Thursday, June 19, 2008

Chrontendo Episode 13: Wrath of the Yakyuu

Episode 13 has arrived, more or less on schedule. As always, it may be streamed or downloaded from archive.org. As you may recall from last episode, the 1986 holiday season has arrived in Japan, and new Famicom games are being released in droves. In fact, this episode only covers ten days, from December 10 thru December 19. We'll finish up 1986 next episode, so you can think of Episodes 12-14 as a trilogy of sorts.

Before we get into the games themselves, let's discuss sports games for a moment. Today, sports games are a major genre, with series such as Madden Football moving an absurd number of units. Sports games played an important role in the early years of video games, with such consoles as the Intellivison building their reputation on superior sports titles. But the astute Chrontendo viewer will have noted a distinct dearth of sports titles for the Famicom so far, with the exception of wrestling games. Nintendo themselves released a handful of basic sports titles early in the system's lifespan - Golf, Baseball, Soccer and Tennis. Since then we've had Irem's 10 Yard Fight in 1985 and Nintendo's Volleyball in mid-1986. With this episode, we'll see this start to change, beginning with the release of a baseball game from Namco that helped kick off the modern era of sports games.

In addition, we have another fine Konami release, a dull text adventure game from Square, and a US style RPG, as well as all kinds of general nonsense. Let's get going.


Episode 13's MVP:

Pro Yakyuu Family Stadium/RBI Baseball
King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch

















For the first time ever, it's a tie! Neither of these titles are stone cold classsics, yet both rise above the crowd. Namco's Pro Yakyuu Family Stadium marks a major turning point in the evolution of the sports game. Rather than using identical, generic players as in Nintendo's Baseball, Family Stadium features real Japanese baseball players, each with his own unique hitting and/or pitching stats. Thus, every team is different, and knowing your teams strengths and weaknesses is vital to mastering the game. Tengen released the game in the US as RBI Baseball, replacing the Japanese teams and players with American ones. RBI Baseball proudly featured the MLBPA logo on front, thus kicking off the era of licensed sports titles. The Family Stadium series continues to this day, while RBI Baseball continued as a separate series for a few years.

















In 1986, Dino DeLaurentiis released a belated sequel to his 1976 hit movie King Kong. King Kong Lives was a box office flop, but did inspire a video game tie-in from Konami, the wonderfully titled King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch. Never released in the US, this fun top down action game has nothing to do with the movie, but is a crazy romp featuring interconnected maze-like levels, the ability to jump, punch and throw rocks, and even a certain number of destructible elements in the environment. Oh yes, and giant ducks. I'm not sure why the folks at Konami think ducks are so sinister, but killer ducks will feature in another Konami game a little later down the road (to be covered in Episode 15).

More Cool Games:

Nazo no Kabe: Block Kazushi

What?! Konami virtually has a lock-down on this episode! Nazo no Kabe is a fun little Arkanoid clone, which beat Taito's Famicom port of Arkanoid to the shelves by around two weeks! Just like Arkanoid, this game is a modern variation on the old Atari classic Breakout. Think of it as Breakout with the following additions: a sci-fi theme, power-ups, enemies, more varied block patterns, and the occasional boss. I will admit, I like Nazo no Kabe better than Arkanoid itself.

Mashou/Deadly Towers

















Here's a game with an extremely bad reputation that it doesn't quite deserve. Mashou is a Zelda inspired adventure game in which you climb a series of towers to obtain and destroy seven evil bells. Much of the game is completely playable, though hampered by the developer Lenar's insistence on hiding most of the important items in completely arbitrary places. Even so, Mashou is relatively decent -- except for one thing. Lenar decided to ramp up the difficulty and length of the game by adding a number of huge, dangerous and impossible to navigate dungeons. The entrances to these dungeons are invisible, so accidentally stumbling into one will usually result in death while your desperately search for the dungeon's exit. This virtually kills the game for all but the most masochistic gamers. Find some maps of the dungeons online, however, and you Mashou becomes surprisingly acceptable. Mashou is a big, ambitious game. Too bad Lenar had to take a crap all over their own creation by adding those ridiculous dungeons.

Wing of Madoola

Again, not a great game, but better than I suspected. Wing of Madoola is the first Sunsoft title to show any promise. A side scrolling platformer with RPG elements, Madoola contains the usual power-ups, bosses, and running, jumping and slashing action. The game is fun in spots and there is a decent amount of variety to the levels, but Madoola is hampered by bad controls and annoying enemies. Still, a huge improvement over Super Arabian.

Deep Dungeon

RPG's are still relatively rare on the Famicom, even as RPG elements are becoming increasingly common. The first in a series of four games, Humming Bird Soft's Deep Dungeon is a straight up US style first-person RPG ala Wizardry. Taking place entirely inside a single dungeon, you control a lone adventurer who battles monsters one at a time, turn-based style. While not getting lost in the labyrinthine dungeon (hint: break out the pencil and graph paper for this one), your hero rummages through piles of trash looking for valuables. While RPGs don't really get any more basic than this, Deep Dungeon will please fans of old-school dungeon crawling action.

Not so good games:

Takeshi no Chousenjou

















Just like Ganso Saiyuuki: Super Monkey Daibouken, this Taito release is a classic example of kusoge - a shitty game. Supposedly designed by Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, the video game hating actor, director and TV celebrity, Takeshi no Chousenjou (Takeshi's Challenge) is sort of an anti-video game -- a deliberately boring, unplayable mess. Certain elements in this game have given it a reputation as either an avant-garde classic or one the worst games ever released. Either way, it is unlikely anyone actually enjoyed this game for more than a few minutes.

Breeder

I'm not sure if Breeder is bad, or just pointless. You construct robots and then pit your creations against each other in the arena - a decent idea for a game. However, the robot battles are completely automated and mostly consist of your robots wandering around the arena, occasionally attacking each other. The result is incredibly boring, but at least Breeder is notable as probably the least interactive video game released up to this point. The Japanese would eventually become the masters of non-interactive video games, so Breeder perhaps a little ahead of its time.

Gall Force: Eternal Story

An anime based shoot-em-up from HAL Laboratory? I had high hopes for Gall Force, but these were dashed upon playing the game itself. Considering this was the first game HAL published themselves, I shouldn't have expected too much. Regardless, Gall Force is a pretty lame shooter, with way too many enemies and useless power ups. The graphics are pretty good, however. This is also the earliest shoot-em-up I've seen that indicates in-game that the pilots are teenage girls. Eventually, Japanese games would start displaying an ennerving fascination with underage girls, so HAL is at least partially to blame for introducing lolicon into console gaming.

The rest:

Doreamon - A quickie release from Hudson, based on the eternally popular anime about a blue robot cat.
Suishou no Ryuu - Dull, almost dialog free text adventure game from Square. That oft-told story about Square facing bankruptcy in their early years is starting to make sense.
Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijou Yuukai Jiken - Actually sort of an interesting title from the obscure publisher Towachiki. As the master detective, you run around the UK, stabbing random pedestrians to death while searching for randomly hidden clues.
Adian no Tsue - A god-damned educational game disguised as a lame Zelda clone. More pointlessness from Sunsoft.
Knight Lore - A heavily modified port of the old Spectrum game, originally from The Ultimate Play the Game (later known as Rare). "Speccy" fans consider Knight Lore a timeless classic, but we'll have to chalk that up to typical British eccentricity.
Metro Cross - Port of an oddball Namco arcade game. You jump over giant rolling coke cans to avoid being electrocuted. No, it doesn't make any sense to me either.

Well, there you have it, another 15 games out of the way! Don't forget to download Chrontendo Episode 13 at archive.org!

6 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...

GALL FORCE: ETERNAL STORY
Often the pronounciation of "Gall" in "GALL FORCE" is similar to "Gal", given the girls seen in the videos, why the extra "L", who knows? Though you refer to them as movies, they were technically "OAV's", or "original animation video". This is similar to the "direct-to-video" type releases we may see for movies over here, but Japanese OAV's often run the gamut of many varieties often going from a single feature-length presentation to a 3-6-13 part series similar to that of TV episodes. There were initially three episodes for Gall Force itself, the first was "Eternal Story", the second "Destruction" and the third "Stardust War". When I first heard about the series and rented it back in the 90's I rented the third tape, not having seen the first at all, and getting confused at the plot since you had to see the first film to figure out what was going on. More Gall Force releases would follow that involve a different casts of characters and surrounds wars that last millennia.

A good podcast review of this series can be found here...
http://www.awopodcast.com/2006/07/anime-world-order-show-29-better-late.html

For anyone who may like to check this out, someone put the subtitled version up on YouTube at the moment...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjKYSUl9BB8


R.B.I. BASEBALL
Just reminded myself of this vid someone made a few years back where the game (in a act of machinima excellence) is synced to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-GgbP9C9Zk

DORAEMON
It's still on the air! It in itself though started sometime in the early 70's as a manga, and there was also a brief and short-lived TV anime series in the 70's that was not as faithful to the manga at all. It wasn't until 1979 that saw the Doraemon as we know it in anime form from then on, though it's present version is an entirely new version featuring a difference voice cast from the previous series. Wikipedia may help you here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doraemon


DEADLY TOWERS
AVGN also ripped into this as well sure enough!
"Why in the f__k are sprites from "Marble Madness" doing in this game?"


METRO CROSS
The character is supposed to be wearing a jump suit otherwise during the game, but perhaps the limitations of the Famicom's color range prevents us from noticing the details. I enjoyed this well very well.

Anonymous said...

It seems like there's something wrong with this episode on archive.org. The streaming version is only 1:13 long.

Is this deliberate? Is it just me?

Just thought I'd mention it in case it was a problem and you weren't aware.

- DJSharpeCheddar

Doctor Sparkle said...

DJSharpeCheddar - It's me, not you. I typed in the time as "1:13" meaning one hour, thirteen minutes, not thinking it would appear as 1 minute, 13 seconds. I've corrected it.

Anonymous said...

Excellent! Thanks for fixing it. I watch these at work, so I just had to skip this one and move on. :| But now the lost episode has been found!

- DJSharpeCheddar

Anonymous said...

Having a 10-year old female character in a video game with no sexual fanservice whatsoever = lolicon? Um... what?

And besides, I don't see what the problem is, it's not like everyone who likes lolicon is a real-life pedophile or something. Quite the opposite; see, the point of lolicon or any kind of hentai with a fantasy theme (furries, catgirls, etc.) is to give you something you can't have in real life. That's also the reason why many guys with girlfriends still watch porn. Claims like 'lolicon turns people into child molestors' (I know that's not directly what you said, but that comment about video games taking a turn for the worse sure made it sound like it) is literally the same nonsense as that 'violent video games turn people into serial killers' bullshit that people like Faux News love to spout so much.

So I hope I could clear up some of the misunderstandings about loli/shota and if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read some doujins.

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