NamCompendium 15: Mouse Police, Chemicals, and Mushrooms

Note: This was originally posted to namcompendium.com in April 2019. It has been lightly revised.

I had a professor during my undergraduate years who was a great inspiration to me. One of the things this professor hammered home for me was to avoid using the passive voice when possible in writing. Be direct. Write in weighty, punchy prose. I’m not great at this mode of writing, as you may have noticed.

I'll give it a whirl though: 1983 is the beginning of Namco’s Silver Age. We are 25 games into this series (five of which were not developed by Namco) and Namco has already started to resemble its current incarnation: A license holder that releases new entries into its existing properties, with a few experiments here and there. In the coming years Namco's position as the arcade kings would be seriously challenged by the likes of Capcom, Konami, SNK, and (in particular) Sega. The followups to their earlier blockbuster titles would never quite reach the heights of the original objects, as we’ve already seen with Super Pac-Man, and in time the company merges with Bandai to become your favorite purveyor of anime games.

However, the prior successes of the company had allowed Namco to accumulate a war chest that was used to fund development of some, umm, weird shit. Think of this as a sort of Final Fantasy VIII situation, wherein the prior game sold so well, and onboarded so many new players, that Squaresoft saw an opportunity to make something more experimental while counting on a sort of baked-in audience. But while Final Fantasy VIII is a masterpiece (don’t @ me), some of Namco’s more inventive titles of 1983 do not hold up as well. We’ll look at three of those games in this issue, and lead off with the best of them.

Mappy

25 March 1983 (ARC, Japan)

Mappy is a game about an anthropomorphized mouse dressed as a cop, raiding the bandit hideouts of a cat gang and confiscating their pilfered goods with the aid of some strategically placed trampolines.

Popo aside, what I’m suggesting here is that Mappy is an absolute good, friends. This is the strangest thing the company had produced since Dig Dug, or perhaps Warp & Warp, and of the three games under consideration herein it had the most staying power. I'd argue that's down to Mappy being the most straightforward of the three. Mappy is at its core a maze game which shares DNA with Namco’s colossus, Pac-Man. That’s not by accident: Mappy uses the same underlying arcade hardware as Super Pac-Man, with the addition of new video hardware to handle horizontal scrolling through the cat bandit’s bounce palace. Again, a strange game.

The player navigates the titular Mappy, a mouse cop (or at least a mouse dressed as cop, in which case Mappy is himself also a criminal?) through the hideout of Mewkies, a gang with a penchant for pilfering art and household appliances. The player’s object is to recover all of the aforementioned wares while avoiding the Mewkies and their feline ringleader, Nyamco. While this loop is certainly Pac-Man-esque at its core, there's some key differences. Firstly, there are the trampolines. While jumping up and down on a trampoline, Mappy enters an invulnerable state and can pass directly though any of the harrying foes who have joined you in the bouncing. There are also doors in the level, which may be opened onto the cats and thereby knock them out of play. Furthermore, flashing doors emit a sort of soundwave burst that traps all cats all across a horizontal plane. Score optimization comes down to timing these flashing doors to catch as many cats as possible. Easier said than done when you're cornered. It’s a nice risk-reward proposition that adds tension by giving the player the ability to make their own bad choices.

The stolen goods in the level also play into the scoring. When you pick up the first of these, another object beginning to flash. Pick up the flashing object and you receive a hot bonus. Another risk-reward choice: do I try to maximize my score by running all the way across this house and risk being mauled in the process, or grab what is expedient? It’s good stuff. What’s more, between the main levels are trampoline challenge bonus levels that task you with navigating a maze of slowly deteriorating trampolines to gather all available balloons. These might be my favorite part of the game, and continue the fine legacy of Namco bonus levels begun in Galaga.

As mentioned above, Mappy is the only one of these three games to have had any sort of legs. Released in March 1983, it came to North America one month after its Japanese release, with distribution handled by Bally Midway. Sales were not what Namco would have hoped, in either region; According to Hardcore Gaming 101, there existed a surplus Mappy boards in Namco’s inventory that would eventually be cannibalized into The Tower of Druaga boards when that game caught fire in Japan.

Still, the game was well regarded enough that it became one of the earliest Namco ports to the Famicom, arriving in November 1984. This version of Mappy is squished and squeezed into the 4:3 aspect of FC titles by lopping off one of the six floors from the arcade game. It's not the end of the world. Namco’s trade dress continued here with serial number “04” emblazoned on the cartridge and box art. Like all early Famicom games (basically everything through about 1986) it sold well and is warmly regarded by Japanese dorks of a certain age.

There are two separate streams to track from Famicom Mappy. Firstly, its own history of re-releases. Mappy had enough cultural cache to be included in the Famicom Mini series of GBA reissues of old FC games, and landed on the Game Boy Advance exclusively in Japan on Valentine’s Day 2004. You will be shocked to learn that this conversion of a Famicom/NES game bears all of the hallmarks of this line of games, with its cramped horizontal resolution and dodgy value proposition at MRSP. Famicom Mappy also made an appearance on now-defunct Japanese Virtual Console in January 2008. Alas, no stealth appearances in Gamecube games here.

The second, more tenuous stream is the May 1991 Game Gear port of Mappy. Released exclusively in Japan, Game Gear Mappy is a surprisingly ambitious conversion of the arcade game. Three separate modes of play are included here. The first is a simple conversion of the arcade game, though with the same cutbacks as the FC port. I mentioned a shared legacy with the aforementioned as the good folks at The Cutting Room Floor have found unused, leftover sprites from Famicom Mappy on the Game Gear cartridge.

The second mode on offer here required a little extra digging on my part, because my kanji knowledge is limited to my slowly diminishing Chinese. Called Gosenzosama no Chousen, or “The Challenge of the Ancestors”, this mode differentiates itself by fiddles with the maps. Gone are the five story layouts first crafted for the Famicom port, replaced instead with a sort of office building. Floors are separated by tricky trampoline, reminiscent of the arcade’s bonus levels, that require some thoughtful navigation to gather objects in the bonus order. You also have ability to get Mappy up to the roof of the building, where the player can drop objects onto Nyamco and the other enemies below. Between these new layouts and the added presence of obvious Sharp X68000 computers as items in the levels, this is my pick for the the most interesting iteration on arcade Mappy until Mappy Arrangement in 1995, or perhaps ever.

Thirdly, there is a multiplayer mode. Now, I’ve got to make a confession here: I have not been testing multiplayer modes of games so far. I know, go ahead and kill me now with a brick in a sock or something. But it turns out that Mappy for the Game Gear is not even the first portable game by Namco to have some sort of multiplayer. Pac-Man supported simultaneous multiplayer on both the Game Gear and Game Boy via both system’s bespoke link cable solutions, and Game Boy Database lists the American conversion of Game Boy Famista, Bases Loaded, as having had multiplayer as well. In any event, Game Gear multiplayer Mappy sets both players own their own map, rather than sharing one layout. The fun comes in defeating enemies, however, which transfers them onto your opponent’s map. Neat! It's like Tetris Battle Gaiden!

Anyway, here's your list of latter day ports.

• Namco Museum Volume 2 (PS1, Feb 1996)
• Namco gallery volume 1 (GB, Aug 1996)
  • Included alongside Galaga, Battle City, and Namco Classic
  • Also uses a multi-directional screen scrolling solution as it suffers from Jeremy Parish’s bugbear: overly large sprites for the GB display
• Namco Museum Battle Collection (PSP, 2005 in NA)
• Namco Museum 50th Anniversary (PS2, GCN, Xbox, 2005)
• Namco Museum Volume 2 (PSP, 2006 in Japan and South Korea)
• Namco Museum DS (2007)
• Namco Museum Remix (Wii, 2007)
• Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade (360, 2009)
  • This is one of the on-disk games with no Achievement support
• Namco Museum Megamix (Wii, 2010)
• Namco Museum (Switch, 2017)
• Hamster Arcade Archives Release (PS4 and Switch, 2019)
• Namcot Museum Archives Volume 1 (PS4, Xbox One, Switch, 2020)

Additionally, the arcade iteration of Mappy showed up on the Wii Virtual Console in all territories between March and April 2009.

The actual followup to Mappy was Pac & Pal, which has already been covered in a prior issue. Pac & Pal was sort of a logical next step for the Pac-Man series, as unwelcome as some of the additions may have been. What came next after Mappy and Pac & Pal bore no resemblance to either game and is an absolute freak show.

Phozon

August 1983 (ARC, Japan)

Phozon is a game about chemistry. Wait, don’t leave yet!

The player is tasked with moving a small collection of particles around in order to form covalent bonds with other molecules. These must be collected at the correct “hard points” around the player’s central molecule, such that eventually the player will have a shape that corresponds with the one provided in the center of the stage. Making these bonds to your hard points often goes wrong, but with the click of a button, you can eject the most recently attached molecule. Be ready to do this a lot.

Complicating this all is an antagonistic molecule, called the Atomic, which can kill the player via contact. It can also graze the outer rings of molecules attached to the player, scraping them off and forcing you to redo your work. You do have limited ability to damage the Atomic during the initial seconds of a given stage, but the real revenge occurs every four stages when the player is briefly turned into a Bosconian-esque weapon of destruction. The main difference is, whereas Bosconian provided a two-way shot, Phozon has you fire simultaneous in the four cardinal directions in an attempt to put that damned Atomic down. Wash, rinse, repeat with faster particles and more dastardly molecular layouts until your 100 yen piece is spent.

Phozon is really, really weird. Charitably, it's a little like Katamari Damacy, played out on a two dimensional plane with 90 less joy, and some Qix blended in for good measure. This was the second of three games planned by Yasunori Yamashita, per MobyGames. I have found all of Yamashita’s output mediocre, with Pac & Pal being the strongest of the trio. Namco seems to have agreed. Super Pac-Man wasn’t even given the Namco Museum treatment in Japan, Pac & Pal was ultimately scrapped as an overseas release after a test launch, and Phozon appears to be the first Namco arcade game since Kaitei Takara Sagashi to not receive an arcade release outside of Japan.

Phozon was also part of another new trend within Namco: developing bespoke hardware with short shelf lives. This actually started in earnest with Pole Position in mid-1982, which ran on what was at the time a wildly complex board built around three Zilog Z80-based processors capable of handling 16 bit instructions. The Pole Position board was ultimately used twice by Namco, the second time being for Pole Position II. Prior to that point, Namco had been diligent in recycling arcade hardware and fitting new games onto existing board designs. For instance, Gee Bee, Tank Battalion, and Warp & Warp all ran on the same fundamental hardware. Pac-Man and both Rally-X games utilized the same boards as well, and all of the Bally-Midway spinoffs (minus Professor Pac-Man) were built on this platform as well. While I don’t have figures in front of me, one assumes this spend-thrift mode of using existing platforms saved the company money over time.

The Namco Phozon board, by contrast, was used twice. We’ll cover its final use case in the next edition. While this constant research and development effort into new arcade hardware may have allow Namco games to keep some sort of technical edge over its arcade competitors, come mid-1985 Sega was going to stick an enormous Hang-On shaped knife into Namco’s heart. It wasn’t until about 1986 that Namco would get out of the business of reinventing the wheel every six months or so, but we are a ways off from that.

In any case, Phozon was ultimately localized for international release when it was included in the NA and EU release of Namco Museum Volume 3. You can play it on every Sony PlayStation system up to the PS4 thanks to various modes of backwards compatibility and digital downloads, so those hankering for a taste of Phozon on the go are in luck if they’ve got a PSP or Vita on hand. Otherwise, it wasn't seen again until Hamster got their Arcade Archive-shaped hands on the game in 2021.

Libble Rabble

December 1983 (ARC, Japan)

Hey, a familiar face! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Toru Iwatani to the NamCompendium! Libble Rabble was Iwatani’s followup project to the fantastic Pole Position, which itself was the followup to (probably) the most important video game ever made. That’s a hell of a pedigree, surely his next creation will add to his legend. Right?

The career trajectory of Iwatani is bizarre. From designing the company’s first video games as a trilogy of pinball/Breakout clones, to the surreal ghost-filled pill mazes of Pac-Man, to a Formula One simulation, we now get... two handed Qix? Amazing to have two Qix references in the same piece, I know. The player controls two opposite facing arrows, the titular Libble and Rabble. Manipulated by two eight-way digital sticks, the player is tasked with enclosing parts of a play field either by joining the arrows after wrapping around scattered pachinko-like pegs, or by touching both to different portions of the outer frame. This is done to capture Mushlins, small fungoid creatures scattered across the field of play. Once a section is encircled, a truly sick wicked gradient is applied to said section.

It is during this trippy effect that various little doodads reveal themselves. Yes, in addition to Qix we also have a little bit of “hidden object game” vibe here for good measure. Said objects include treasure chests, which are merely revealed if captured in too broad a range of enclosed area. To open the chest, the player must capture a tight arrangement of pegs around said chest. Once opened, six Topcups (we are all in on fantasy creature naming here) escape. Capturing all six Topcups with yet more circles automatically advances the level and allows the player to partake in a bonus level, which consist of, what else, capturing more chests.

Antagonizing the player through these bizarre proceedings are time itself, represented by the border of the game steadily changing from blue to pink, and a host of different enemy creatures. These will either attempt to snip the player’s line, which will regenerate, or attack the arrows Libble and Rabble themselves; this as well as running out of time costs the player a life.

Have you kept up with all of this? It’s a lot to think about, and none of this is helped by the two-handed and disparate nature of the proceedings. Games like Robotron 2084 and Smash TV also use a two-handed joystick layout, but those are made easier by having to keep track of a single “character”. Here you are threading two abstract shapes in and around pegs on a board while under attack, with a time crunch, all while attempting to complete the most advantageous loops and shapes possible.

Libble Rabble relies on a whizbang 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor, the first Namco machine to do so. I do not have evidence to support this claim, but I'm guessing Iwatani could get away with this hardware requirement for his new game after having produced Pac-Man and Pole Position in succession. That said, my sense is that Libble Rabble was not a stunning success. It was the final game designed with Iwatani in a sort of auteur position, and it would be four years before he would receive another credit on any game. The hardware, meanwhile, was recycled exactly once three years later when it was used for the generally unloved Toy Pop. Libble Rabble has not even seen as much love as the latter, as it has never been included in any of the countless Namco Museum collections.

That isn’t to say the game has never seen a port or conversion. There were some Japanese PC conversions, outside of the scope of this project bar the superb Bosconian. And then there was the token console port. Eleven years after it arrived in arcades, Libble Rabble was ported onto the Super Famicom for a Japan-exclusive reissue. This is the first in-house developed SFC game we have seen so far in the NamCompendium, and only the second overall (recall that Ms. Pac-Man was developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Williams). For all the nice things I had to say about the SNES port job of Ms. Pac-Man (scrolling notwithstanding), Libble Rabble is an even better conversion. In fact, it’s nearly perfect!

The music is pitched just ever so slightly different, and you lose the satisfying action of using two 8-way arcade sticks to control the arrows. Libble Rabble employs a similar control scheme to Super Smash TV, another fantastic conversion, where the player holds diagonals on the directional pad and simultaneously presses two face buttons to simulate diagonals on the right side of the controller. It’s the only real compromise I have noticed. I’ve thus been forced to place it right at the top of my own Namco SNES/SFC games list on Giant Bomb, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the game as a whole. It’s a shame this was never released on a Virtual Console service, though the arcade original did at least achieve that in November 2009 in Japan. And naturally your friends at Hamster would put this out on (most) modern platforms in 2021, with their requisite "absolutely zero frills or fanfare" approach to reissues.

******

So, three absolute freakshow games to help us round out a transformational year for Namco as a company. We will put a final bow on 1983 and step boldly into 1984 in the next issue, one where Namco will get into proper Silver Age mode: iterating on established properties to mixed results.