video game dalliances, with projects including Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (one of the mecha shows that, along with Episode 4's Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, became the basis of the Americanized anime Robotech), surreal wrestling superhero parody Kinnikuman (a.k.a. Ultimate Muscle), and influential supernatural rom-com Kimagure Orange Road. (His involvement might've been another factor behind this choice of subject, given we're just days removed from the conclusion of The Dark Blight Club.)

Anyway, as with last episode's Armored Police Metal Jack, we're just going to take the first three episodes of the show as a case study. I gotta stop turning these things into gargantuan 5,000+ word affairs or no-one's gonna read them. (No-one's going to read this either, but at least I can kid myself that it's some SEO issue.)

Episode 1

So let's establish the story here, as revealed by the first episode. Hat is a regular human kid, dissatisfied with the boring status quo of his life. Due to a mishap, he falls down a giant hole connected to the "Underworld": a land filled with monsters. This land and its animal-people were sealed many centuries ago by a human hero, and yet despite their predicament not all the population living down there are hostile towards mankind and are simply looking to live in peace. In fact, Hat quickly befriends the floppy-eared, canine-like crybaby prince of the monster kingdom's royal family, though he's also targeted by malign elements looking to galvanize the kingdom into declaring war on the world of humans as revenge for their imprisonment. Now, it's been a hot minute since I played any Undertale, but I was watching most of this first episode with the weirdest feeling of déja vu. Toby Fox has always been transparent that he drew the ideas for Undertale from a great many sources, from EarthBound to Moon: Remix RPG Adventure to Live a Live to Falcom's Brandish, so this being a deliberate pull is entirely possible. I kinda want someone to ask him about it, but how do you fit that into a conversation without it sounding like an accusation?

The first episode has plenty of action in addition to all its exposition dropping. Hat falls into the Underworld and immediately makes an enemy of the show's antagonist, Jaku. Jaku's in a rivalry with the established monarch, King Aleph, and has kidnapped Aleph's son Prince Hotdog to coerce the king into opening the barrier between the Underworld and the human world during an eclipse, an opportunity that comes along once every 63,000 years. Hat and Hotdog end up sharing the same cell and a burgeoning friendship is born between the two, even if Hotdog is something of a wiener (so to speak). We're also introduced to Kowaru, Jaku's fox-like "Bowser Junior"-ass son and main henchperson, and Jaku's floating servant Doguu. Towards the end of the episode, Jaku's plan to break the barrier goes off without a hitch despite Aleph's interference and the overworld island with the Underworld gateway is transformed by the dissolution of the barrier magic. Hat, Hotdog, and the elderly human "Grampa" Tau (his original Japanese name is "Tau jii-san", which can also just mean "Old Man Tau") escape Kowaru and Doguu, who are riding around on giant biomechanical Petamo Beasts (these names all come from the fan translation by the way, so I've no idea how accurate they are), until they find themselves at a temple dedicated to the human hero that originally sealed the monsters, Magical Hat. The spirit of Magical Hat grants Regular Hat his powers due to the latter being the former's distant descendant, and Hat's able to fight off the two villains and rescue Hotdog in his powerful new body. The episode ends with many questions left for the series to answer: Who is this shady Grampa Tau figure and where did he come from? What will Jaku do in response to learning about Magical Hat's revival? What happened to Hat's parents, last seen when their helicopter was disintegrated when the barrier collapsed? Where did Aleph vanish off to? And will Hotdog ever grow a pair?

Surprised by how this magical fantasy show immediately establishes that helicopters and video game consoles exist. The technology level remains ambiguous throughout the series.

For being a tiny little scaredy-cat that someone unfortunately named Hotdog, he's got an unusual amount of pride.

Jaku (the big green guy) fighting King Aleph (the small, on-fire guy). This was a pretty neat fight, displaying Jacku's trickery and Aleph's invulnerability.

The island, mid-transformation. Lot of Stars of David in this show. I guess as magical symbols go, it's easier for kids to draw than a pentagon.

Kowaru and Doguu here, summing up the entire essence of the show.

For a show that I figured was a side-project of Studio Pierrot, the sequence where the island is transforming due to the collapsed barrier had a lot going on visually between the moving earth and random magical lasers firing off everywhere, making for quite a spectacle. I'm slowly acclimating to the character designs in this show—there's a lot of kooky cast members already, and Jaku in particular has some monstrous Jabba the Hutt vibes with his enormous tongue and weird teeth—so it doesn't much resemble the cartoons we had over in the west during the 1980s, which (in case you weren't around to witness it firsthand) were mostly half-assed trash. Or, to put it more kindly, the level of animation you'd expect from studios with tiny budgets and too short deadlines that was hoping to recoup most of its expenses through toy sales.

Episode 2

We start with Kowaru and Doguu reporting in to Jaku, who advises the two of them to steal Magical Hat's magical hat, as he'll be powerless without it. OK, so my two main issues with this is that I thought Magical Hat is so-called because his name is Hat and he happens to be magical, not because he has a magical hat. The second is that it's not a hat but a turban, which is an entirely different taxonomy of headwear. However, we're still early days with this anime so I'm prepared to admit any errors on my part. Hat, meanwhile, has humbly taken on the mantle (or hat) of the incredible powers of his forebear and uses it to... basically fuck around? First it's psychically making hats float around like he was staging a live re-enactment of Hatris (makers of that Taron Egerton Tetris biopic take note) and then it's almost squishing Hotdog under an enormous crown, which is some unexpected symbolism on the crushing responsibility of his role as a future monarch. He then fills Grampa Tau's house with popcorn after the old man is bewitched by the promise of a shady hair-growth tonic in the supplements of his newspaper. I realize that was a whole lot of sentences about basically nothing, but I'm concerned this show is beginning to settle into being a madcap cartoon made for the terminally attention-deficit rather than focusing too much on story arcs going forward.

Fortunately, the story picks up again. Grampa Tau is captured by Kowaru and Doguu and so are Hat and Hotdog after they come looking for him. Hat's forced to contend with another Petamo Beast, the crablike King Lob (I guess King Crab was taken), as well as the returning ape-like G-Konger. Using his magic, he switches G-Konger's allegiance and the two Beasts fight it out while Hat and Hotdog make a run for it. However, after meeting up with Tau, the villains' plan is revealed: they're using the vast underground wind tunnel network which has always been there to blow Magical Hat's magical hat (and it is magical, my mistake) off and render him powerless. The villain duo steal the hat and stick it in the most heavy metal kitchen appliance I've ever seen to destroy it completely, stopping the threat of Magical Hat forever. Except, actually, Grampa Tau had made a fake magical hat in his spare time and switched it while the group was being tossed around everywhere by the wind. Now, before anyone calls foul on this "deus ex milliner" development, Grampa Tau's house (which has a big hat on it) was absolutely full of hats—they were the ones being messed around with by Hat earlier—so I appreciate the groundwork in establishing the old man as someone with a keen interest in hats. Jaku, to his credit, recognizes the real magical hat wouldn't be that easily destroyed, even if the instrument of destruction was as cool as it was.

He's right, those are hats.

Grampa Tau's clearly the brains of the show. (He still falls for it.)

I like that the Petamo Beasts all have these boss title drops whenever they show up. It's so the kids know which toys to beg their parents for.

I need this food processor for my kitchen immediately. Think of the Satanic smoothies you could make with that thing.

A lot of casual ageism on this show. Tau gets no respect. Nor should he.

Pissed off, Kowaru sends an enormous Doguu mecha called Gigantor to stomp on Grampa Tau's stupid hat house and the episode's big final battle begins. While trying to stomp Hotdog, Hat casts a spell to make Hotdog similarly huge so he can fight Gigantor on even ground, but of course he immediately bails due to cowardice. Hat can't shrink Gigantor until he's removed the previous enchantment, a limitation I'm sure won't come up again, which means he's screwed when Gigantor picks him up and throws him away after Kowaru steals his hat. Hat lands near where Hotdog is cowering and the two come up with an incredible idea: Hat will use the water pump hidden inside Hotdog's backpack (what is this, Super Mario Sunshine?) to wash the Doguu statue—since it's made of dry earth, it'll quickly melt into mud after being splashed. (Wait, what was the bad guys' plan if it started raining?) The episode ends on a comical note with Hat leaving Hotdog's gigantism intact to stop him from being able to sleep inside the house as punishment for his desertion. Wait, did I say these two were friends?

Episode 3

The third episode starts with Grampa Tau getting a message in a bottle from his associate, the flatulent Ken-chan the Mystic (I wonder if he has any relation to this Ken-chan?). Someone's turning people into gold over on Rocky Island, to the west of the central Usom Island that our heroes occupy, so Hat and Hotdog decide to set sail and solve the problem. They crash the boat after turning it into a plane because Hat was too impatient with how long the sailing was taking and the duo find gold scattered across the beach; the island itself in the process of turning to gold, and given the kid logic governing this show I suspect that means it'll start to sink underwater before too long. Hat has completely stopped giving a shit about Ken-chan or Rocky Island's problem because he's too busy collecting all the gold, but soon runs afoul of a pitfall dug by a new character: Spin, a fiery heroine with pigtails and a big ol' shotty she points at Hat and Hotdog. She demands some answers, so Hat being the gentleman that he is first transforms her shotgun into a daikon radish and makes her cry by yelling in her face. She's not that much of a pushover though, and goes on to explain her sad background: her sister was a normal, loving sibling until she discovered the local Jizo statues had turned to gold, tempting her to sell them off to a businessman and then join an all-joshi wrestling federation to win the gold championship belt. Very relatable backstory. Anyway, she's eager to find the source of all this gold transformation nonsense affecting her island and agrees to help the duo.

On their way to Ken-chan's place, the group is accosted by more Petamo Beasts and—wouldn't you know it?—Kowaru shows up to steal Hat's hat again. His magical one, that is. Things get a little complicated (and a lot gross) when foxboy falls in love at first sight with Spin. After getting his hat back while Kowaru is distracted trying to bust a move to impress the first named female character on the show, Hat takes out the enemy Petamo Beasts and the villains are defeated once again. However, an earthquake strikes and Doguu lets slip the mastermind's identity: the island's Underworld boss, Gold Baboon. Kowaru and Doguu meet with Gold Baboon soon after, explaining their presence there is only to chase after Magical Hat, and Gold Baboon decides to help them out by lending them his (clean) underwear. Seeking reinforcements themselves, Hat, Hotdog, and Spin contact Grampa Tau and he agrees to send over his trump card: the Ultimate Deadly Assistant-Machine, Robog. Robog proves to be less than impressive when he arrives—the dude looks like my man Dizzy the Egg, except he's about a foot tall and says "nya" like a cat for some reason—but he's determined to prove his power by using his incredible ability of transforming into a teapot. Hat, ever the diplomat, decides he's immediately done with this tiny egg bullshit and tries to abandon it. This is the point where Kowaru and Doguu show up, wielding Gold Baboon's underpants that can turn anything contained within to solid gold—which raises a lot of questions that I'm pretty sure I don't want the answers to—to extort the magical hat. Hat's quick thinking has him ask Robog to turn into a fan to deflect the pants's golden wind and then uses his own magic to transform the cliff the bad guys are standing on into a SpaceX rocket, causing Kowaru and Doguu to be defeated by a rapid unplanned disassembly. The episode ends by promising more adventures on Rocky Island as it fades to credits, but I think we've seen enough.

There's no character introduction that can't be improved by having them point a shotgun at a child's face.

Truly a revolting development.

Gold Baboon, a very imposing figure. More so without his underpants, I'd imagine. I mean, I would rather not imagine.

Guys, we've only had a female character on the show for five fucking minutes. Let's have less of the May-December outta you in particular, gramps.

Magical Hat finally has itself a mascot character! Thanks, I hate it!

I'm glad the third episode was able to finish introducing all the main characters we see during the intro—Hat, Hotdog, Spin, Robog, and Grampa Tau—so it feels like we've had enough of a vertical slice of this show's mayhem in action. It's very much a kids' show of the era, never really slowing down on the action or humor to prevent their younger audience from losing interest. For a protagonist, Hat is a magnificently peevish asshole more prone to abusing his powers than using them to help his friends, and the rest of the heroes seem just as petty. Honestly, there were some major Dragon Ball (the original, not Z) vibes from the ensemble: overpowered idiot kid hero, a mostly useless short comic relief guy, a helpful but frequently sus old man, and a feisty girl with a knack for gadgets (I dunno who Robog fills in for; maybe Chiaotzu since he's small, white, cute, and I could see him self-destructing eventually). Definitely not objectionable as Saturday morning cartoon fare goes, and I did find a few of the lines amusing—kudos to the localization I was using for getting the jokes across. Oh, and before I forget, here's the earwormy opening.

The Game(s)

Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken ("The Great, Surprising, Turbo Adventure of Magical Hat" is how I'm going to take a swing at that) is a 1990 Sega Mega Drive game and the only video game adaptation for Magical Hat, at least as far as I'm aware. It's a platformer published by Sega and developed by Vic Tokai, a major telecommunications company in Japan that also dabbled in game development during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras and a little while beyond. Their other games include Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode, Clash at Demonhead, and The Krion Conquest for NES, the Shinseiki Odysselya RPGs for SNES, and... uh, the Playboy Karaoke Collection Volumes 1 and 2 for Saturn (what?).

We're technically only covering one game this time but, as you'll soon see, it's actually two. Kinda.

Welcome to Magical Hat: The Video Game! All the stars are here. Well, besides Spin. Girls don't play video games, after all.

The game starts with this cutscene of the island drifting apart, much like it did in the show. I don't remember them being quite so... individually themed.

Hotdog and Grampa Tau give us the 411 on the show's plot and our role in same as Hat, just in case you bought this game without ever watching an episode. Hey, maybe it was a rental.

Video Game Hat is... not the most handsome protagonist, but he's got the moxie at least.

When accompanied by Robog, Hat can throw him to take out enemies at a distance. Robog returns after a few seconds. He'll also act as a shield: without him, you die in one hit.

Your standard melee attack has an unimpressive range, but it's usually enough for these slow enemies.

In addition to his attacks, Hat can also extend his aerial coverage with this flutter jump. It won't get him any higher but it will let him glide in a manner of speaking.

These wobbly red tubes can fling you a fair distance, but only if you land on top of it.

This is what Hat looks like when he croaks. Kind of overselling it if you ask me.

It took a while to figure out how to get up to that platform on the upper right (the area down right is just a lava pit).

Turns you just use the top of this tree, which is obviously a platform you can stand on. Clearly. (You cannot stand on that other tree, by the way, or in fact any of the trees we've seen so far.)

What's truly mystifying is figuring out where the goal is. I feel like it's gotta be around here somewhere.

One of Magical Hat's bonus games. I hope I win some pills, I'm getting a headache.

The second level is a vertical one, and if you push against this reflecting wall you can very slowly make your way up.

Another of the post-level mini-games. This is a variant of Ghost Leg. If you have five coins, you can spend them all to ensure victory.

The mini-game coins aren't too hard to find, if you're thorough. Of course, if you put yourself in danger and die while trying to farm them for the chance of extra lives it's not the most productive process.

The first world boss is none other than Gold Baboon! No sign of his underpants, so I guess he's going commando in this fight. Might be time to bounce already.

All right, we've danced around the spooky elephant in the room long enough. Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken did eventually see a localization for the American Sega Genesis and European Sega Mega Drive but it's undergone a few cosmetic changes, to put it mildly...

Yeah, it's Decap Attack. Probably obvious enough if you came here from the Forums. I'm sure you would've been way ahead of me on this one regardless; this community's a bunch of damn nerds. (Says the guy penning an anime x video game crossover feature.)

If you wondered what this body part island floating apart business was about, I hope you now have your answer.

Man, everyone got a glow up with this new visual treatment.

Beyond the new kooky horror aesthetic the game plays more or less the same as it did before.

I've always liked Chuck D. Head's standard melee attack. Just horrifying.

I'm glad that, even with the complete visual overhaul, it's still almost impossible to see certain platforms. Staying true to the original's spirit.

It still has our old bendy friend here, the uncanniness of which is probably better suited to this art style.

Glad to see the game is still as mysterious as ever with its level exits. Just where the hell is it?

Does it do right by the anime? Well, maybe more so in its original form, but there's still a lot missing from the show. For one, the Petamo Beasts were treated like Pokémon that Hat could capture and use against his enemies, but I got as far as the first boss and didn't see an option to use one. Magical Hat also doesn't use magic at all, nor is his hat a Mario style power-up, so I wonder if Vic Tokai did any research at all before producing some Alex Kidd/Bonk the Cavebaby knockoff that vaguely corresponded to the show's look. Not to say it was too half-assed either; they clearly had confidence in this game if they selected it for a global release and put this much work into altering its look. There are certainly worse platformers on Genesis, and even among the good ones few can match Decap Attack's personality and volume of quirky ideas.

That's going to do it for this episode of Game OVA. Hopefully this was an intriguing look into the secret origins of a Sega game that continues to see rereleases on modern platforms and the esoteric magical superhero kids' show that was its indirect progenitor. I'd like to do more of these on Game OVA in the future; specifically, games based on anime that were scrubbed of its unworkable licensed material and underwent massive visual changes for their international releases. For our next adventure, though, I'm planning to get back into anime for older kids with something martial arts-themed (no, it's not Ranma ½). Hope to see you there, ready to wax on and wax off as I wax poetic about another ancient anime everyone's consigned to the collective memory hole. Hat's all, folks!

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Indie Game of the Week 332: 3000th Duel

By Mento August 11, 2023 0 Comments

I can't speak for duels, but this is probably the 3000th explormer we've featured on Indie Game of the Week. What can I say? I have a type. 3000th Duel, from South Korean studio Neopopcorn, is an explormer-RPG hybrid that, as is almost customary at this point, has a few Soulsian affectations to its mechanics and world design. Dropped into a misty forest with amnesia and an unremovable mask, the warrior protagonist just generally mills around a large open map looking for their memories, picking up treasure and taking down corrupted undead monsters in the process. It's definitely riffing on the Dark Souls narrative blueprint of "don't show or tell, screw anyone looking for plot", hiding what lore it has in infrequent memory pick-ups (they look like floating purple orbs, as do many things in this game) and item descriptions. I'm maybe somewhere between a third and halfway through—it's a pretty dense game—and I couldn't tell you what's going on besides that something real gnarly happened to this place while you were out chilling in the woods.

Mechanically, we're looking at something similar to Salt and Sanctuary or the IGAvanias with its seamless merging of an action-platformer and a semi-complex action-RPG. You'll find the usual traversal upgrades out in the world, meted out at semi-regular intervals, but each one will also open a new section of the skill tree for you to pour points into. Said points can be found in chests but are usually acquired as level up bonuses, along with stat points you can distribute between the four parameters: vitality (HP), strength (damage), mind (MP and magic power), and activity (stamina). You can rely on both weapons and spells in combat, the latter burning off a mana resource that can be restocked at save points or via some rare items, and two of the first upgrades you get include a charge attack and a special attack (which runs off its own power gauge that is filled by landing normal attacks on enemies). There's many spell types but only three general weapon types: the fast blade, the slow broadsword, and the well-rounded spears. The blades also have good coverage in the space surrounding you but have limited reach, while the inverse is true of spears (and the broadswords are somewhere in the middle). It's a familiar combat system for any IGAvania veterans who opted for a greatsword for its convenient overhead strike arc over a more straightforward spear or rapier, while the skill tree upgrades tend to include a lot of weapon-type-specific buffs for those wishing to prioritize; the downside here is that the skill trees haven't really been well thought out with "preferred type" in mind as the overly linear trees often means having to acquire the upgrades for other weapon types to reach the ones you want. Subsequently, you might as well just stick with whatever your strongest weapon happens to be unless the boss is specifically weak to something.

Wow, you're big. Now bring your head down here so I can hit it.

This sloppiness is sadly ubiquitous. The localization leaves much to be desired though it's never incomprehensible, it's very hard to correctly gauge the hitboxes of weapon and enemy attacks and their visual flairs do nothing to help, every character model has this weird sheen to it that makes it look plastic, there's bosses that can kill you in three hits and will quickly outpace your healing unless you get real good at dodging their attacks, and for a grim fantasy dystopia setting full of undead monsters and a brooding hero (or maybe heroine, I've not been able to ascertain) it's awfully cute with its compact "chibi" character graphics. Despite all this, and for the fact it's an utterly unremarkable "one of those" in so many ways, there's a solid gameplay core here and a considerable amount of content that suggests the developers keenly understood the type of game they were making. Whether that's plainspoken map design that highlights chests and other valuables and offers plenty of player markers besides, the risk vs. reward that comes with using well-placed charged attacks for the combo damage that gets stacked on if you manage to fully hit an enemy with it or opting instead for a hit-and-run combination of normal and special attacks, balancing weapon and spell types to pick those best suited for the boss at hand (an aerial boss, for example, is best fought with a sword as its arc aims upwards) by letting you equip two sets at once that you can switch at any time, or choosing to save the powerful but finite spells when the boss is on its last and most damaging phase or using them early to quickly push the fight into its final stages to preserve your curatives. If you have the patience for it, you can farm drops from enemies for some decent equipment early on or come back later with certain accessories equipped to make those drops more forthcoming. There's a great many accessory types to find and equip, including stat boosts and item find bonuses, and since enemy elemental damage can add itself to normal damage for a devastating amount of combined harm resistances should also play a part in any boss strategy.

I dunno, I wouldn't call 3000th Duel the most nuanced or distinct game working this particular beat, but while it can be unnecessarily grueling (many enemies have become HP sponges at the part of the game I'm at) there's a competency to what it's doing and a remarkably wide arc to its character progression mechanics to fit what's shaping up to be a 20-hour-plus runtime. That the bosses have been nightmares so far probably speaks better to its difficulty curve than if they were all pushovers, and for what it's worth the game does throw a lot of consumables at you in case you need an edge in a fight that's ideally already going your way (items aren't easy to replenish until you find the vendor some 30% the way into the game's progression). You do have the renewable Estus Flask equivalent to fall back on, which are these cool gothic grimoire things, but you don't get many of those and each one heals about as much as a single boss attack so heal-scumming through a boss fight isn't exactly feasible. You're better off relying on your dash evade and memorizing boss patterns for openings, much like in any Souls type. The platforming became a lot more palatable once I'd acquired the air dash and I imagine it will again with the double-jump, which looks to be the next one in the sequence if the skill tree screen is accurate, and you have the usual obstacle courses full of moving platforms, spike traps, and awkwardly-placed flying monsters to trip you up. (Spikes aren't insta-kills, thankfully, but they do take a significant fixed percentage of your HP so damage boosting through them is ill-advised.)

Guys only want one thing and it's disgusting (well annotated map screens in explormers).

I'm going to see where this game goes for a while longer. I think if you're a devotee of its particular combination of Soulsian high-challenge horrors and spending hours filling in every gap in a gargantuan map in case there's some rare weapon or stat boost hiding in that negative space, then this game should keep you in good company for a long while even if it's nothing much new. For anyone else, it might be a hard game to recommend over something in the same genre with more polish or innovation given how competitive the Indie market for these games have become. Me? I'm in backtracking hog heaven right now, even if these unfair bosses are starting to grind my gears a smidge. Yeah, yeah, skill issue, I get it. Not my first rodeo. Or even my 3000th.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Pretty much the same criticism applies right up to the end. The boss difficulty is no joke, especially when you consider that hitbox ambiguity, but just generally exploring and acquiring those traversal upgrades felt very classic IGAvania. I ultimately didn't bother with the free DLC because it sounds like it ratchets up the difficulty several times over and I have other things to do this month besides putting myself in an anger coma.

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Mega Archive: Part XXXIV: From Golden Axe III to WarpSpeed

By Mento August 8, 2023 4 Comments

Welcome to another action-packed installment of the Mega Archive: a chronological exploration of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive as I continue to work on its representation in our Wiki. This Mega Archive pushes us past the halfway point of 1993 and into the latter half of that year, and largely focuses on western games released across July. In fact, it's probably the case that most of the entries moving forward will have a heavier emphasis on western-developed games: the Mega Drive was getting pummeled in its native Japan—the aging NES was outselling it in 1993—but was making up for that deficit and more overseas, especially in the States, hence the greater presence of western studios.

As for the games this time, well, there's one particularly cursed furry elephant in the room we'll need to address but otherwise it's a fairly solid assortment, including an unexpected port of one of the best PC sims, a couple major arcade properties seeing third entries that were exclusive to the Mega Drive, and the debut of one of the system's most beloved multiplayer racing game franchises. If nothing else, the eclectic nature of this week's releases highlights how versatile a system the Mega Drive is becoming, not settling on any one genre or any chase-the-leader business as it inches closer to the era of its peak popularity. Best of all? No sports this time. A rare oasis. (They'll be back in force come the fall, not to worry.)

To consult past entries or just to see how far we've progressed through the Mega Drive's library, be sure to check out The Official Mega Archive and Mega Archive CD Spreadsheets™. I plan to include the rest of 1993's release schedule (and several upcoming Mega Archive entries) just to ensure nothing gets left behind again.

Part XXXIV: 441-450 (June '93 - July '93)

441: Golden Axe III

Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
JP Release: 1993-06-25
NA Release: 1996-05-01
EU Release: N/A
Franchise: Golden Axe
Genre: Brawler
Theme: Kicking Gnomes to Get Your Shit Back
Premise: Enchanted hatchets and powerful magic are flung around with reckless abandon in a grim fantasy world that definitely doesn't have a "don't axe, don't spell" policy.
Availability: The English version once belonged exclusively to the Sega Channel, but these days you can buy it via the Sega Genesis Classics compilation on last-gen consoles or directly from Steam.
Preservation: For a long while, Golden Axe III was the "lost" Golden Axe, talked about by the western Golden Axe fanbase in hushed tones regarding its new, expanded cast and other features gleaned from magazine previews. It's not clear why Sega didn't release the third game in their reliably popular (albeit maybe not as popular as Streets of Rage) brawler series—rumors were they weren't satisfied by it—but it did eventually see an official NA localization via the ephemeral Sega Channel service, hence the long delay between its JP and NA releases. The original cast is gone, though the substitutes for Tyris Flare and Ax Battler more or less look identical, and you have some anti-hero types in the mix like the pantherman Chronos "Evil" Rait and the giant Proud Cragger (also my Tinder handle). It also has a new branching path system to its level progression, and an alternative final boss depending on your actions.
Wiki Notes: Mostly just needed text. Releases and screenshots only required minor edits.

442: Eliminate Down

Developer: Aprinet
Publisher: Soft Vision
JP Release: 1993-06-25
NA Release: N/A
EU Release: N/A
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
Theme: Invaders Must Die
Premise: Mankind is finally ready to start colonizing space, but we get ambushed by an alien race called the Amuleto who clearly don't want to share. Our salvation can only come from humanity's greatest starfighter with the awe-inspiring name of "Steel Pylon". Aren't most pylons made of steel?
Availability: A Japan-exclusive game with no rereleases. Supposedly a pretty hard find.
Preservation: Another visually sharp if all too busy Mega Drive shmup, a holdover from a time when the MD was getting a game just like it every other week. Eliminate Down shares a gimmick with a few other shoot 'em ups like Toaplan's Hellfire [MA IV] in that you can alternate weapon modes and each is best suited for enemies approaching from certain directions. For instance, your main weapon fires a beam directly ahead but you also have those that can fire behind as well as a spread shot that covers both vertical directions, maximizing your reach albeit not all at once. The alternative modes can also be upgraded along with the main weapon, and as is typical with the genre you'll lose those upgrades if your ship is destroyed. We have sorta met Aprinet before—they assisted Varie in programming one of their Nakajima Satoru F1 games, Nakajima Satoru Kanshuu F1 Super License [MA XXVI]—but this is the only game for which they have the main developer credit. They later merged with another company to form Planning Office Wada (or POW), which had a couple of Saturn games.
Wiki Notes: Very little work needed, and a pretty detailed page too for one so obscure. Just some minor clean-up.

443: Lethal Enforcers

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
JP Release: 1993-12-10
NA Release: 1993-06-25
EU Release: 1993
Franchise: Lethal Enforcers
Genre: Light Gun Shooter
Theme: Dispensing GUNishment
Premise: Pick up your own blue (or pink) Justifier and mow down hundreds of digitized, shades-wearing criminal goons in Konami's legendary arcade on-rails shooter.
Availability: Surprisingly, nothing since the 1997 PlayStation port. Saw a couple of sequels also.
Preservation: Lethal Enforcers is thought to be a touchstone of the on-rails shooter, popularizing the use of digitized sprites of actors getting violently dispatched for that genre in much the same way Mortal Kombat did the same for fighting games. Both Time Crisis and Virtua Cop, its 3D successors, were built on the mechanics and ideas Lethal Enforcers brought to the table. For its home versions, Konami went to the trouble of creating their own light-gun peripheral—the Konami Justifier—which was included with every copy of the game, making it hard to track down in mint condition. The default color was a sky blue, but the additional ones (which needed to be purchased by mail order) were pink, leading to no end of arguments between insecure boys who wanted to kill crooks with the manlier pastel-colored plastic revolver. For such a trendsetter it's odd that it's never seen any kind of rerelease or modern remake, but then it wasn't always the most racially sensitive game.
Wiki Notes: Just MD-specific releases and box art images. It was a SNES double-dip, first in a while.

444: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Developer: Traveller's Tales
Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: July 1993
EU Release: 1993
Franchise: Dracula
Genre: Vampies
Theme: Literally Literary Horror
Premise: A Wallachian count has kept himself young and spry over the years by regularly drinking health tonics, but now some uppity Brits have come along and demanded he stop. We're so demanding.
Availability: Licensed game.
Preservation: Coppola's 1992 Dracula movie, which starred Gary Oldman chewing the scenery (and necks) and Keanu Reeves attempting some manner of accent that a human being might theoretically employ, was produced through Colombia Pictures which means Sony had a stake (as it were) in its creation and as such would ensure that video games would soon follow. There were multiple versions of the Dracula game that all came out across 1993, with the Genesis and SNES versions being more or less identical spins on a classic 2D platforming Castlevania formula. After all, that series has vampires and other gothic monsters, so it probably made a certain amount of sense for future Lego-wranglers Traveller's Tales to follow Konami's lead. In this game, the optional sub-weapons of Castlevania—axes, stakes, at least two guns—correspond to boss weaknesses in a style similar to Mega Man, so a priority is to find the right one somewhere in the stage and hold onto it. Fortunately, your pal and mine Abraham Van Helsing is on hand to tell you which weapon will be most effective on the upcoming boss. The gameplay's a bit awkward and rushed-feeling but not abjectly terrible, if you're looking for something Castlevania-like for your Genesis but can't wait for 1994's Bloodlines. (The Sega CD version is very different, and we'll be visiting that in short order.)
Wiki Notes: A SNES double-dip, so just some minor edits to the page's MD-specific details.

445: Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind

Developer: Al Baker and Associates
Publisher: Accolade
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: July 1993
EU Release: August 1993
Franchise: Bubsy the Bobcat
Genre: Platformer
Theme: Smarm and Sarcasm. Smarmcasm. Ooh, I already don't like that word.
Premise: The alien Woolies are here to steal everyone's balls. Yarn balls, that is, and as Bubsy has some kind of chemical dependency on them he decides to steal them all back. I guess no-one's actually knitting anything with them, then?
Availability: I've got a guy who can hook you up with some Bubsy if you really need Bubsy. The guy's name is Steam: both of the old 2D platformers and several ill-advised reboots can be purchased there. The only game not currently available for sale is Bubsy 3D, I guess because the Geneva Convention can actually come through sometimes.
Preservation: I knew if this feature went on long enough I would be forced to acknowledge the existence of Bubsy the Bobcat. Poking the sleeping lion, as it were. Accolade had a thinktank of the most annoying people in their employ (not factual; I'm sure they're delightful) come up with a mascot that... honestly, were you to put every '90s video game mascot character to follow Sonic the Hedgehog (including Sonic's own menagerie) into some sort of Tiermaker ranking of most irksome funny animals, Bubsy probably wouldn't be the worst of them by a long shot. He does have this reputation of meowing the meow but not walking the walk, the disparity between his unwarranted confidence and the actual quality of his games being more significant than most, so maybe that's why he's taken on this meme mantle of the ultimate tryhard. That terrible animated sitcom pilot and the suffering generated by Bubsy 3D no doubt added to it also. Anyway, the game itself is sort of like if you took a topographically-incomprehensible Amiga platformer and married it to Sonic's sense of alacrity; without Sonic's charm, though, you're just faced with the unfortunate business of frequently running full speed into enemies you couldn't possibly account for in time. I'll say that, visually, it doesn't look terrible at least?
Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip, so it all needed was a PAL MD release.

446: Micro Machines

Developer: Codemasters
Publisher: Codemasters
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: 1993-09-14
EU Release: July 1993
Franchise: Micro Machines
Genre: Racing
Theme: Just Tiny Li'l Guys
Premise: Monte Carlo's done, Le Mans is boring, but what about racing on a kitchen table on a course made out of Cheerios? And what if instead of a proper race you just had to get five feet ahead of your opponent to win?
Availability: Remakes as recently as 2003 (which was 20 years ago, damn) and a more contemporary iOS/Android port is about it. The spirit of the MM series lives in Indie micro-sized RC games to this day.
Preservation: The title that possibly shifted Codemasters onto racing games forever, Micro Machines—based on the tiny car toyline from Galoob—is a top-down racer that imaginatively creates twisty, hazard-laden courses out of the quotidian: bathrooms, bedrooms, and backyards. Displaying a sheer variety that would even make contemporary racing games seem hopelessly limited, Micro Machines has you racing in all sorts of vehicles across all sorts of levels, each with their own pitfalls and obstacles. It was a huge multiplatform hit back in the day, spawning a sequel which we'll also encounter at some point, and one that was a particular favorite of my Mega Drive-owning pal and I. The "get far enough ahead, win a point" system is a little awkward to acclimate to but made sense given the top-down nature of the game: the alternative was a split-screen, and that would've made it tough to see too far ahead of you. This is also our first Codemasters joint on the Mega Archive: it wouldn't be until the PC rally games of the early '00s that they'd fully dedicate themselves to simulation-style racers, so we'll see them repping a bunch of different genres on the Mega Drive in the coming months and years. Some decent quality stuff too: they're one of the UK's better homegrown MD developers. (And, yes, it will mean me having to re-introduce the virtues of Dizzy the Egg to you all again. Look forward to that.)
Wiki Notes: Yet another SNES double-dip. It was also a page that had seen significant work even before I got to it back then. Didn't need to do squat this time.

447: MiG-29 Fighter Pilot

Developer: Domark
Publisher: Domark (EU) / Tengen (JP/NA)
JP Release: 1993-11-26
NA Release: August 1993
EU Release: July 1993
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Flight Sim
Theme: Dogfighting, Plane and Simple
Premise: Taking down targets in a Russian jet fighter. Nothing controversial about that.
Availability: Flight simulators, especially 16-bit polygonal ones, age in dog years. Actually more like hamster years.
Preservation: An unfortunate burgeoning trend for the Mega Drive, once the destination of many arcade-accurate shoot 'em ups, is early polygonal flight sims that really have no business being on anything but the high-end PCs of the era. Like almost any game with 3D graphics, it runs like molasses on the MD's overburdened X68k processor. Sims like MiG-29 lean into that deficieny a bit though by presenting themselves not so much as twitch-action games but heavier simulations where you're considering tactics and your next move, almost as if adjusting for what is practically a turn-based game given its framerate. I simplified things here by saying Domark are the developers, but the game was a co-production of several internal studios and contractors. Domark's own The Kremlin, for instance, are credited for the graphics while externals PanelComp and Tiertex have credits for the game's coding and music, respectively. UK publishing house Domark were recently introduced to us with James Bond 007: The Duel [MA XXX]; we'll next see them in a developer role when we get around to October.
Wiki Notes: Unlike most of the other western games this month, this was exclusive to the Mega Drive so the page needed some work. Releases, screenshots, box art, body text, and a header: the full set.

448: Pirates! Gold

Developer: MicroProse
Publisher: MicroProse
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: July 1993
EU Release: N/A
Franchise: Pirates!
Genre: Pirates!
Theme: Pirates!
Premise: Become a dread pirate or perhaps one that hunts same in Sid Meier's famous larcenous maritime simulation game. Did you know pirates just stole shit from other people?
Availability: The Genesis port is long (John (Silver)) out of print but at least the PC port can be bought on GOG along with its predecessor. Any port in a storm, right?
Preservation: Hoist the mainsail and open your torrent client of choice because we're about to embark on some piracy. Sid Meier's Pirates!, for which Pirates! Gold is an enhanced remaster with improved graphics, is a very broad simulation game that tries to recreate every activity a pirate or privateer might find themselves involved in, from swordfights to ship battles to recruiting able seamen at ports and selling your purloined lucre to even courting a lady wife looking to join a Fabio-type for romance and adventure on the high seas. There's many routes to take and thus a whole lot of longevity behind its construction. We also see MicroProse back for the second Mega Archive in a row; they showed up last time with F-15 Strike Eagle II and it'll be November '93 before we bump into them again. Best known for their PC RPGs and sims, Pirates! is one of MicroProse's more celebrated franchises and one of the few to see a console port. In fact, it got two, but for some reason the other one was for the short-lived Amiga CD32.
Wiki Notes: Just a little sprucing up the text. I grabbed the header from its GOG store page.

449: Rolling Thunder 3

Developer: Now Production
Publisher: Namco
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: July 1993
EU Release: N/A
Franchise: Rolling Thunder
Genre: Side-Scrolling Shooter
Theme: Spy Shit
Premise: While Agents Albatross and Leila were off saving the world from Geldra, the leader of the terrorist organization Gimdo, some other guy was assigned to take care of Geldra's second-in-command. That's right, you're a second-string taking on some other second-string. The stakes done got raised!
Availability: The only other place the third Rolling Thunder can be found besides Genesis is on the Namco Museum Mini Player, one of those micro-sized arcade cabinets My Arcade puts out.
Preservation: Another Japanese-made American Genesis exclusive, this time from Namco. Rolling Thunder 3 is the last in Namco's side-scrolling spy thriller franchise though the only one to be exclusive to consoles (and to one console in one region specifically). They pulled something similar just a little while earlier with Splatterhouse 3 [MA XXXI], perhaps deciding that making some of their more "grown-up" franchises Sega-only would be a reconciliatory salve given their greater focus on the rival Nintendo and NEC systems of this era. Either way, it's a similar game to its predecessors, as you hurry to the right while shooting down goons, going through doors to look for any incriminating evidence as if all the armed robot soldiers weren't enough proof that these guys are up to nefarious business. Speed is the name of the game: spend too long in a firefight or poking through rooms and you'll come under fire from some kind of phantom sniper. Namco sourced this one out to their frequent collaborators Nowpro; however, this would be their last game for any Sega system. (Namco themselves, however, still have a few more MD games in the docket for 1994.)
Wiki Notes: The page had no releases or screenshots, but we had a pretty thorough text section thanks to power user Nes. I'm glad, because that always takes me the longest to do.

450: WarpSpeed

Developer: Accolade
Publisher: Accolade
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: 1993
EU Release: July 1993
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Flight Sim
Theme: Star Raiding
Premise: What if Star Raiders, but Accolade made it instead and called it something non-litigious like "WarpSpeed"?
Availability: Nope. Plenty of better modern interpretations though.
Preservation: Accolade's not quite done with us yet. Their other game for July, the one that doesn't involve cats, is WarpSpeed: a somewhat shameless attempt to resurrect the old strategic space shooter Atari game Star Raiders for the 16-bit generation before Atari themselves could. Accolade was founded by former Activision folks, who in turn were ex-Atari people, so there remains a smoldering resentment for Atari and its refusal to credit its creatives back in the 2600 days. I suppose trying to poach their properties factors into that. WarpSpeed has you warping and/or speeding around star system grid maps taking down enemy fighter squadrons that pose the most threat to nearby starbases, which you need to keep around for resupplying. You can systematically clear the map of the other starfighters at your own pace, but the real-time aspect means you'll often receive emergency signals or new mission objectives that'll demand your attention. I played this a lot as a kid, probably because I was a huge fan of the similar Elite, though even back then the actual dogfighting was never the highlight. I guess I just liked having a big map of icons to wipe out. Explains why I play so many open-world games now...
Wiki Notes: One more SNES double-dip for the road. Very little to edit this time.

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Indie Game of the Week 331: Ostrich Island

By Mento August 4, 2023 0 Comments

At first blush, Ostrich Island seems like an elaborate joke game. Visually it's kind of a mess, your directives are not clear beyond some open-world tomfoolery, collectibles are called things like "Statuette of Egbert", it's very easy to accidentally take five steps into the water and drown, and the sheer number of minor visual and physics glitches intimates that the developers had too much on their plate just dealing with the major glitches (i.e. the ones directly interfering with the gameplay, rather than just adding to the overall level of aesthetic jank) to fix them; all these traits combined together makes Ostrich Island feel like something that fell off the back of the Indie asset flip truck that used to exclusively be the domain of Steam but are now all over Switch eShop and the PSN store as well. It doesn't help that ostriches are inherently ungainly as animals go; less majestic like its flight-capable falcon and eagle brethren, more silly, violent, and awkward. They're like lanky teenagers that had one hell of a growth spurt over the summer and are so full of nervous energy it's like they're never quite sure where (or even how) to stand still. In spite of all this, Ostrich Island has a certain moxie and a guileless joie de vivre that makes it a hard game to dislike. If anything, you find yourself rooting for it to hold itself together after a few levels, willing to pushing past its less stable aspects to see where it's going to go next.

Similar to the equally unfettered (and similarly dopey-animal-centric) Goat Simulator, your goals are myriad and set across large open-world-ish maps and almost all of them involve collectibles in some way. There's the ostrich eggs with the impossibly high bloom, considered the equivalent of the game's power stars due to the way they're directly related to purchasing upgrades; there's the golden eggs, which are instead rewarded for achievements (some are level-specific challenges, some involve a photography mini-quest, others for the usual milestones); there's buried food and ladybugs to dig up for score bonuses; there's a set of cosmetics for your ostrich to wear; and there's random items and treasure that fill up the ostrich's "nest" home. The upgrades tend to be non-essential but very handy power-ups like a significant boost to your jumping height or running speed, and the first is a useful (but not as useful as you'd hope) power-up that makes ostrich egg collectibles easier to see.

The perfectly reasonable amount of screen vignetting that results when stepping on water.

The ingenuity comes with the level design. Most levels are just non-descript tropical islands with a smattering of palm trees, chests, lobsters (apparently deadly to ostriches), tribal idols, and so on, but they tend to revolve around one or more gimmicks. Some have portals that teleport you to remote islands, a few levels have a dense fog to navigate, some are set underground where both low lighting and bats are issues, and one level even has you kicking chickens through portals for ten minutes. The basic goal of each level is to reach its exit (there's sometimes a second exit to unlock) but the real one is to somehow maximize your score for that level. Score is generated by finding items, catching bugs (shockingly difficult; those little guys move fast), random destruction, digging up food, defeating enemies (the ostrich has a powerful kick, though it's hard to aim), and many other methods that might take a little legwork and experimentation to find. A glitch makes it possible to max your score the boring way—palm trees don't despawn after you knock them down, so you can keep kicking them forever for a points boost—but otherwise you're working towards multiple objectives at once to hit that 100% target, all while the water level slowly rises and makes parts (and some collectibles) of the level unreachable. Of course, maximizing your score doesn't actually get you anything, but Ostrich Island isn't really focused on serious progression and hitting targets but more in letting you run wild and free, mastering the game by your own definition.

The game's difficulty largely comes from some deeply unfair mechanics, but even those too are part of its charm. The lobsters (and bats, found in the underground levels) are extremely fast and will one-shot you if you get too close, though sometimes their random pathing will have them just appearing directly behind you with no opportunities to elude them. There's the strict limitations to how far into the water you can go. There's the slightly awkward jumping that can make platforming an ordeal; though it gets better once you have the improved jumping power-up. There's the fact that the game loves putting traps everywhere, like pits you can't even see because they're underwater or explosive gas tanks sitting right next to levers you need to kick to activate. The game doesn't penalize you too harshly for deaths but you do have a limited number of lives, some of which can be restored by hitting score milestones within a level. Otherwise, you get three and then you're out, though you can buy back in by spending a valuable golden egg currency if you're that near to finishing the level with as close to 100% as your patience permits. Most levels aren't all that long, fortunately, and you can always enter a level and get whatever item or target you need for an achievement and bounce right afterwards if you left something unfinished in your previous run.

I really only have myself to blame for getting stuck like this. Well, time to reset the stage.

Writing about Ostrich Island after the fact has me occasionally wondering what I saw in a game so clearly tied together with loose string and duct tape, the whole enterprise threatening to fall apart with just a stiff breeze, but the charm of that goggle-eyed avian protagonist doing its darndest represents, in a microcosm, the appeal of the game as well. It's trying to give you so many ways to enjoy its tropical vacation; pecking, kicking, squawking, and cursing your way across generic tropical islands with some very un-generic and occasionally unhinged collectathon gameplay, fulfilling a wide variety of objectives both obvious and inscrutable while praying to whatever gods ratite-kind might have that you can reach the telltale bubble barrier that indicates the end of the level with all your lucre and spare eggs intact without getting ganked by a turbo lobster or falling to a watery grave because you put too much beef on that last leap. Ostrich Island is a trip, and for as frustrating as its messy construction can be I found myself equally fascinated (in a good way!) by it in turn.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

> Forward to 332: 3000th Duel

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Game OVA Season 2: Episode 2 - Armored Police Metal Jack

By Mento August 1, 2023 3 Comments

The Property

Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack, localized as Armored Police Metal Jack, is an anime TV show about three heroic men cut down in their prime attempting to foil the criminal organization, Id, from assassinating the scion of the Zaizen corporation (great, so they're cops and bootlickers). These three individuals are revived through the use of cutting-edge cybernetic technology and become the Metal Jacks, the newest line of defense against rampant crime in a Tokyo City of the far-flung future of 2015.

I might've had RoboCop on the brain lately thanks to Blight Club and a recent Film & 40s on the original film, and you don't need to go too far to find an anime ersatz (I may even cover another one later based on a certain Masamune Shirow manga, depending on my mood). It's another property that started as an anime—we'll get into that in just a moment—and later saw a brief run of novelizations and, of course, a couple of video games. This show is also about as obscure as I dare get; beyond this point it starts getting tough to dig up a sufficient amount of translated episodes floating around out there.

The Cast

Ken Kanzaki: A cocky, laid-back police detective who's an expert marksman and a bit of a wiseacre. After protecting Jun Zaizen from an assassin robot, he is blown away by an errant missile and is reborn as Red Jack. Like his human alter-ego, Red Jack largely focuses on ranged attacks with a powerful side-arm and is the de facto leader of the Metal Jacks, insofar as he's usually standing in the middle of the three and is the one yelling the most. Is friends and partners with the more serious Eriko.
Ryou Aguri: A suave but snobbish Formula 1 driver that leaps in to protect Jun and Kanzaki for unexplained reasons, getting himself nearly killed in the process and reborn as Silver Jack. Recognizing that driving a fancy car is basically the same as swinging a fancy sword, Silver Jack fights up close with a lightsaber (or non-litigious equivalent) and tends to use his speed to outmaneuver his robotic opponents. Despite his youthful looks he's the eldest of the Metal Jacks at the ripe old age of 23.
Gou Gouda: Champion pro wrestler with the ring name of Gonzales Gou, despite having no lucha libre affiliation, Gou becomes the most physically imposing of the Metal Jacks, Blue Jack, after also taking a missile to the face. A big dude with a big heart and usually the salt-of-the-earth comic relief of the team, as is tradition for the heavy guy in any superhero ensemble.
Masanao Daigo: Scientist type who is in charge of the Metal Jack project and commands them during missions and their training. Is always wearing shades.
Eriko Yoshizawa: Ken's no-nonsense if occasionally reckless partner. The Anne Lewis of the show.
Jun Zaizen: The son of the now deceased CEO of the Zaizen Group. Brilliant but sheltered. As of the end of the third episode he's still in intensive care after the same explosion that almost killed the Metal Jacks.
Megadeth: The tyrannical leader of Id, the terrorist organization threatening the peace. Seeks nothing more than a symphony of destruction, with plans to transform Tokyo City into a dystopia due to his "conquer or die" ethos. With an enormous army of robots and cyborgs, he's a veritable master of puppets (wait, that's Metallica).

Red Jack, a.k.a. Ken Kanzaki. In Japan, just having a gun is enough of a superpower.

Silver Jack, a.k.a. Ryou Aguri. The handsome one, or at least that's how he'd introduce himself.

Blue Jack, a.k.a. Gou Gouda. I'd say he was working his enemies into a shoot, but Red Jack's the shooter.

The Anime

The Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack anime was created by Sunrise studio and credited to their amalgamous pseudonym Hajime Yatate, which is actually the studio's collective writing/production staff. Sunrise is one of the most famous anime studios currently active, possibly even more than last episode's Madhouse, having been behind many famous original works like Cowboy Bebop, Code Geass, and Armored Trooper Votoms as well as adaptations of novels/manga Inuyasha, Outlaw Star, and Gintama. Perhaps (though there's no perhaps about it) their biggest contribution to the world of anime is the mecha megafranchise Gundam. Needless to say, we're going to be bumping into them many more times depending on how long this feature goes. They're officially known these days as Bandai Namco Filmworks, and have subsequently worked on animated cutscenes for many of Bamco's video games including most recently the post-apocalyptic action-RPG Scarlet Nexus as well as the new opening animation added to the Zone of the Enders HD Collection. They've even lent their talent to western productions, contributing to Batman: The Animated Series (tying in this episode with yet another Blight Club property) and, a personal favorite of mine growing up, the bizarre French sci-fi anime Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. (I still struggle to explain what that show is about. Star Wars vs. mutant plant alien monster trucks? Theme music still slaps though.)

The credited writer for the Metal Jack anime is one Hiroyuki Kawasaki, who also wrote the scripts for many video-game-to-anime adaptations (the reverse of what we're covering here on Game OVA) including those for Sakura Wars, Tales of Eternia, and Wild Arms. He also contributed to that Halo Legends anime anthology DTV show, writing the "Homecoming" segment. The director for the episodes we're covering is Hiroshi Matsuzono, who also directed the Tekkaman Blade anime and was a storyboard artist for both the Sakura Wars and Arc the Lad TV anime adaptations. (Really did not anticipate how JRPG-heavy we were going to go this time considering this is a sci-fi mecha action show about cyborg cops.)

As for the show itself, it aired on TV Tokyo between April and December of 1991 for a total of thirty-seven episodes. It's got some violent moments but I believe it skews closer to a pre-teen male (or shounen) audience with its tokusatsu (superhero) elements and straightforward, black-and-white storytelling; its slot in the schedules was late-afternoon (5:30pm) which tends to fit that demographic. Considering the slightly more adult fare I've been featuring with Game OVA Season 2 so far, it'll be nice to cover a show that doesn't go topless every five minutes.

(Since I got a little carried away with the previous Game OVA, we're only doing three episodes.)

Episode 1

A perfunctory pilot that plops down all the exposition it needs to so that it can get it out of the way of the final five minutes of cool dudes in exosuits blowing up cool robots. Cops Ken Kanzaki and Eriko Yoshizawa, racecar driver Ryou Aguri, and pro-wrestler Gou Gouda are all in attendance at the 10th birthday party for Jun Zaizen, son of the CEO of the Zaizen Group corporation: the former two as police bodyguards and the latter two as celebrity guests. Kanzaki learns that, while Jun is a child prodigy, his sheltered upbringing has made him lonely and socially awkward; Kanzaki cheers him up with a brotherly pep talk while the two take a break from the party. After the lights in the room are brought down so Jun can blow out the candles on his cake, a three-meter tall mech is able to somehow quietly arrive and mingle with the crowd before it starts shooting up the place. It eliminates its first target, the CEO of Zaizen, but is thwarted by Kanzaki who damages its camera with his revolver before it can finish off Jun as well. Despite this, it's able to fire off a missile before escaping, apparently killing not only Kanzaki and Jun but an assisting Aguri and Gouda as well.

While mourning Kanzaki, Eriko and the police chief find themselves called into action when Id, a flamboyant and well-funded terrorist organization, takes over a bridge and starts firing indiscriminately at a major public building. Their rampage takes the lives of many Tokyo City citizens and the cops are underequipped to deal with Id's overwhelming firepower and high-spec mechs. Enter the Metal Jacks: a clandestine police force consisting of Kanzaki, Aguri, and Gouda along with a cybernetic dog, ~~Bladewolf~~ Lander, who quickly take care of the first group of Id robots before they're able to kill an imperiled Eriko. However, the same mech that crashed the earlier party proves too much for the trio to handle and they're forced to switch from their standard Jack Suits into their mecha Jack Armors with the unfortunate battlecry of "Jack On!", adding a significant boost to their offense and to my second-hand embarrassment. With this upgrade, they're able to take down the assassin robot, though the two Id lieutenants at the scene manage to peace out amidst the chaos. Sworn to secrecy about what happened to him and his companions by the Metal Jacks project lead, Masanao Daigo, Kanzaki mysteriously reappears full of jokes and no worse for the wear in front a surprised Eriko and the police chief as they watch over a comatose Jun, Kanzaki promising him justice for his father.

If I had a nickel for every one of my birthday parties that ended in disaster after a giant assassin robot showed up. Who am I kidding? No one ever showed up to my birthday parties.

I think ten million dead goes a little beyond 'bold'.

The Metal Jacks had a month of intensive training before their debut, at least a week of which was spent practicing this pose.

Never not funny.

I mean... you destroyed the robot someone sent after him, you haven't avenged anything yet. This is like impounding the vehicle involved in a hit-and-run and saying 'We finally got the metal bastard, case closed'.

I can already see the show settling into a recurring pattern of the heroes getting beat down and having to pull out their trump card, borne from the many tokusatsu shows Armored Police Metal Jack draws its inspiration (particularly Super Sentai/Power Rangers and its "deus ex mecha" Megazords). After all, the anime was originally meant to be a sequel to a live-action tokusatsu show that nonetheless ended up an unrelated anime from what I can only assume was a significant lapse in communication. Since this show has 37 episodes (and was originally meant to have 50) I wouldn't expect any plotlines to be resolved any time soon. This first episode also spends almost zero time on Aguri and Gouda's characterizations, so I suspect (vainly hope) that's what the next few episodes will focus on.

Episode 2

Ah, that delayed characterization has arrived for Aguri and Gouda, albeit not with a whole lot of specificity just yet. All three of the Metal Jacks are required to go through brutal endurance training, and both Silver and Blue have grown weary of all the hard work and secrecy around their new roles and decide to bail. Kanzaki, as Red, tries to convince them to stick with it as they'll lead much more meaningful lives as anonymous superheroes than they would in boring, unfulfilling jobs like "internationally-famous racecar driver" or "pro-wrestling champ beloved by millions". They're still ready to bounce even after Red makes his impassioned case, bizarrely, so instead Red insults their decision and they just kick his ass and leave. I'm already into this team dynamic, long may it continue.

The city is about ready to host a peace treaty delegation at the expensive Crystal Tower building, but the cops are antsy about a mysterious report from some random hobo who claims he saw a man disappear into a column of light down by the docks. This column turns out to be the work of an evil scientist Id has recruited to take out the Metal Jacks, using a combination of... you know, I wasn't really able to follow what this was. It's like glass, but also metallic and able to be remote-controlled, so the user can call down a shower of shards from anywhere and cut normal people to ribbons (which is what happened to the docks guy). Red Jack was shrewd enough to figure out that the Crystal Tower is made from this T-1000 nanoglass shit (again, somehow) and convinces the peace treaty delegates and nearby cops on security detail to stack themselves into their vehicles so they'll be protected. However, the glass shards—which eventually become a floating demonic head JRPG monster at some point—prove too much for him to handle alone.

Gouda quickly climbing in the favorite character rankings.

Presumably Gouda didn't mean Lander though. Everyone loves Lander. Except for Red Jack, I guess, since he won't let him ride in the car.

A screenshot of the Glass Gremlin himself. This will be important later.

Fortunately, both Blue Jack and Silver Jack have a change of heart after watching Red Jack on the news laying his life on the line and come help, despite Red being a pain in the neck. Silver even has an epiphany after a "course out" while racing that his "whole life has been a course out"; it'd almost be poignant if I could make heads or tails of what it meant. The three together—after summoning the Armor Jacks of course, since that's two minutes of runtime in which nothing needs to be written—then proceed to overwhelm the regenerative powers of the glass-summoning floating goblin head and destroy it for good. The episode ends in much the same way as the first: all three of the Metal Jacks watch Jun Zaizen's recovering in a secret underground hospital ward having resolved to work together and put themselves in harm's way for the sake of some rich kid they met for five minutes at a party they were contractually obligated to attend. That kind of camaraderie just doesn't come along every day. I think the second episode was a mild improvement over the first, even if the show's already become hopelessly formulaic (the bad guy was defeated by the exact same "Metal Crusher" punch from Red Jack from the last episode), but we still don't really have any idea who any of these characters are just yet without a spotlight episode. I'm also not sure the show's done enough to earn us caring about the rich kid in a coma, beyond the fact that he's rich and that he's in a coma. Still... glass shards monster face, huh? I guess that's something. (I almost forgot to say, the bad guys killed the scientist after he failed by stabbing him in the back with a big claw and it was kinda brutal for a kids' show. I'm not quite certain who the audience for this is supposed to be.)

Episode 3

The third episode quickly introduces us to a new character: Sayuri Kanzaki, Ken's kid sister. She's visiting Ken ostensibly for a visit but soon reveals the real reason she's there: to drag Ken back home to safety after suffering serious grief after the greatly exaggerated reports of his death. Kanzaki's too busy being both a cop and a Metal Jack so he tells her to take a hike, only to run afoul of this episode's monster of the week. OK, so, as far as I can tell the deal this time is that a scientist has worked out a way to build a robot that feeds on negative energy, in particular feelings of panic, and has set up a large vine-like robotic being to move through the innards and take control of a major subterranean public venue, in this case the train station and surrounding shopping mall that the Kanzakis are visiting, and deprive it of electricity while causing its structural stability to rapidly deteriorate, through which he can use the terror of the trapped civilians to feed his monster. This is, of course, with the supervision of one of Id's recurring lieutenant characters, who is fascinated by the murder potential of this biomechanical emotion vampire roboplant.

The other two Metal Jacks arrive once the commotion starts and begin looking for a way to get into the building to rescue survivors before it collapses, with Blue making the shrewd decision to start breaking down random load-bearing walls. Meanwhile, both Kanzakis are trapped inside along with two other kids and an adult couple who basically trampled the kids while looking for a way out like a pair of George Costanzas. The adult man, who we'll call George (because it's his actual name, no joke), starts demanding the others follow his lead despite Ken's insistence they stay put and wait for the rescuers to arrive; George instead berates him for being a useless cop while continuing to harass the tiny children he almost stomped all over earlier before he notices an air vent and starts making his way over. Ken spots that there's a bunch of robotic tentacle-vines in the way, and theorizes that these metal tubes will attack any panic-stricken human being that gets close. I'm guessing this isn't his first run-in with empathic sentient robot cables of death. In what has to be one of the most "WTF" moments of the series so far, the moment George inevitably gets dragged away by the tentacles towards a metallic pitcher plant (???) and Kanzaki reaches for his revolver to rescue him, Sayuri's all "why are you trying to save his life, he was rude to us". To properly correct his traumatized kid sister with all the tact the situation requires, Kanzaki slaps her right across the chops and tells her she's an idiot. Even if the guy is a prick and deserves to die, Kanzaki rationalizes in earshot of the dude's distressed significant other, a policeman is supposed to save people and not kill them, probably. I had to watch this scene twice to take it all in, as I was still reeling from Kanzaki's instant read on how these barely visible metal tentacles must be reacting to specific psychological responses to empower themselves like that was a scenario right out of his police handbook.

A perfectly calm response by Tokyo's citizenry once the electricity goes out.

Yes, most likely. It just makes perfect sense is all.

She's standing right there, dude. In fact, George himself is only a few feet away. This is why no-one respects the cops (plus all the murders).

Seems a bit harsh, Red Jack. I'm sure the monster's not that stupid.

No, OK, that's a pretty stupid-looking monster.

Once George becomes independent from the tentacles, Ken has all of the survivors head toward the air vent while he fends off the roboplants, aided by the sudden appearance of Lander who made his way down the vent from outside. With no-one left around to discover his secret identity, he transforms into Red Jack's suited mode and starts weeding out the place, but it turns out to have been in vain: the robot has now absorbed enough negative emotions (I guess?) to evolve into a stupid-looking giant monster and all three Metal Jacks switch to Armor Jack mode to defeat it, with Red Jack once again applying a decisive Metal Crusher to tear a big hole through its head. Oh, and the scientist behind all this gets killed by the Id dude's giant claw because he dared to be disrespectful. (How many mad scientists do they have on their payroll that they're this expendable? Are these guys the anime version of Black Mesa?) Anyway, not only is the show getting dumber but the animation quality is starting to take some serious dips. Characters often appear off-model, continue to move their lips even after their lines are finished (I'm watching subs, so it's not a localization issue), and much of the Armor Jack sequences are recycled as I'll demonstrate shortly. Three episodes in and I'm not quite sure if the show's just yet to find its robot feet or if it's running on fumes already. Either way, I think I have a pretty decent impression of what Armored Police Metal Jack is all about by now, and since the annoying kid sister will be a permanent cast member (she's in the intro so I figured) it's probably a good time to call it a day.

So that's the anime. I suppose that means we should do whatever the opposite of "Jack On" might be now that we're all finished here. Fairly typical tokusatsu stuff, from my limited experience with the genre, though from watching the show's quality deteriorate in real-time I'm not sure Metal Jack was one of Sunrise's higher priorities. I can imagine a studio that large probably has any number of B-teams working on lesser properties, but then I recall the general quality of western animated kids' TV in 1991 and maybe this show isn't too different.

The first Metal Crusher. Take that, assassinbot!

The second Metal Crusher. Take that, glass demon goblin!

The third Metal Crusher. Take that, bulbous xenomorph plant monster... thing!

That its original run was curtailed due to low viewership might've been a red flag, or possibly a silver or a blue one, but if anything can engender two tie-in video games after it had finished airing it couldn't have been that widely disliked. Speaking of which...

The Game(s)

I found two Metal Jack video games, both released in 1992 a few months after the show wrapped up its original run. The one we're going to cover here in detail is the second chronologically of those two games: Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack for the Super Famicom, released on July 31st 1992. It was published by Atlus and developed either by Atlus themselves or an anonymous contract developer. The game was fortunate enough to receive a fan translation from one MrRichard999 back in 2018, though there's not a whole lot of text involved with an action game like this. Regardless, I'm going to use it.

You could generously call it a brawler but it's more akin to something like a side-scrolling action game such as Kung Fu or Rush'N Attack: you're mostly just beating down fodder enemies that endlessly spawn from the sides of the screen and die in one hit, with a mild bit of platforming to break things up along with a tougher boss fight at the end of each stage. As with the show, the moment a boss arrives the protagonist(s) are compelled to switch to their Armor Jack form to fight it on even ground, giving you a few other commands to work with. Fun fact: There were plans to localize this overseas with some truly wild westernization name changes. For instance, Ryou Aguri was due to become "Billy Crash", an incredible name for a racecar driver.

The intro, where most of the game's text can be found. 2015 was hard on all of us.

Now that's a slick logo.

You can play as any of the Metal Jacks. I'll stick with the dude with the gun.

So the idea is enemies show up, you either punch or flying kick them (or that's the deal with Red Jack's moves, at least). The kick has a much greater range so I tend to just spam it.

You can also just shoot them, but ammo is limited. Enemies drop it occasionally but don't hold your breath. Best to save whatever bullets you find for the bosses.

Speaking of whom, here's the first stage's mid-boss. Enemies move slow and are easy to predict, but you're likely to take collision damage when they're too big to avoid (or have a long-reaching weapon, like this flamethrower). There's no cooldown on your attacks so you can just find somewhere safe and keep punching them to stun-lock them if you want. I wouldn't call this game challenging.

Nice flying kick, but can it go this high? Advantage: Red Jack.

Oh jeez, that's quite the fail state. Wait, why is my left arm going numb...? What... did y-

Anyway, we finally reach the boss of the first stage and you know what that means: Time to Jack On all over this guy!

The first boss is none other than this Glasshole. Trick here is to avoid the claws by moving around a lot, though you're a bigger target now. You're limited to the Metal Crusher, but it can be charged up for more damage.

Unpredictably, the second stage is a sewer level with some truly revolting poop streams.

What? No-one told me there would be platforming. I'm just here to punch and shoot things.

Why is Brock Lesnar here? Why is he shirtless in a sewer?

It's been five minutes, dude, how are you alive again? And with such a nice tan? Oh wait, I guess I did knock you into... ah, my bad.

Final boss for this stage is... two ninjas. The way I won this was to duck in the middle where they couldn't reach and just use the charge punch over and over. The old strategies are the best.

Just figured I'd add to my Metal Crusher screenshot collection.

Stage three is some creepy lab full of these goopy slime dudes. Not into whatever's happening here.

I'm also not into whatever Dhalsim shit this mid-boss is trying to pull, so I'm back to ducking and punching. Hey, it works.

The lab has random pits everywhere and you have to jump down them to make progress. Whee!

Next boss is this huge cybernetic armadillo guy. He's kinda cool looking. I just ducked in a corner and used the charge punch repeatedly again, since it covers the whole screen. What, was I going to engage with the game's challenges honorably? Hell no.

Stage Four is a broken highway and has a similar vibe as the prologue level of Mega Man X, complete with more pits to explore.

Oh, I guess they're not the exploring type of pits. I think I'm done.

Does it do right by the anime? I guess? The show was as much of a mindless brawler as this game is, though this really does feel cheap and quick. It's like they started work on the game when the show was at its peak, watched any interest in it peter out in real-time, and then decided to quickly put the game out the door before the Metal Jacks left the public consciousness completely. It's not bad looking for a 1992 game but as a brawler it's very rudimentary. It's also quite short and easy: the Longplay for this is something like twenty minutes (and, just to confirm, Longplays are not speedruns by any means) and apparently taps out after six levels, meaning I just got past the halfway point here. I suppose that's a nice change from all the other brawlers on SNES, since they tend to be obnoxiously difficult without the potential endless continues offered by an arcade cabinet (provided you have the coins to spare).

Before we're done here, there's the matter of the other Armored Police Metal Jack game. The same-titled Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack is a Game Boy turn-based strategy game from KID Corp and Takara, released on January 8th 1992. KID (an acronym for "Kindle Imagine Develop") was a long-lived contract developer behind many anime licensed games and later their own range of visual novels while Takara is the giant toy company that later merged with Tomy and frequently dabbled with game development, KID being one of their more frequent contractors. In a weird coincidence, Takara briefly owned a controlling stake in Atlus, the publisher of the other Metal Jack game (though I'm guessing Metal Jack was not the reason since it happened in 2003, and also why would anyone even care).

Put simply, it's a no-budget Fire Emblem with the Metal Jacks and pals as your combat team, which tends to be the case for many mecha anime game adaptations (e.g. the Super Robot Taisen franchise). No fan translation for this one so I only got as far as deciphering the menus, which were mostly kana. Trying to write kanji with the Game Boy's resolution sounds like a nightmare.

Like a nice, economical Game Boy title screen. Text right up to the edges.

This was one of the mechs from the first episode, and the first map boss. I think the horns are ornamental.

It's the Metal Jacks! You can tell by their expressive faces.

So yeah, it's one of these. Move your guys around, don't let them get surrounded, and divide and conquer to clear the map. The enemy variety is... not great.

I believe this says 'kikku'. Works for me.

I think that says 'buri'? These are some tiny characters.

Oh crap, he had a machine gun. My one weakness.

In addition to the Metal Jacks you also have their dog buddy Lander. You best believe I'm putting him in harm's way.

You can also fight with Silver Jack's and Blue Jack's vehicles too. Hey, they needed to fill up the numbers for the hero's side. Who else could they use, Sayuri? A comatose Jun fighting from a robotic hospital bed?

All right, I'm not sitting around waiting for every single one of these guys to take their turn.

Does it do right by the anime? The show never exhibited much in the way of what I would call "strategy", so I'd say this made a little less sense than Atlus's primitive brawler. There's not a whole lot of tactical depth to it either, possibly given it's a 8-bit GB game with not much room to breathe, but I could see a fan of the show slowly hacking away at each of its maps during a quiet moment in their commute or something. Maybe there was a way to have the Metal Jacks combine with their vehicles to go into Armor Jack mode with some kind of limitation (like you could only be in that mode for three turns at most) to make things interesting, since I don't think I could've survived fighting that many dudes if they're all packing SMGs. Not a genre I have a lot of patience for at the best of times, though.

And that'll do it for the Metal Jacks and our guided tour through the mean streets of Tokyo City, a location I'm sure Game OVA will never revisit. Even if this show and its games were perhaps a tad underwhelming and esoteric, I've enjoyed the process of researching what I could about it. Jeff Gerstmann once played the SNES game on stream and had some curiosity about its origins, so in the back of my "what to blog about" notes I'd always pencilled in an excuse to dig a little deeper into this silly action franchise. Next time I'll probably check out something a little more celebrated, but until then keep watching the skies for sapient glass robots with mischief on their mind and always, always, remember to Jack On!

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Indie Game of the Week 330: Darq

By Mento July 28, 2023 0 Comments

If there's two things I find scary, it's creepy monsters hiding in the shadows that defy rational explanation and having to think. Unfold Games's Darq is the rare game that caters to both those fears. The game follows a bald kid (or maybe a teen; it's hard to tell without the hair) as he finds himself stuck in a loop of falling asleep, waking up in some nightmare factory, and then narrowly escaping back to the waking world only to repeat the pattern as his exhaustion takes over. Much of Darq takes the shape of a 2D action-adventure game—the Limbos, Insides, or Little Nightmareses of the current horror-platformer (platfearmer?) trend—where you're walking (sometimes creeping, sometimes running) around areas solving some basic inventory puzzles. What is less basic is the way the game's environments tend to wrap around in odd ways, allowing you to walk along walls and ceilings and occasionally flipping the perspective of the world to allow for other destinations across perpendicular axes. This irrational traversal creates an uncanny and vertiginous effect that can't help but accentuate the already eerie monochrome setting and horror tone.

Darq has seven of these nightmare worlds to visit, the seventh immediately following the sixth as a more action-packed denouement (read: a whole lot of trial-and-error dying). A typical puzzle might have you navigating a three-dimensional maze, twisting walls around to complete a circuit, or sliding blocks around to free a key item. Most rely heavily on spatial awareness, as does the twisty level design itself: you'll be going in and out of the background and foreground, turning the geometry around, and discovering paths in the unlikeliest of places. Fortunately, each of the individual levels is fairly short so building a mental map of these topsy-turvy locations isn't too mentally taxing a prospect. Likewise, the inventory puzzles and more Layton-esque instances don't offer too much of a roadblock: despite the disorienting subject matter it's a relatively simple and brisk playthrough at just over a couple hours in length.

Oh, what a feeling; when I'm creeped out on the ceiling.

Because the game is trading in horror staples, expect a smattering of jumpscares and puzzles where you need to evade a wandering ghoul's attention. Some use the protagonist's same unexplained command of the environment, shuffling up a wall to allow some weird trumpet monster or what have you to trundle past. Others might involve a red light/green light scenario where you have to pay close attention to the distracted monster's sudden perking up towards the sound of an unknown intruder in their midst and make sure not to move when it's alerted. These sequences often serve to detract from the puzzles, especially if the monsters are patrolling an area between you and a location you might need to revisit with the right items, but I guess horror games are always faced with this dilemma of whether to introduce actual peril to keep the stakes raised or just hope the overall creepy atmosphere alone is enough to unsettle the player. The checkpointing is generous enough and the enemy patterns predictable enough that it's never so rough to be a detriment to the playthrough if this whole stealth horror thing isn't your preference. Sometimes, having to suddenly hide and duck around a monster can sometimes make for a nice switch from having to think about circuit puzzles and where it is you need to backtrack to next after grabbing some random piece of junk.

Darq's a hard game to review for several reasons. The first is the atmosphere, which isn't easily rendered by text alone: the monochrome worlds and the boy's bald, emaciated appearance recalls German Expressionist horror like Nosferatu or the gothic-whimsy of illustrators like Edward Gorey, as do the levels' vaguely 19th century furniture and trappings, while the sound design does its darndest to remind you that you're never particularly safe even if there's nothing in the immediate vicinity trying to grab you (for now). The second is that the game largely relies on elaborate environmental puzzles that need to be seen in full before you can really process how to solve them. The third is that the story is practically non-existent despite offering a lot of incidental subtext that is never followed up on—a recurring nemesis is a blindfolded old lady in a wheelchair who proves to be absurdly strong, though if this is meant to be an elderly relative or a fellow asylum patient or what is never disclosed—followed by a real out-of-left-field ending that implied that the protagonist was in purgatory and fighting to be reincarnated, as evinced by what sounds like a live birth once you pass through the game's final door. It's one heck of a trip, albeit a short, confusing, and sometimes irksome one, though its environment-bending puzzles and relative brisk pace makes it one that's easy to recommend to those looking for a stylish short series of spooky shocks and surprises if nothing too substantial. (Sorry for the sudden surfeit of sibilance; I have a cold.)

Yes, it was I who was dropping that crane on BatGrubb. And I'd do it again!

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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