With a shocking heist and car chase, the film blasts the viewer into the action. This doesn’t let up for the first ten minutes. At first, one may think that Jack Sholder’s The Hidden is just another 80s action flick. But after the cool down from the initial scene, one realizes one has also entered the realm of sci-fi horror.

After helming the slashers Alone in the Dark and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, director Jack Sholder shifted genres. Combining buddy cop action, dry humor, and an intergalactic twist, he gave New Line Cinema a modest box office success that most critics at the time received favorably. What makes The Hidden stand out from the other alien body-horror thrillers of the time is the script’s reflection on what humanity is and should be. It contrasts hedonism with the desire for connection with others, particularly through family.

Sholder could not properly handle the theme without the effort of the actors. After the exciting opening on the Los Angeles streets, we see the realistic camaraderie at LAPD headquarters. With the banter back and forth, one can tell that the officers truly care for each other. The atmosphere may seem stereotypical in the context of a wake of other police procedurals. We start with the sarcastic hysterics of the lieutenant as he deals with the FBI involvement. Yet, Sholder employs humor, which he sprinkles throughout the film, that is not over-the-top unlike the action. This keeps the officers dealing with the mysterious body-hopping threat looking competent rather than buffoonish.

The best interactions are between the two main investigators, Det. Thomas Beck (Michael Nouri) and FBI Special Agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan). Nouri portrays a tough officer who wants to do what it takes to stop the ongoing mayhem but hates being out of the loop. Still, despite his somewhat gruff demeanor, the film eventually reveals a tender love for his wife and daughter. MacLachlan is the individual standout performer. He must play Gallagher with a mysterious, alien air who seemingly has dropped out of nowhere into the investigation. Gallagher shows a naïve honesty that is still hiding that he knows more than he’s letting on. This leads to funny snippets of dialogue as police partners.

It also leads to touching scenes such as when Beck invites Gallagher to his home for dinner. We see a sweet awkwardness as he takes sense of his surroundings and tries to engage with the Becks. We also note there must be a tragic backstory for Gallagher as he observes their daughter. It’s no wonder that David Lynch would later select him to portray Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks.

Although the spotlight is on Beck and Gallagher, the pursuit itself would fall flat without a memorable antagonist. This could go quickly awry as the antagonist is an alien parasite controlling human hosts. The actors portraying the human hosts thus must be both individualized but also display a similar nonchalant attitude to the host body and others. They also need to exhibit a wonder at some of the more materialistic and tawdry aspects of humanity. All the possessed characters manifest this to degrees of success. However, the standouts are Jonathan Miller (William Boyett) and Brenda Lee Van Buren (Claudia Christian). Miller steals the show as an unhealthy middle-aged man pursuing whatever he sees. It’s like the id run rampant. Brenda stuns as an exotic dancer turned Terminator-like being. She engages the duo in both another thrilling car chase and following shoot-out.

This brings us to what most will likely view as the crowd-drawing aspect of the feature: the action. As mentioned before, the film immediately starts with a shocking heist and chase. Sholder decides to go from grainy bank security cam footage to a short transition to bright, sunny L.A. streets. He follows this with stunning shots of the fleeing Ferrari as it recklessly terrorizes the city streets. Throughout the film, there is further interesting focus on vehicles, including Gallagher’s equally eye-catching Porsche. This, combined with the ambulatory mayhem the alien forces its hosts to commit, leaves the audience little time to relax.

However, the quiet moments do allow for the audience to catch their breath. It’s during these moments that I believe that Sholder wants to contemplate the underlying theme. That theme is revolves around what it means to lead a fulfilling life as a human. The antagonistic alien parasite shows what happens when selfishness takes control. It not only destroys others, but it damages the host beyond repair. Gallagher, however, shows concerns for Beck and his family though they are new acquaintances. The thought is to choose to see what is more important: human connection or the pursuit of heedless desires.

The only gripe that I have is with parts of the score. There are stretches of beauty, particularly during the interaction of Gallagher with Beck’s family. However, the synth work often feels tinny. This is not a solitary problem with this film. From the late 80s to the early 90s, a lot of synth scores sound hollow compared to earlier in the 80s. Perhaps, it’s due to the shift from analog to digital. However, it can be distracting. Fortunately, the “alien” nature of the plot occasionally complements the dissonance. It would just be better if the keys had a richer tone. The soundtrack, on the other hand, plainly rocks. Special props to The Truth and the title track “Hidden.”

New Line Cinema was fortunate to have The Hidden in its roster of films. Being “the house that Freddy built,” there’s little that holds up outside of cult status during the studio’s early years. There’s the Nightmare and Critters series, and even those had some duds. With its thrilling set-pieces, atmospheric L.A. location, and interesting character interaction, this thematic but not pretentious genre-mesh deserves greater visibility.

Again, it’s another story of attraction against the class divide, with a twist on the Ringwald feature. This time, we focus on a male protagonist of lesser means, Keith (Eric Stoltz), along with good friend Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), a tomboy in similar outsider status. They have close bonds in status-conscious suburban L.A. However, their friendship comes to a breaking point when Keith gets an opportunity to date Amanda (Lea Thompson), one of the popular girls in high school. Though of a similar background as Keith and Watts, her previous relationship with the wealthy bully Hardy (Craig Sheffer), raised her star.

Will Keith and Amanda truly connect? Will Hardy really let his girl go? What’s truly hiding behind Watts’s opposition to her friend dating Amanda? And in an ancillary plot, what choice will Keith make as his father puts pressure on him to be the first in the family to attend college despite his pull to art?

Deutch doesn’t just cut and paste from his previous effort. Again, he animates most of his characters beyond teen movie stereotypes. This time, the comedy is almost entirely dropped. This is very surprising for a John Hughes work. Still, Some Kind of Wonderful is lively in the interaction between characters. Normally, the main character would be completely at odds with his family. However, despite the normal family bouts, one can sense the closeness and love within the Nelson family. I’m drawn to two scenes. One is where the older sister reveals something to him, and another is where he and his father fiercely butt heads over a college matter. In both scenes, Keith ends up being closer to his family at the end. This wouldn’t come across as realistic if it wasn’t for the acting chops of the characters.

I will however say that there are contrasting lows with some of the other characters. One can overlook the lack of development with the youngest sister and the mother. However, the bully Hardy seems somehow less interesting, despite a greater scene presence, when compared to Steff of Pretty in Pink. Despite his propensity for violence and his aggressive possessiveness of Amanda, Hardy seems less top dog of the school. He appears more as fearful competitor with Keith. Compared with James Spader, Sheffer comes off less ostensibly charming. Even though one finds out the reason why Amanda was initially drawn to Hardy, it still ends up making her less desirable. However detrimental it’s to her character, it does provide a pathway to the conclusion.

The star character is Watts, and her interactions with Keith lead more logically to the film’s end than Andie’s and Duckie’s relationship does to Hughes’s desired original ending. Watts and Keith do not have a one-sided relationship. It doesn’t seem that Keith is just tolerating her. They both care about each other and their interests. Despite her pride in her independence and outsider status, Watts doesn’t come across as silly. One can understand why Keith would want to stick by her, even if it causes him to lose cool points. Her protectiveness of him, though strong, doesn’t come across as stalkerish.    

The typical new wave soundtrack again highlights the drama of the scenes. Personally, I don’t think it’s as good as Pretty in Pink’s. However, the bands The Jesus and Mary Chain, Charlie Sexton, and Propaganda, who is featured during the opening Watts drumming sequence, stand out. The slightly heavier sounds appear to reflect the more angsty nature of the characters.

Critics generally praised Some Kind of Wonderful on release. People today seem to have neglected it in contrast with other teen films of the era. Perhaps this is due to the dramatic earnestness of the acting combined with the lack of winking at the audience. I think this separates it from the rest of the pack. Moreover, speaking of pack, it’s Brat Pack light, having only Lea Thompson, whom most view as an ancillary member anyways.

Still, one shouldn’t view the Some Kind of Wonderful as Pretty in Pink 2.0. John Hughes is writing great scenes and dialogue for teens and adults for one of the last times before he shuffled off to “kidsville” and the unbridled wackiness of his 90s work. Deutch is at his apex, letting the actors play to their strengths. They didn’t know it at the time, but the golden age of teen dramady was coming to an end. It’s wonderful that this film could be one of the concluding chapters.

iT’s the late eighties and you’re five years old up late. You’re watching cable television and this rolls across your screen on the cable-TV guide channel, “CreepShow 2”. Do you watch it?

Yes, you do.

Creepshow is the sequel to the original film from the minds of Stephen King and George Romero – obviously. Directed this time by Michael Gornick the cinematographer from the original anthology. Creepshow 2 although shorter than its predecessor is still based on stories from Stephen King and produced and written by George Romero. Still inspired by the Horror comic books of the fifties from such publishers as the legendary EC COMICS brand and in my opinion is the scarier of the two. There isn’t much dark humor found here. The emphasis leans more toward unsettling body horror and straight forward horror based on genuine mood, violence and atmosphere.

The progression of the film is narrated by the Creep blending both live action and animation in its prologue, interlude and epilogue. The body of the fill consists of three tales: Old Chief Wood’nhead, The Raft and The Hitchhiker. All very good stories, but the final tale is the creepiest one of them all. I still get weird chills every time i see the degradation of the Hitchhiker; completely uncomfortable macabre shit.

There was supposed to be five stories instead of three and although the Black Cat would’ve really made this movie better, I’m happy it didn’t make the cut and instead was included in the Tales from the Darkside movie in 1990.

Creepshow 2 stars: Tom Savini (Dusk til Dawn, Dawn of the Dead), George Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Will Sampson (Poltergeist 2, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Tom Wright, Stephen King, Lois Chiles. Distributed by New World Pictures. Released on May 7, 1987.

Watch this in the dark and I mean deep in the dark of your bedroom. Two thumbs up.

Stay Cool, Stay dry, Stay off the roads and keep your fingers on that REWIND button.

At the end of last month, we looked at three titles from the year 1987, taking stock of their pros and cons thirty years after their original release. I like to think of the process as something between an honest review, a nostalgic look back, and a brutal Friar’s Club roast (except I’m nowhere near as funny as any of those guys). This week I’ve chosen three more games from ’87 for us to slap around before giving them a big kiss and saying “happy 30^th.”

Karate Kid

Atlus/LJN

November 1987

Daniel turns the Japanese kids on to some Florida-style death metal. I like how “map” is just a line.

Here’s another license LJN got their grubby hands on during the 80s. I never had a strong opinion about any of the films,but karate was a big deal during the era in question and I understand why they had such success. I hear they’re doing a TV series, which makes me happy for Ralph Macchio since he really faded into the background once he hit adulthood. I digress… the NES game lumps the first two films together, focusing mainly on the second installment set in Japan. The first “stage” consists of a karate tournament that can be won relatively easily by spamming kicks and being insanely aggressive. Once you end up in Okinawa, things get trickier. You have to fight tons of thugs (some of them are carrying what look like harpoons), walk through a typhoon, and save your cute Japanese girlfriend from the massive prick who’s the student of Miyagi’s rival in the second movie. You actually have to save her twice, but only one of those times require you to actually beat Growly Scowly (a quick Wikipedia search tells me his name is Chozen and the girl’s name is Kumiko). Truly, Daniel-san was living a modern otaku’s wet dream. Or hero fantasy. I don’t know.

I can’t really smear Karate Kid in terms of overall quality. It’s hard but not stupid hard, has some pretty cool minigames, and there’s a level of polish present that you can tell Atlus was responsible for. The graphics are pretty good except for two things: the power-ups are just letters, and what the fuck is up with Daniel’s face in some of the minigames?

like a kewpie doll cross-bred with a Roswell alien.

My one complaint is that the game’s kind of short once you get the hang of it. Otherwise, Karate Kid is one of those few exceptions to a rule: a game published by LJN that didn’t come out the other end looking like forty dollars worth of chewed bubblegum.

Black Tiger

Capcom

August 1987

Listen up, because this is one of Capcom’s less well-known arcade titles, but probably one of its best from the pre-SFII era. Black Tiger is fucking crazy. The story’s fairly basic: three dragons slapped a kingdom around until that kingdom was pretty much bullshit; enter the protagonist, a berserk knife-hurling bodybuilder who wears just enough armor to look armored but never enough not to show the world how he keeps it real in the gym.

“Like what you see?”

Let me veer slightly off topic for a second, in reference to the main character’s melee weapon: these things are called flails, not morningstars or mace-and-chain. A flail, which evolved from the ancient tool used to process grain, is one or more weighted heads on lengths of rope or chain, affixed to a handle. A morningstar (also called a godentag, meaning “good day,” a morbid twist of humor I adore) is usually just a massive club with bands of iron and spikes augmenting the ass-beating end.

So our dude here battles his way through a dangerous fantasy world using a deadly throwing knife/flail combo, smashing the minions of the three dragons and un-petrifying some “wise men” he finds as stone statues along the way. For his trouble, the stone-to-fleshed guys will give the hero extra time on the clock or zenny coins. I KNOW A BUNCH OF YOU NERDS LOVE MONSTER HUNTER, so that currency will sound familiar; Black Tiger was the game that first featured it. Anyway, chests and hidden treasures (in walls, etc.) have more powerups like armor, life refills, extra lives, and more. Just like another Capcom title, Magic Sword, some of the chests are full of nothing but fuck-you and will hurt you if you don’t react quickly after opening them. You can also spend those sexy zenny coins on items in shops run by the little beardy guys you keep de-stoning. While the game is a platformer, it has a lot of areas to explore… almost enough that you’d want a map screen or something, but it’s pretty hard to actually get lost.

Bedecked in gold, ready to obliterate a dragon-man.

I am all about Black Tiger. It’s very Capcom with its epic but cartoon-like presentation, and it’s a lot of fun to play despite having a level of difficulty typical of a coin-op title. Capcom has a history of doing fairly well when crafting fantasy-style games, and this is no exception. I can’t even come down too hard on the one misgiving I do have about Black Tiger: when heard through the original equipment (or an emulation thereof), the sound effects are fucking annoying. As if to compensate, the music is of a quality on par with Capcom’s other arcade stuff… above average.

Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa

Sega

October 1987

The cutest little sapient spaceship you ever did see.

I love the original Fantasy Zone. I enjoy shooters in general, and Fantasy Zone‘s combo of excellent gameplay elements and a goofy style has me lovingly devoted to it. I cannot and will not speak ill of it. It is severely awesome and if you disagree with me you should probably just go the rest of the way in that direction and admit that you’ve secretly hated video games since you were born.

I don’t get the same gooey feeling in my black heart when I play this sequel, but it’s also very good. The first thing I noticed was that the backgrounds are absolutely breathtaking. Much more

both the laser-burger boss and the candy-cake mountains are rendered in deliciously deep color.

attention was paid to this aspect the second time around, and it’s most evident in the arcade version (which came after the Mark III/Master System version, in a world where arcade versions are usually the mommy). The music isn’t quite equal to that of the original in terms of catchy-ness or charm, but a couple of tracks (notably rounds 1 and 5) come close to hitting the mark.

FZII plays very similarly to its predecessor; a little added complexity comes from the fact that each zone has two “sides” to clear before the boss shows up. Speaking of the bosses, expect no punches pulled. They are every bit as challenging as you’d hope, and you’ll have to stay alert and be quick. While FZII seems on its surface to to be a minimally altered clone of its predecessor, I’m already planning to open up my emulator after this to play it some more. Unlike so many sequels and second chapters in various media, it’s satisfyingly true to its origin but enough of its own animal that it could stand on its own merits.

Karate Kid – 6/10 (It’s not a classic, but it’s really quite good for something LJN has its name on, which impressed the shit out of me)

Black Tiger – 7/10 (when I rate something 7/10 it means I like it but I couldn’t play it nonstop for more than a day or so, which is right where this one falls in. Still a fantastic arcade platformer!)

Fantasy Zone II – 8/10 (I’ll stop comparing it to the original, but it’s definitely worth playing if you liked the first one.)

I’ll start this off the way I like to start as many conversations as possible these days: I have a ton of emulators now, not to mention a handful of working consoles. Every moment I don’t spend writing, doing other work, playing D&D, sleeping, reading, or doing gangster shit (read: more sleeping), I tend to spend screwing around with games no newer than the year 1998 or so.

It occurred to me that hadn’t done a “grab bag” style write-up for a while, so I looked over my breadth of selection and got an idea. I could just use a particular year as my theme. Any platform, and genre, any style. Here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s do it up right and have a look at some games that are turning 30 this year. That’s right… get in the DeLorean, because we’re going back to ’87, and we don’t need roads because your ass can sit right there and enjoy the show.

R-Type | Irem | July 1, 1987

The shoot-em-up remains one of my favorite styles of game, and the 1980s were its formative era. We saw the genre that began with games like Galaga begin to transform, yielding high-octane excitement that progressively offered more and more challenges along with the advancement in gaming technology. R-Type is notable in the history of the shmup not only for being one of Irem’s most successful games, but also for its considerable difficulty and innovative gameplay elements.

Yo… this is vaginas. You’re not even trying to hide it, Irem. You straight up made a boss monster by stacking up lady-parts.

For real though, this game is fucking HARD. Like a lot of shooters, the focus is on the game itself, not the plot; you’re responsible for saving humanity from an alien menace hellbent on destroying it. This life form is called “the Bydo,” and apparently its preferred method of war is the relentless bullet hell. At least they gave you a badass little ship!

Well, okay… it doesn’t start out badass, but powerups let you improve your main gun, and you can also get a little “pod” that can float near your ship or detach from it. This little guy provides more firepower, not to mention versatility. You’re gonna need all the extra guns you can call in, too. I would say that we’ve seen harder shmups since; that’s not hard to say with confidence since I’ve played Ikaruga and also seen some of the insane shit people have home-cooked on the Internet. Don’t let that take away from the challenge of R-Type, though. It is not, in any way, fucking around.

The visuals are pretty rich for 1987, most notably the environmental art and the huge (sometimes gross) bosses. Lots of attention to detail, rich color depth, and surprising complexity for 384×256. There is a giant spaceship, as well as several aliens of varied forms, and all of them are rendered in surprising detail. The music is pretty ponderous, and the sound effects get annoying quickly, but that’s really the only department in which R-Type suffers.

NetHack | Mike Stephenson/NetHack Dev Team | July 28, 1987

I’ve waited for a long while to bring up the roguelike genre in one of these articles. If we were to go just by logged hours, by sheer time spent playing, I’d say this genre of game would rank in the top 3 for me personally. I will define the format in the briefest way possible: the player chooses from a couple of sets of parameters (usually a race and character class, like most RPG fans are familiar with), then is placed at the beginning of a randomly-generated dungeon or other environment with the idea of achieving a particular goal. Play is turn-based instead of realtime, allowing for careful thought and planning. You will usually die a horrible death before achieving your goal, but the fun is seeing how far you can make it.

NetHack is only two generations removed from  Rogue, the 1980 Unix-based game that started the genre. I’ll go ahead and mention now that the graphics for these early games were not the focal point. NetHack is also not known for its breakneck action, although it can get really exciting if you’re into it and have an imagination. And for those of you who don’t, well, there are tilesets for the modern iteration of it that offer a richer visual experience. In fact, the game has continued to see maintenance and updates, last releasing a new version in 2015.

In NetHack, you choose your race, role (class), gender, and alignment (lawful, neutral, or chaotic) and head down into the dungeon to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. The amulet is said to grant immortality if offered to the gods. Why the hell anyone would want to live forever is beyond me, but maybe I’m just a downer. There are, of course, sub-quests, one of which is specific to whatever class you chose. The dungeon is about 50 floors, and the journey is never the same twice. Needless to say, the dungeon is chock-full of all kinds of monsters (and I mean all kinds; the variety is staggering), most of whom want to murder the shit out of you and eat your body. There are also a lot of leftover bits of gear lying around from the chumps who tried this before you, and some of them (potions, scrolls, etc) give no outward indication as to their purpose or effect. You can always go in blind, but that’s as risky as it sounds. Drinking something when you don’t know what it is? Sounds like the way several of my early D&D characters fucking died. Let’s do it!

Oh, and when you die… you’re dead. No retry, no saved game. Start again. Make a new character. Therein lies most of the challenge and enjoyment of the game.

Like many truly oldschool roguelikes, NetHack is entirely and truly free. I also recommend DCSS, which is a more frequently-maintained and sometimes more approachable oldschool roguelike.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link | Nintendo | January 14, 1987

Usually I take a giant shit on at least one of the games I write up in these articles. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect me to do that to Zelda II. It received positive critical reception in 1987, and even some modern gaming sites consider it to be pretty solid. However, if you ask many individual players – real folks like you and me – they’ll tell you that Zelda II is clumsy, needlessly elaborate, tedious, and unapproachable without a guide or walkthrough.

This. This, right here, is gaming at its finest. Please put a flathead screwdriver in my brain.

I fall somewhere in between. I’m not crazy about the game’s tacked-on RPG elements; I think that, at the very least, they could have made leveling up go faster. It’s also incredibly annoying to have little figures chase you on the world map. More significantly, the game relies on a lot of hints and instructions from people in the towns, and a little clarity seems lost in translation. The plot is also utter bullshit. In fact, it angers me. It’s Zelda, but not the Zelda from the first game? How many Zeldas am I gonna have to fuck with, here? There was no need. No need.

It’s not a terrible game, though. Zelda II has a lot to offer the modern player.

Sneering, it mocks you in your weakness.

Get yourself a walkthrough, preferably one that focuses on clarity. Walkthroughs can suck the fun out of most RPGs, but this one actually benefits from a little help on deck. That way, you can focus on not getting your ass constantly kicked in stupid ways. Don’t forget to pick up the stupid little goddamn bags that appear when some monsters die. That’s part of leveling up.

When you are able to separate from these elements, it can actually be a fun challenge to navigate through Zelda II. Progress involves fighting carefully, calculating risks, and learning the weaknesses of the monsters (particularly the rowdy crew of assholes inside the palaces).

The graphics are standard for NES in 1987: not great, not bad. The music, though… let’s put it this way. The overworld/map screen music would make terrific music to pipe into a room you were confining someone in for aggressive psychological torture. It’s this violently cheery, over-wrought, bizarrely jaunty tune that belongs nowhere except maybe on a level of Hell that is made out of grandma-candy. The rest of the soundtrack is fairly good. If you pay close attention to the intro music, at one point it sounds like the melody to a Nickleback song. Don’t ask me which one, because the only times I’ve willingly listened to Nickleback were out of tolerance or sheer circumstance. I just have an ear for music.

JUST RATE ‘EM ALREADY

R-Type – 7/10 (hell of a good shooter, innovative for its time, good challenge. Why does one boss look like a huge alien cooter though?)

NetHack – 8/10 (If you like an RPG experience that is protracted, cerebral, and casual yet detailed, this type of thing is for you.)

Zelda II – 6/10 (There’s plenty not to like about it, but I can get into it if I just turn off little parts of my consciousness or achieve ego death.)

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2018/03/31/grab-bag-1987-games/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2017/11/30/grab-bag-capcoms-disney-on-the-nes/ https://newretrowave.com/2017/11/30/grab-bag-capcoms-disney-on-the-nes/#respond Thu, 30 Nov 2017 19:25:36 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2017/11/30/20171130grab-bag-capcoms-disney-on-the-nes/ NRW Gaming -The Place Where Dreams Come True. Join Bryan as he stacks up five of the numerous NES titles Capcom produced for Disney during the console's heyday and golden years.

Disney owns everything now. They own Darth Vader and Spider-Man. Disney is a monolith… an empire. We kneel at its majestic feet and howl that we are unworthy to bask in its glow. We fork over heaps and heaps of dough to soak generation after generation of our children in Disney’s particular flavor of saccharine, and that company has more money than some countries do. Disney has us on a leash.

And because we crave abuse, sweet sweet abuse, we love it.

It definitely spills over into the video game market. Of course it does! They have a whole department of people who examine and analyze all the other shit that kids and preteens are into, and they make sure they’ve got a finger in the pie. What started with the Nintendo Entertainment System continues with series like Kingdom Hearts. You’ve got Squaresoft writing games involving twiggy little blond anime kids saving the Magic Kingdom alongside Goofy. Sure, it sounds absurd… but the things is, most of the games are good.

Capcom yielded a bumper crop of NES titles for Disney during the middle and latter periods of the system’s lifespan. They developed many of the titles, and published a few as well, keeping their hand in the till as the house that Walt built wrote check after check. This resulted in a pretty high standard of quality; while LJN was pulling licensing deals out of a Powerball machine and releasing uninspired digital gruel, Capcom was taking the stairs instead of the elevator and making sure they looked you in the eye when they shook your hand. I’ve plucked a couple of games from this family for review in the past, but I figured it was time to immerse myself (and as a result, you) a little deeper.

 

The Little Mermaid

1991

 

The Little Mermaid was a pretty big fucking deal in the early 90s. Did you know that the early VHS release had a dick on the cover? It was hidden as one of the towers on the castle! As a grown man, that is the first thing I think of when the film is mentioned.

Let’s put it this way: if that’s NOT supposed to be a schlong, then Freud would have a field day with this artist.

Anyway… you know how Capcom do. They turned this bitch out. I mean, at least for a game based on Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The intro is long, covering a paraphrased and liberally switchboarded version of the movie’s plot. These narrative scenes are the game’s only real flaw; the characters all seem like doll-eyed mannequins in some calm but churning hell. The music, which is decent everywhere else in the game, is meandering and bland.

“Listen, I don’t know, I’m just a fucking crab, okay? I emcee for your dad, I pay my bills, and occasionally bet too much on the seahorses and end up in hock with the mob. How the hell am I supposed to know how to get you a pair of feet? Ursula’s as good a bet as any, honey. It’s that or stay down here as the sexiest little chicken of the sea. Carpe diem.”

The game itself is worth aggressively skipping the cut scenes for. Ariel swims through the familiar locales of the film, dealing with threats by trapping fish in bubbles to throw as weapons or picking up loose items. It’s similar to the Chip n’ Dale NES cart Capcom released the year previous, but Ariel is a good deal more versatile and also doesn’t run around bashing herself on the head like those little assholes do in their game. There’s an additional aspect where you collect pearls to up the power and range of your attacks, as well as some light puzzle solving. I hadn’t messed with this one much as a kid, but revisiting it was a fun experience.

I would describe the graphics as “slightly shittier than Mega Man.” There’s not a ton of definition in a lot of the sprites, but hey, they’re fish. The backgrounds look pretty good (especially on the ice level and the sunken ship) and things have a colorful but controlled tone to them. As I said before, the music during game play is pretty good, an upbeat and lighthearted soundtrack that I found very appropriate for imprisoning little fish inside bubbles and hurling them brutally at their kin. This isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t quite reach “classic” status for me. I’d say that if you collect, and you see this for $15 or less, go for it. Don’t get nuts over it, though.

 

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom

1990

 

The first tidbit I have to offer you about this one is that Capcom did not release it domestically in Japan; Adventures in the Magic Kingdom was released only in Oceania, North America and Europe (France, UK and Scandinavia). Another one that flew under my radar as a kid, this game seemed powerfully stupid at first when I revisited it, but it grew on me as I ignored the premise and focused on the gameplay itself.

The game opens on a beautiful day in Disney’s fully fabricated reality: the Magic Kingdom. Mickey’s got a parade all planned, but his day’s about to hit a serious speed bump in the form of his dipshit friend Goofy the dog. Mickey had the bright idea to trust Goofy with the keys to the gate. Goofy left the golden key inside the castle… and also locked himself out of the castle in the process. I swear to God, Goofy, you’d lose your ass if it wasn’t attached to you.

That really narrows it down. Look at his face. He’s got that oblivious serenity that only a total nimrod can manage. The kind that just makes you angrier at his sub-animal stupidity. Goofy is one of the luckiest morons in the world, because he has no idea that he is a fucking moron. There’s a lesson in that somewhere, but it’s probably not worth meditating on.

Mickey, with the air of a celebrity who’s used to being obeyed, casually fobs this problem off on you. You’re some kid dressed like Curious George’s dad, running around completely unsupervised, acting as an unpaid intern for Mickey Mouse. The object of the game is to find all six of the silver keys in the different parts of the Kingdom where that hillbilly schmuck Goofy lost them. Maybe it’s time to find someone else to carry the key ring. Forgive me if I seem judgmental, but if someone’s actual fucking name is Goofy, maybe they should be limited to low-impact responsibilities.

The levels are based on Disney’s popular rides/attractions at their amusement parks, and a lot of the “characters” you have to deal with to find the keys are just Mickey and Goofy in costumes. This is some kind of spiritual torture, some means of annihilating the ego of a gamer to achieve anti-enlightenment. Space Mountain is pretty sick, involving some fast-paced piloting and shooting. The Old West one is absolute bullshit as you careen downhill in a runaway train while boulders ricochet across your path at random, but the Haunted Mansion one is probably my favorite.

Look at his face. He seriously looks like he’s worried about getting murdered.  Don’t worry, little gaucho boy… it isn’t the ghouls and Draculas you need to worry about at Disney World… it’s the alligators and the room-temperature food.

One thing Adventures in the Magic Kingdom deserves a lot of credit for is how it mixes up the gameplay style. You’re racing in cars and spaceships, walking around in overhead view to gather clues and info, then plowing through some formulaic platform action. As much as I jokingly make this game sound like a secondhand bag of farts, it’s really fun. The challenge level is certainly a tad more “Capcom Difficult” than The Little Mermaid, but things are still manageable if you have basic chops and quick thumbs. Things progress in a far more linear fashion than one may think, so the game’s only a time commitment if you go in totally blind. Don’t do that, though. Damn.

Click an Image to Enlarge.

The music’s a bit of a throwaway in places, but as with Little Mermaid above, the level themes are great. It turns out that the composer for Adventures in the Magic Kingdom was Yoko Shimomura, who would later go on to write the music for Kingdom Hearts. The graphics are… well, they’re fine. Another vividly colorful palette, a variety of lively sprites and some well-drawn (if uninspired) backgrounds. Most of what’s fun about Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is knowing you’re playing a couple games at once.

 

Darkwing Duck

1992

 

I always thought it was cool that Launchpad McQuack was able to find a client after DuckTales. He’s a good guy, he works hard, and even though he’s kind of a goof, he’s always there when you need him. You can’t ask for more than that in a private helicopter pilot.

The hero behind the hero.

I’ll come right out with it: I never gave two shits about Darkwing Duck as a kid. By 1992 I think I was more interested in the campy horror films I could get away with watching on rented VHS and making my first forays into the world of RPGs. This game got added to the stack because it’s one I hear mixed things about. I took Darkwing Duck for a spin, and I can sum up my impression of it pretty quickly: It’s Mega Man except you’re Darkwing Duck and you can hang on hooks and lanterns.

I’m not saying it’s bad. Relax. It’s actually better than the Mega Man games in terms of mechanics, as someone who loathes Mega Man‘s extremely limited control scheme. Darkwing Duck can actually crouch, and has a neat little trick where he can grab things hanging against the background to get across tricky areas. Seriously though… play this shit for about ten minutes and tell me it isn’t just Mega Man‘s format with a few extra dashes of flavor. You still only shoot straight in front of you, though. The dopes in Contra can aim in eight directions, and they die in one hit. Get it together, Rock. You have no excuse.

Click to Enlarge.

I don’t know who any of the characters are except Darkwing Duck and Launchpad McQuack, but the graphics they’re drawn in are really well-done. One thing I’ll say for the Mega Man series is that it is visually appealing, and the same quality and style is present here. The music is addictively cool, a jazz-themed score with a ton of variety and finesse. The sound effects are worth mentioning; there is a slight but noticeable jump in quality, and if you need a ready example, just listen to Launchpad’s helicopter. That’s pretty damn slick for the NES.

 

Mickey Mousecapade

1987

Even the title screen is sparse and drab, like a tenement at the turn of the century. Mickey and Minnie wear forced smiles, choking back the leaden contempt they have come to feel for one another, themselves, and every living thing. There is no turning back now, no starting over, no exit from the whirlwind. This will end in tragedy, but it’s better than the shame of being alone.

 

Hudson Soft actually developed this one, but Capcom published it. It was released in Japan a year before the Western world got it, as Mickey Mouse: Fushigi no kuni no Daibouken (Mickey Mouse: Adventures in Wonderland). Before getting into the game itself, there’s one more bit of trivia to share: if you were to take the cartridge apart, you may notice a hidden Mickey Mouse symbol on the game’s circuit board.

DO IT, GO PRY YOUR COPY OPEN TO SEE IT IT’S TOTALLY WORTH IT

Petey the Dog is a huge creep and has kidnapped Alice (yes, from Alice in Wonderland). Mickey busts through the door of the Fun House like a train wreck on a mission to rescue her, and drags poor Minnie along on his quest. It’s pretty clear based on context clues that Minnie would rather be doing something else. Those context clues are her reluctance during the first intro animation (wherein Mickey barks her name like an abusive boyfriend to get her to comply) and the total lack of interest she seems to display in 1 player mode while following Mickey. The real goose turd is that if she doesn’t keep up, you can’t finish a level and you’ll have to backtrack to find her. The misogyny is painted thickly with a wide brush in Mickey Mousecapade, or at least I’m willing to read into what I saw and make a mountain out of a molehill.

“Don’t you make me wait on you, Minnie… and God help you if I ever see you talking to another man. Now come on, we’ve got to go rescue a young blonde.”

I’m very sad to report that this is not one of Hudson’s usual home runs. Even QC and oversight from Capcom failed to render Mickey Mousecapade more than barely playable. Progress is tedious right from the get-go as you navigate an impossibly huge fucking house with no real clue what your specific goal is. Mickey throws stars, and they travel through the game’s space way fucking slower than you’d imagine a star would move. You have to worry about two characters getting hurt while having only nominal and indirect control over one of them, and this gets old quick. Minnie will drown, get bitten by animals, chopped with swords, etc. as you duck and weave trying to put 10 pounds of mouse shit in a five pound bag.

Minnie plummets to her watery grave as her loving boyfriend turns callously away; Judging by the snake’s face, he’s having a better day than you. Click to Enlarge.

Graphically, the game’s on par with late 80s NES fare. The backgrounds are rich once you reach the flowery part of the forest before the castle, and some of the bosses are nicely detailed. Otherwise, it is adequate. I don’t think they put much time into the audio side of things, but it’s not offensively bad or a distraction or anything. It’s just not impressive. I just end up more focused on Mickey and Minnie’s apparent codependency and the severe peril to which it exposes them both. Mickey Mousecapade makes me think about things… about the nature of how we love each other, and how that can become poison to us. Run, Minnie. Get out while you can.

 

Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2

1993

A few more lines on Dale’s face… the job and the trucker pills will do that. Chip lives cleaner, sure, but he holds on to a lot more from the streets when he clocks out. Takes the demons home with him. Men of honor live thankless lives that rob them of their very humanity… but it’s in their blood now. Once a cop, always a cop. Fighting a war you can’t win. It still bothers me that neither of them wears pants.

 

Everyone’s a little older, a little wiser, and yet these two gumshoes are still throwing themselves at danger like suicidal moths to an infernal flame. Chip and Dale both want to die; they crave the taste of ashes and dream often about the cold of the grave. One day. But not yet. Not until every pint-sized criminal has been driven off the streets in a great welter of blood and smoke.

Hence the NES sequel.

I wrote about the 1990 original earlier on in my tenure here at NRW; it’s an exercise in insanity that requires either a hint of masochism or some very sharp reflexes… and overall, I like it. It’s both good and bad that this is essentially the same game with different levels. There’s a bit more of a story, something about Fat Cat releasing evil spirits from an urn to rules the world, but all that does for me is produce comedy gold like the screenshots below:

 

As the thumb-sized duo tangle with the supernatural to put a stop to Fat Cat’s plans, you can still nail each other in the head with boxes and generally get in each other’s way, either deliberately or on accident. It’s the only thing not to like. The same frantic sense of action is present, along with a mind-boggling variety of enemies and a new set of clever challenges.

The graphics are improved somewhat, and this comes through especially well during the otherwise laughable cut scenes. That little extra touch more shading, more detail by a few pixels, makes quite a difference in the presentation. The soundtrack rivals that of the first game with its madcap vitality and hyperactive pace, and there seems to be a good deal of musical competency at work. Looking in at this game from the outside, they didn’t just remake Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers for the NES… they made a second one and may have accidentally even improved it.

 

AND THE WHEAT IS SEPARATED FROM THE CHAFF

Little Mermaid: 7/10 (Novel and engaging, visually appealing. On the good side of average.)

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom: 7/10 (It wouldn’t be so good in my eyes if it didn’t have the variety in it that makes it stay interesting.)

Darkwing Duck: 5/10 (You phoned it in, Capcom. Whatever. You can get away with shit like that sometimes. You’re Capcom.)

Mickey Mousecapade: 4/10 (It strikes me that game design decisions were made on short notice, with little foresight or perhaps even testing o results. It also strikes me that those involved may have just hated the project and wanted it to be terrible. Good job.)

Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2: 8/10 (WELL SOME TIMES / SOME CRIMES / GO SLIPPIN THROUGH THE CRACKS / BUT THESE TWO / GUMSHOES / ARE PICKIN UP THE SLACK / THERE’S NO CASE TOO BIG / NO CASE TOO SMALL / WHEN YOU NEED HELP JUST CALL)

 

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This one is about computers. As much as console gaming forms the crux of what I discuss here at NRWG, it is occasionally my duty to draw attention to that parallel road, that meandering yet meaningful story of mankind’s attempt to entertain itself with computers before they were all plugged into phone lines. (Hell, many of them were before it was even a thing.)

So you remember back in the 80s when you thought your MS-DOS shit or your Amstrad CPC was cool? Do you remember the days before Japan started dropping unfathomable machines on the West one after another? Back before the Internet forcibly occluded every dark corner of electronics culture in stark detail, there was a time when Japan kept the best shit for themselves. And I can’t blame them when I look at some of it. We wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. Like apes confronted by Arthur C Clarke’s monolith, we would have felt so many emotions that we were reduced to hooting until dusk at the x68000.

My favorite touch is the little pole accessory for the mouse cord. That is very Japanese to me. I don’t even know why.

Sharp released the first model in 1987, naming the machine after its 10MHz CPU. It boasted one whole megabyte of ram, which today is about enough juggling space for one small photograph. ( I realize RAM and disk space are two different things, I’m trying to be illustrative here.) Despite IBM-style PCs in the West having moved on to the concept of built-in hard drives, the x68000 had no such bulk; it had its own OS that bore astounding similarity to MS-DOS but pulled all extra data from floppy.

We’re not here to get soggy over this thing’s data capabilities. When it comes to graphics and sound, the only things the Western world has that came close were the Amiga and the Atari ST… and neither could hold a shaky, barely-lit candle to this heartbreaker. During a time when a lot of people were gradually making the stroll from boxy candy-colored shit to VGA graphics, the standard color palette on the Sharp x68000 was 65,535 colors in a maximum resolution of 1,024×1,024. By comparison, VGA’s 1987 vintage can output 256 colors at a resolution of 320×200. Better get your bifocals out. Needless to say, this graphical depth demanded audio of comparable richness.

I mean, think about it – this machine hit its peak in the early 90s. This shit was like staring God in the face. Except maybe not as awkward.

Regular readers (if I have any; I certainly hope so, or I’m still in that coma and this isn’t even happening) are already aware of my desire to basically fucking marry the Yamaha YM2612 – the exquisite little weaponized synth chip that makes all our favorite Genesis soundtracks go boom-boom. The Sharp x68000 uses a slightly more grown-up, sophisticated cousin of the YM2612. The YM2151 boasts eight channels to the 2612’s six, and to put it in plain terms, the end result sounds far “cleaner” and also offers more potential detail. In other words, the music output on even the off-the-shelf model is delicious. I am terrible for saying this, but aside from the minimal loss of “ass-end” I seem to hear on x68000 soundtracks, I may actually like this chip better. Two key examples of its power to deliver are the x68000 retooling of Akumajō Dracula and the port of Thunder Force II. It even makes River City Ransom sound gnarlier!

Japan’s decision to only market this marvel domestically kept the x68000 a near-secret in the 80s and 90s, but the sheer volume and variety of titles released for it makes the secret all the more unbelievable. You would think more buzz would have been generated – even now, in 2017, when everyone has seen everything and it’s been made into twelve shitty memes, I look at the screenshots and the videos with a certain awe. I humbly present some highlights of what I have found in my plodding research.

Akumajō Dracula

Konami, 1993

It’s a remake of the original, but it’s arcade-quality. (in fact, the x68000 was the test system for the Capcom CPS system for many years.) I digress – the difficulty level is increased just enough to re-engage, the music is remarkable, and I especially love that Stage Clear theme. “Epic” applies here.

Dead of the Brain

FairyTale, 1992

1) this owns 2) ew though

It’s all in Japanese, but I get the general idea. It seems to be a really cool spin on Re-Animator by way of Return of the Living Dead… definitely inspired by both. The music’s not as mind-blowing here, but the graphics are really turned-out. It’s hard to do effective horror stuff in a game medium, especially the earlier you go in the timeline, but Dead of the Brain really impresses me by melding cartoony with frightening.

Dracula Hakushaku

FairyTale, 1992

I’m sorry, these just fascinate me. I’m noticing a dual theme with these graphical-text adventures: prominent tits and horrible things happening or being found.Still, really detailed illustration, great color choice to make for a dark theme.

A Preponderance of NSFW shit

Big Surprise, 1987-1993

It looks almost like cross-stitch. It is an open and kitchen-ready mockery of itself.

Just in case you wanted to jack off to this, well hey, at least it’s better than the same image would be rendered on a VGA machine. Don’t think too hard about what you’re doing, bucko. I guess people made do back then. Some of it’s awfully MSPaint, though.

Heart of Saphilamun

Annandule Project, 1991

I found very little background info on this one, in either language. It was apparently a hit, but in a flash-in-the-pan sort of way. Something about the screenshots and video intro I’ve found really unsettles me. Maybe it’s the brief, silent sequence depicting a nude woman literally fucking falling apart against a black background. Maybe it’s the horrifying winged snake thing. Maybe it’s the fact that I even asked on forums and couldn’t get a synopsis… it’s apparently loosely based on Lovecraft. I’ll buy that.

All of this has enraptured me with this mysterious device. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this glimpse into the grey shadows with me; I live for this kind of shit, and it’s part of why I love to write these articles. I get to pluck artifacts from the dusty ground of the wasteland, wipe them off, and decide they need talking about. Cheers.

See you in July, stay retro!

I’ve got another one for you from the Land of the Rising Sun, RetroFans… and oh, my stars and garters is it something. It’s a sizzling double-order of strange with a side of weird sexual stuff, heavily seasoned with Buddhist culture’s way more hardcore version of Hell than ours, and best of all… it’s Namco, so it’s also a pretty good game.

Yokai Dochuki is the fascinating story of a little boy who died and woke up in Jigoku, the Japanese Buddhist version of Hell. For the First couple of levels he carries a ghost with him, which he burps out before frantically praying at a shrine mere feet away as the ghost tears ass like she was the demons’ dad and they were playing with her power tools. Then he goes to see a VERY questionable mermaid show, peeps some pretty disappointing ogre tits, and finally has a chat with Buddha several stories above a lake of blood.

You know, let’s just start from a softer spot. This isn’t “jump in with both feet” shit.

In 1987, Namco had a fresh new deck of 16-bit arcade hardware called System 1, and they figured the best way to kick the tires was to go all-out on a domestic market platformer. Released in Japan in April of ’87, Yokai Dochuki (which literally translates to “Phantom Travel Journal,” a really casual label for a child’s jaunt through Hell) entered history as Namco’s very first 16-bit arcade platform game. While we never got it here in the Western world (and probably would have been aghast at some of the content), the game was reasonably popular among its domestic audience. Despite the fact that everything’s in Japanese and I have exactly zero idea what the fuck is happening ever, I really enjoy playing the PC Engine version I’ve been lucky enough to access. Yokai Dochuki is pretty challenging, and it boasts some really cool little bells and whistles considering its 1987 development/release. I found it completely by accident, but ended up learning a few things about Japanese culture, video game history… and sadly, what an ogre’s boobs look like.

Let’s talk about Jigoku for a second. It turns out that since Buddhism spread throughout Asia from Nepal and the Indian Subcontinent, “Jigoku” (地獄) is just the Japanese name for the Buddhist concept of Hell. Its original name in Sanskrit is “Naraka,” and it’s a huge set of horrible places. It’s not permanent like Christian Hell, but it still sucks big time. A soul also isn’t sent there due to judgment or punishment, but because of “accumulated karma.” So really, a being could wind up there seemingly randomly upon death… just like poor little Tarosuke has!

Fortunately for him, he can pretty much Hadoken at will, and when he’s first finding his Hell legs he walks around with a pet ghost tucked away. When confronted with a powerful demon, Tarosuke shouts something I don’t understand, and then the ghost flies into his mouth and he burps it back out. I’m not sure why that extra step is necessary, but no one seems the worse for it. While this ghost (which appears to be a little girl) whips the ever loving hot shit out of entire gangs of oni, Tarosuke waddles over to a shrine that’s conveniently just a few feet away.

Look at him. It’s 11 AM and he’s already in Hell and three sheets to the wind. He’s gonna get ghost juice all over this guy’s floor.

This type of showdown only happens twice (I think). Mostly it’s just you, Tarosuke, navigating the landscape of screaming living corpses and huge floppy-headed wizard dudes while you try to find the Buddha to have a chat. Again, I stress that my understanding of the spaces between is very limited due to the language barrier, but like most video games worth playing, you have to make a few stops first.

There’s also a store that shows up at the start of a few stages, where an old woman who just runs a shop in Hell will sell sake to a little kid. You can buy something early on that’s pretty useful: there’s an item that looks like the Black Lagoon creature’s foot, and it reduces the amount that water impedes your movement. Most of what the old woman sells seem to be life bar insurance items; that is to say, you auto-use them when you’re about to die and they pump a little gas into your tank. But yes, it seems that in Jigoku, just like in a real hustla’s life, only two things truly matter… money and power.

You’re either about that life… or you ain’t.  Or you’re n Hell and you’re a little kid. Whatever.

Yokai Dochuki actually has five endings, only two of which are remotely happy. The worst one has you end up staying right in Hell where you’re at. There’s also Hungry Ghoul World, which might sound cool to some of you horror hounds, but I want to stress that IT’S A WHOLE WORLD OF THAT SHIT, ALL THE TIME. Beast World is the ending I can reliably get, where you turn into sort of a pig-type creature that is content living in its own filth and eating almost anything. Since this most closely mirrors my actual real-life adult lifestyle, I am proud of my ability to reliably send Tarosuke there so we can be friends forever. One of the good endings has you waking up at your own funeral… and it kind of looks like they dressed you up like Princess Zelda. (I realize I’m probably being boorishly ignorant of East Asian funeral customs, but seriously, you even have a little Triforce tiara.)

Either way, it’s kind of like looking into a mirror.

To get to any of those endings, you’ve got to find Buddha. It’s what you do along the way that helps or hurts you. For instance, I know that to get one of the two happy endings, you can’t kill any enemies on Level 5. At some point early on you get a chance to gamble with some frogs and a zombie. Apparently, even though I think this is extremely fucking dope, Buddha does not.

Rock solid truth: Hell is just gangsta shit 24/7 and the scene is so Mad Max down here even Buddha gettin’ mad sendin’ high rollers to Beast World and shit.

In one of the last stages along the shittier path to reaching the Enlightened One, you have to go get… something from some lady who lives underwater. You ride a turtle down there, and she gives you some carnival barker routine… and then, in possibly the unsettling moment in the game, a set of pre-pubescent mermaids take the stage topless and shake their shit… MUCH TO TAROSUKE’S PRURIENT DELIGHT. To the point where HE CAN’T HELP FREQUENTLY LOOKING BACK AT YOU, THE PLAYER, TO SEE IF YOU’RE GETTING A LOAD OF THIS. I won’t comment further, it’s really not that bad in the grand scheme of things… but still, why does it have to be there? It makes that one level worse than anything in Splatterhouse.

They say that Hell is the impossibility of reason.

In another late level, you meet a grape-colored ogre woman who… has not aged well, and who has become the proud surrogate mother of an alarming number of crows. She wiggles, glances around, and mumbles while her crows look at you like you just got off the boat.

I will always hate birds in any video game because birds in video games simply thrive on defying all common sense in order to utterly destroy you. And yes. I saw them. Now you “get” to see them. JOURNALISM IN ACTION!

Don’t anthropomorphize crows at all. All you get is smarter, smugger crows.

After all these trials and tribulations, you finally ascend about a half-mile into the black sky above a neatly-contained lake/pool/whatever of blood. Apparently that’s where Buddha likes to chill and reflect on enlightenment… on a cloud structure that looks like a wobbly cat jungle gym teetering over Hell’s version of the hotel pool. If you were good (it’s fucking hard to be good in Hell), you go to Titty-Heaven or back to your weird family. If not, you get royally chumped or just turned into a pig. At least as the pig, it looks like you have a girlfriend or something, which is better than anything called Hungry fucking Ghoul World.

You’re on some Dr. Seuss set prop suspended above a gigantic stone bowl of hot blood, asking Buddha if he minds you clocking out of your karmic torment a few eons early since you’re a little kid. Moments of silence pass before he calmly condemns you to Hungry Ghoul World. The worst part? You know he made up his mind in the beginning and made you stand there just because he thought it was funny. And it was.

Ports were released for Japan’s Famicom and PC Engine systems in 1988. Once again, the Western world was left out of Namco’s bizarre yet well crafted piece of video game history. Later years not only saw Tarosuke show up in things like the PS2 game Namco X Capcom, but also saw Yokai Dochuki released for the Wii Virtual Console… yet again, Japan only.

PC Engine (left) and Famicom versions. The Famicom version includes a “Pious” counter so you can actively see how screwed you are. Being the angel-born miracle machine it is, the PC Engine clearly wins out on presentation… but both versions lose surprisingly little of the original feel.

Theories abound as to why the game never made it over here. One of my favorite ones is that it contains shit like the overt sexualization of children (even if those children are cartoon mermaids) and is also set exclusively within a very culture-specific concept that 9 out of 10 of us Westerners would have scratched our head at in the 1980s. It wasn’t until later that just over half of our young people would try so hard to be Japanese that it posed a potential safety risk. I digress; other theories insist that there WAS a version in the works for the English world, to be released on the American/Euro versions of the same two consoles. If you’re into emulation and you look around, there is a very good unofficial translation that goes by the name it’s suggested was planned for the Western cart… “Shadowland.”

Screaming crowds of damned souls; huge bean-headed mutant wizards; a giant woman who doesn’t seem to mind at all that you’ve invited yourself to bath time; the five-thousand dollar cat that was made using Granny’s refurbished Girl Scouts stem cell kit.

From a purely technical, play-the-video-game-you-pansy standpoint, Yokai Dochuki is pretty amazing. In 1987, it had a surprisingly open-ended play experience and was quite involved for an arcade title. It’s fun to play, and once you get the hang of how Tarosuke does his stuff it’s easy to wheel around and look like a badass. A lot of the enemies are creepy as shit; there’s a couple different beef-jerky skeleton dudes and a lot of monsters that are just horrible faces that float. Your environment changes a lot, and there’s not much downtime as you travel across Hell. The music is absolutely addictive, and I’m actually listening to a YouTube video of the main theme as I type. Graphically, Yokai Dochuki is everything a 16-bit heavy hitter should be. It’s colorful, detailed, and it conveys itself well as something that’s supposed to be both creepy and humorous.

I could just do without the mermaid child exploitation and the ogre tits, is all. Here’s the soundtrack!

Thanks for taking another walk to Japan with me, folks. We’ll have more for you in May, and as usual, if you’d like to ask me something or tell me about something I should write about, you can reach me via email or the NRW Gaming Facebook page.

Remember… when you’re going through Hell, keep going. Otherwise you might get turned into a horny, gluttonous pig.

Since the very dawn of video gaming, ever since the first of countless alien invasions and nameless ninja clan insurgencies, gamers and developers have all agreed on one thing: peace is nice, but it’s incredibly boring. A common theme has emerged throughout electronic gaming, one of conflict and mayhem, where the stakes are never low and neither is the adrenaline level. We crave games of war, and damn it all, the developers and publishers have always been right there with us on the front lines.

This trend, when examined, waxes and wanes; an observer of the timeline can see it ebb and flow from simple sword-fighting between two nameless knights to full-scale nuclear war (and the theoretical after-effects). The mid to late 1980s seemed to hit a particular stride, when Cold War phantoms mixed with constantly more badass-looking real life military hardware to spawn a long list of not only films but video games (sometimes directly inspired by said films). War, we knew, was hell… and as this era burned bright red in celluloid and pixel-screen, we strode happily forward to swim in hellish waters. The devil himself was happy to take our hand, and to point out the price… 25 cents for a dip, $40 per cartridge to buy our own backyard pool.

This trio of games is not meant to be a best- or worst-of list, nor a definitive one. These three titles simply stick out most readily in my mind as examples of the over-the-top gloss we often give military strife through the lens of entertainment. And yeah… they’re pretty awesome.

Jackal/Top Gunner

Konami, 1986

I said this wasn’t a best-of list, but this definitely has to be one of my favorites. Jackal is called Tokushu Butai Jakkaru (“Special Forces Jackal”) in Japan, and was marketed in some regions as Top Gunner. In Jackal you play the role of a Special Forces unit tasked with the noble mission of rescuing POWs behind enemy lines. This kind of work is extremely hazardous, so it’s a good thing the brass gave you jeeps that maneuver like gazelles and are as bloodthirsty as you are.

Red beret, devastatingly precise mustache… Easy to tell who drives the jeep… who’s in charge. There’s a cooler in the back. Help yourself to a martini or some Dom Perignon. This will all be over soon, soldier.

Up to 2 players can play, and that’s the better way to go about it since you WILL be mobbed constantly by both infantry and enemy vehicles. The cool thing about most soldiers on foot is that you can just run them over in cold blood, mangling them under your jeep’s blood-soaked wheels as you laugh. The bad news is that they are rarely alone; not only do soldiers pack weapons that can destroy your jeep in one hit, so do the tanks, gun emplacements, bombers, and jeeps similar to yours that tend to accompany them. That’s why you also have a machine gun and a seemingly limitless supply of explosives.

Your POWs are in little buildings, and you open those buildings safely by blasting the shit out of them. Most of them just file out and climb into your seemingly bottomless jeep, but the guys kept alone in their own little sheds upgrade your blammo-factor from grenades to rockets that upgrade each time you rescue another such prisoner.

The arcade original, not unlike that of Contra, is non-stop, with very little in the way of transitions between areas of strife. Not so for the NES port and some other versions; in those, you even get cool little cutscenes illustrating what a rad time you’re having cutting a swathe of carnage through the enemy. Every version has bosses, though, and they’re no joke… from mammoth war machines to walls of launchers and even hostile rows of statues, each set will turn your life into an exercise in move-or-die.

Guerilla War

SNK, 1987

A big part of what makes this one stand out is its original choice of subject matter, which was hastily and clumsily scrubbed for Western release: in Guerilla War, the two players are supposed to be Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, overthrowing the Batista regime. In fact, the game was called Guevara in Japan. Both the titling and dialogue were quickly altered for release in the USA, in hopes of rendering the entire thing generic… I’d say they did nine tenths of a job.

I CAN STILL KINDA TELL THOUGH, CAN’T YOU? I GUESS IT’S JUST INTUITION.

But whatever. This isn’t an opinion piece or a history lesson. Anyone can agree it’s a ballsy move to make a game about that kind of heated subject, and anyone who’s played Guerilla War can agree it’s a pretty balls-to-the-wall run and gun game that is at least worthy of having such a past attached to it.

The only tactical concern of yours besides not dying when you dismount a quick boat to singlehandedly topple the entire enemy force is not to kill hostages accidentally. This is hard, not only because your enemies are all over the place and it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but because it’s tempting to just fire wantonly into cross-traffic and hurl grenades in front of you to clear a path through the chaos of battle. While this is a viable tactic about 2/3 of the time, it gets risky when there are bound and gagged men from your side nearby. Let’s be realistic: some will die. Rescue the ones that don’t.

In the grand tradition of war-themed video games, this one has no shortage of over-the-top enemy shit. You want to fight a train? Well, get ready to fight a fucking train, Che. All by yourself.

Strider Hiryu

Capcom, 1989

Many of us have played the NES title Strider, and most of us know it’s a far cry from the source material. Strider Hiryu, released originally as an arcade title and gradually ported to tons of systems besides the NES, is based off a 1988 Kadokawa Shoten manga of the same name. Hiryu (which means Flying Dragon) is also the protagonist’s name. Here’s what makes it a war game: Hiryu is an assassin sent to kill the overlord of a Communist dystopia in the year 2048. This game was a taste of sci-fi blended into the familiar orgy of violence, and while the overtones may have been lost on a lot of casual players, they still set an interesting example of theoretical futurism carried across different media. While the Red Menace of Soviet Russia ended up reaching a far different fate in real life, the 2048 of this timeline is still a hell of a place to be a super-assassin.

Yep *hitches thumbs through belt-loops* that there looks purdy Soviet to me, soldier. You know what to do.

As Hiryu, you get not only a plasma-generating sword and the acrobatic skills of a jacked-up gibbon, but you can also call upon three different “option” robots to help you unleash a whirlwind of murder on the Motherland. You also get a grappling hook, which seems superfluous after mentioning the other shit, but it comes in handy. All this gear is good, because your target, the Grandmaster, has spared nothing in defending himself. Be ready for robot gorillas (far larger, of course, than organic ones), elaborate laser traps, and more troops than you can shake a plasma sword at.

Robo-Ivan just got knocked the fuck apart by a sword made out of what’s inside the Sun. Robo-Sergei back there is having one of those moments where you wonder what your robo-life would have been if you’d just stayed in robo-art college and studied robo-cubism instead of joining the People’s Droid Army.

I’m kidding. Shake it at all of them. Leave none alive.

FINAL VERDICT:

Jackal – 7/10

Guerilla War – 7/10

Strider Hiryu – 8/10

One of Jackal’s aforementioned cinematics. See you mid-April for more red-blooded gunpowder action!

There are certain films that hold a nearly universal sway over 80s kids (and even some 90s kids) as pseudo-magical in their charm and nostalgic value. The 1985 film The Goonies stands upright upon the high peaks of this spiritual realm, having captured multiple generations’ hearts through the magic of VHS/DVD media and network syndication. It’s one of those hands-down classics that you’ll watch again when you find it during channel-scrolling, even if you’ve seen it hundreds of times. I wasn’t old enough when it originally debuted to really grasp it at all, but watching it now still reminds me of viewing it on crisp VHS and feeling those first tightening strings in my heart: not only for Kerri Green, but also for adventure. There’s been a constant pinwheel of bullshit and speculation online for years about possible sequels, remakes, etc. but two things have always been surprisingly low-key concerning the Goonies intellectual property… merch and new media.

The guy who played Sloth is deceased; would they CGI in another Sloth or write him out of the sequel? Neither option sounds appealing; half of the appeal of a sequel would be seeing how that dude turned out after years of having to shit his pants in a chair and watch reruns of old mob movies.

There have been video games, however. The first was released by Datasoft the same year as the film, for the C64, Atari 800, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. This limited its audience to people who owned a personal computer in 1985, and so it’s not often mentioned in lucid detail. It was okay, but like most early computer games, there wasn’t a ton to write home about in the end. In ’86, Konami put out a Goonies game for its domestic market, but it could be glimpsed Stateside if you happened to run into a PlayChoice 10 arcade system at the right time. It was a ghost of things to come, but an entertaining ghost at that: you controlled Mikey as he traversed six linear (but sometimes complex) stages, rescuing a Goonie and unlocking a series of doors to move on each time. The game featured other things we’d see again more prominently, such as slingshots, certain visual themes, and even music that would sound familiar later.

Everything about this image makes me concerned for the child’s welfare, but I’m sure anyone without suspension of disbelief would feel the same about the film.

Then we got our “sequel.” It’s a game I have mixed feelings about, and I’m very sure I’m not alone.

Cardinal rule of retro gaming: if the company releasing the game is Japanese, the Japanese promotional material for the game will always be extremely badass. No exception here. If it weren’t for a fairly faithful representation of Anne Ramsey’s (Ma Fratelli) face, I’d wonder if this was some kind of MI: 6 crytozoology hunt, complete with a race against time versus the Compound Bow Mafia. Frankly, way cooler than Goonies II.

Goonies II looks a lot like Konami’s first swing at the franchise, but it’s got a lot more detail. First off, “linear” factors nowhere into any appraisal of this game’s layout. You’re not going in a single straight line unless you fall into a crevasse. There will be backtracking, there will be wandering, and there will likely be some dying. See, you have to rescue your six fellow Goonies again… they’re just not arranged for you in a stack like the first game. You not only have to find them within a staggeringly vast area, but they are hidden… in a series of doors and hallways you navigate from a first-person perspective and investigate using tools. This time Mikey plays both action hero and super sleuth. According to the closest thing to official lore I could find, this kid is 13 years old, barely 5 feet tall, and suffers from asthma. It’s a damn good thing he’s a fireplug. And that he has his lethal… yo-yo.

Fleeing from beach ball-sized spiders and a man with a gun. Kind of like most kids would do. Note that I have already been wounded, despite my caution.

Thankfully, you’re not expected to do this empty-handed, in the dark. Both in the corridors and in the game’s more dangerous 2D environment, it’s possible to find all kinds of useful tools. In fact, the sheer number of items you claim near the end of the process is enough to weigh down a full-grown adult. Some items can only be acquired through elder abuse, and I wish I were just making a tasteless joke. Sometimes you have to “interact” with people you find in the strange first-person rooms, not only for self-evident tips but also to get things like radios and candles. The classic example is how you have to strike an old man sitting on a mat five times with your fist to get the candle. It’s like Simon’s Quest meets the scene in True Romance where Christian Slater leaves Patricia Arquette alone to go get hamburgers, but with the visual gruesomeness dialed back. I just feel… unwholesome about it, I guess. It’s a puzzle of violence.

Apparently what I do is get all Sonny Corleone on adult strangers to see what’s in their pockets NOW HOLD STILL YOU KNOW I HAVE TO CHECK

You also discover, through the fundamentally useful but often cumbersome map you’re given, that the game world has two “sides…” a front and a back. While this complicates things overall, it at least gives you more visual data to keep certain areas separated in your head. Learning how to find your way through Goonies II takes a while, but it’s not impossible.

I do not think you are carrying the six other kids. I’m not sure where they go once you set them free. Knowing the rest of this game, probably Hades or Valhalla. This is what existence is, Mikey. Existence is struggle. If you’re not fighting, you are dead.

Konami has a thing for combining stupidly mean enemies with player knockback physics that make you want to steroid-ragequit, and nothing’s any different in that regard here. You are constantly and aggressively assaulted not only by snakes and spiders, but by full-grown men with weapons, scorpions bigger than you are, skeletons (some of them have wings), armored knights, and flying metal skulls that steal your boomerang. Shit will fly at you while you’re trying to carefully negotiate jumping hazards, move on slippery ice, or swim underwater. When you die (and you will), you’re presented with Ma Fratelli’s winsome image as she gives you the option to continue or not (but not before taunting you).

Imagine the movie character saying this, out loud, to a barely-conscious young Sean Astin.

If you decline, you’re given a password to resume the quest later, and if you have the balls to continue, you’re just dropped near where you croaked with none of your extra health full and a little less of your use-based equipment like bombs. Oh yeah… you get bombs! Definitely something I’d trust a 13 year old with… spherical black cartoon bombs.

Okay… Knights and skeletons in the log cabin. Gill Man’s shocking generosity. Trio del Godzilla in Lavaland. Finish it off with some Silence of the Lambs shit and you’ve got Goonies II.

So, let’s say you make all this happen. Let’s say you tough it out, rescue all your friends, and head toward the endgame. Well, the endgame involves rescuing Annie the Mermaid. You know, the lovable and memorable mermaid that was… not in the Goonies movie at all. As you unclasp the padlock holding her in her watery prison, she unclasps her hands (revealing her featureless void of a torso) and professes her love for a 13 year old child. Then we’re treated to a stunning cinematic which, while I’m actually being sarcastic, is more than we get from most 1987 NES games.

“Yup, ya got me… I’ll just get in the back here… all by myself… at least in prison I can grab a shave…”

The graphics are 1987 NES graphics, which are really neither good nor bad; there’s nothing I can say either way about them except that you can usually tell what everything is. That’s all I usually ask for in an 8 bit title. The sound is the same quality wise, but I must concede that the soundtrack is pretty sick. We not only get a rendition of the Cyndi Lauper song used in the movie and its promotion, we also get some well-written original tracks of the quality expected from Konami and their composers. The only tracks I find grating are the underwater and ice areas… it’s not even that they’re bad, it just that the loops are really short. Everything else is nice and busy without seeming cluttered, and there’s good subtlety to the use of 8 channels, something you didn’t always hear on earlier NES games.

Goonies II really is a mixed bag of pros and cons. I’ll list these off below instead of dumping them into a trash bag of a paragraph.

PROS

• The rudiments of the gameplay itself draw you in and keep you interested

• very recognizable as a part of the intellectual property, in certain ways that really count

• once you grasp the layers to the challenge before you, it can be very entertaining

• fucking fantastic soundtrack (at least from a composition standpoint)

• it’s kind of like a Metroidvania before we were familiar with the concept of Metroidvanias

CONS

• let’s be honest, there are a lot of moments where you just have to soak the fuck out of some damage, and early on, that’s pretty rough

• a level of complexity to the problem solving process in some of the first-person areas that just ends up tedious

• the classic platformer tactic of “let’s make it stupid hard to jump in this one spot” is used a bit too frequently, compounded by the fact that Mikey jumps like he’s never sure where he wants to land, on the moving platform or in the magical realm of shattered femurs

• this may make me sound like a pussy but some of the later enemies have the resilience of a T-800 and are much more agile; weapon damage does not scale to meet them

• there is only a mermaid in this fucking game because they needed one more thing for you to do

What saves this one from teetering on the brink of its own chasm is the nostalgic value, buffered considerably by the admitted pleasure I found in re-approaching it as an adult. I think Konami overestimated our attention spans and patience back in ’87, but Goonies II actually fits pretty well as a game for the present tastes. I recommend it to predominantly “modern” gamers who want to taste some retro, as well as people who just got pissed off at it as kids but have focused their chi a little more strongly as adults. I give Goonies II a 7 out of 10.

Oh… good. Well, bye.

Today we’ll tackle another notable game that’s long overdue for a NRW once-over. I’d been saving this one, because I’d really like to pluck heavily from 1987 this year, and Karnov is one of the most laughed-at yet loved games from the era. Karnov is a nested set of dichotomies; It’s nothing complex, yet a deeper look reveals it as far from simple. It’s a fairly silly game in some regards, but its solid gameplay and decent overall production value make it difficult to casually disregard.

Karnov was originally released in 1987 as an arcade game by Data East. I won’t wast a lot of time on the “fluff” because there isn’t much. Karnov (Jinborov Karnovski is his full name according to original Japanese material) is a strongman from The Soviet Union who has set off on a quest to find the ultimate treasure. I guess it’s good not to get bogged down in a bunch of lofty morality-play crap every time we want to shoot some fireballs or murder some dinosaurs. It’s nice to just have some buttons, a joystick, and an army of bizarre monsters begging you to slaughter them as you stomp your way to glory.

Pictured: Jinborov Karnovski, strongman/firebreather/adventurer/pimp, literally stomping his way directly to glory. Those gold bracelets ain’t gonna finance themselves.

Karnov’s main weapon as he treasure-hunts across a monster-filled wasteland is his ability to breathe fireballs. Despite being a strongman, who would likely consider using a baseball bat or even his massive fists, Karnov didn’t settle for being a one-trick pony. He learned how to breathe fire. No big deal. You wouldn’t get it anyway. You don’t even lift, bro. You don’t even look good in Zubaz like he does. Just leave this shit to Karnov.

“Your girl wish you look like this. Flex like Karnov. FLEX!” To be fair, all the non-digital art is incredibly flattering to Karnov. In-game you see that he’s taken to eating rich foods and drinking cheap beer, and has just really let himself go. The treasure is to hire a really good personal trainer because he knows he’s lost the willpower to fix it himself.

Anyway, inexplicably breathing fire isn’t the only trick Karnov has up his sleeve. As you move through the game world, our broad-shouldered buddy can pick up trick shoes, magic ladders, and even disposable pairs of wings. There are also power-ups that will improve your fire breath, and one even makes you crazy fast and super dangerous for a while. It doesn’t last long, but you’re basically a tubby little volcano god while it does. The more mundane tool-like power-ups go into an inventory below your field of view, and you can select and activate them from there. The only maddening part is that you select them using the same controls you use to move, so being precise with something like the ladder can be a tricky task until you get the hang of it. But then, who’s ever as precise as they’d like to be when they’re using a magic ladder? Shit, my insurance premiums are through the roof just from the last incident.

After minimal power-up seeking, you become the burly, land-based equivalent of an A-10 Warthog. Notice the birds at the top of the screen, understandably reluctant to swoop down and witness this science.

There aren’t a staggering array of baddies in Karnov, but what’s staggering about them is their sheer weirdness. My personal favorites are the fish dude who tosses shit at you out of his purse, the disturbingly undressed regular human dude who jumps down on you, the skeleton riding the ostrich, and the prominently featured dinosaur who ends up being an absolute bitch. If you’re fast and can keep from getting whacked (and losing the power-up that turns your fire breath into the equivalent of three hardworking artillery crews), then you’re probably in good shape. If not, your gaming experience with Karnov will probably be short. The game does two things that aren’t uncommon elsewhere in gaming, to keep things spicy: it recycles bosses later as regulars and it has no shame when it comes to using huge fuckoff crowds of monsters. You’ll also find that birds win their usual award as “most annoying enemy,” and they’re not the only thing that flies. Only the later bosses are super hard, but Karnov‘s daunting feel diminishes when you realize it’s kind of like a shoot-em-up game, except your fat little ship walks and jumps, and you’re able to move forward at your own pace.

A goofy punk-ass dinosaur braces itself to catch a lethal dose of a disease called “these hands.” Karnov’s current inventory contains some kind of bubblegum bottle, some fluffy Charmin wings, and a pretty princess’s party mask. He took one look at what he had in his pockets and knew he had to do this shit the Chicago way.

The arcade version’s graphics are pretty good, being standard for 1987 and comparable to most other similar titles released around the time. They take a huge hit on any of the console/computer ports, but that’s to be expected. The sound is minimal, and the music is comprised of only a few tracks. It’s not bad, though… there’s just not a lot there. Karnov is all about the game itself, and the dressing is served on the side.

The game was officially ported to the NES, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC machines. Karnov himself went on to star in a series of fighting games, one of which is titled Karnov’s Revenge. He also makes appearances in other Data East games, most notably in Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja as the boss of the first level. He’s become something of a staple in that region of pop culture where video game stuff sticks well… just search on YouTube and elsewhere and you’ll see what I mean. Jinborov Karnovski may have started out as a weird but novel protagonist for an arcade game, but he’s found a place for himself.

Screenshots of the NES and ZX Spectrum versions. The C64 version looks remarkably similar to the ZX, and the Amstrad one looks horrible, so you can look that one up yourself and blame you, not me. Click to open either image in a new tab at full size.

Karnov gets a 7/10 from me, mostly because it’s just a solid platformer with some good style crossover. It’s not what one would expect at first glance, and while it’s a bit bland on its broad face, it delivers once you start playing it. Even the ports are decent fun, although the NES one rules the roost. The game and the character have ended up etched into the collective culture of retro gaming, and it’s not just because a chubby Russian fire-breathing weightlifter is a funny idea.

“Hello, ladies…”

Well, that wraps it up. More coming throughout February. If you’ve got a game you’d like to see covered in an article or video, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or stop by the Facebook page to chime in. Later, gamers!

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the video game developers who were active in Japan in the 1980s and early 90s, and I’ve learned some of interesting stuff. A lot of it has to do with these companies’ origins and beginnings – some of which differ greatly from what one might assume. Taito, for instance? You know, the very Japanese corporation that gave us Bubble Bobble and Operation Wolf? That company was founded in 1953 by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Michael Kogan. What began as a distributor of amusements during post-war Japan’s recovery would grow into one of the most prolific developers of 1980s and 90s gaming. Kogan had proved that being adventurous can really pay off.

In 1987, Taito hit the world with a truly badass barbarian who would heartily agree with that sentiment. Rastan Saga (or simply Rastan outside Japan) was released to arcades as a kit; existing cabinets could be converted with a little bit of work into Rastan cabinets. Taito released the game this way not only to save money, but to hedge their bets; by not using a dedicated cabinet, the company stood to take less of a hit if Rastan failed to take off.

The marquee slide from the conversion kit, featuring Rastan enjoying one of his favorite hobbies: choking the shit out of pterodactyl-men.

This skepticism, while wise in theory, proved unnecessary in practice. Rastan did well domestically and in America, but took surprising hold in Europe’s market. It spawned a truly prolific set of ports for nearly every European home system of the time. Rastan was ported to the Apple IIGS, the Amstrad, C64, IBM/DOS, the Sega Master System, the MSX2, and even the garishly-hued ZX Spectrum. Later on, it even received a Japan-only port for the Sega Game Gear.

A badass poster promoting the MSX2 version, which depicts Rastan, to quote McCartney, “comin’ down fast from miles above you.”

In the long and noble tradition of 1980s pop culture barbarians, our protagonist in this hack-and-slash adventure tale is Rastan, a ripped dude in a loincloth who bears an absolutely uncanny resemblance to Robert E. Howard’s legendary Conan character. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I suppose. The storyline exposition is left out of the Western version of the arcade game, but Rastan is out to slay himself a dragon. See, he made a deal with the princess of the land of Ceim: dispose of the dragon, and get paid ALL OF THE KINGDOM’S TREASURE. Either Rastan is one hell of a bargainer, or the Princess could use some work at it.

100% absolute clone of Conan the Cimmerian. Well, except for the fact that his vertical leap is about thirty feet.

The game begins with Rastan dropping from an unreasonable height into the first level, where you can immediately begin slashing through monsters and making your way across the game world. Rastan is pretty athletic, not to mention acrobatic; his prodigious leap is an essential tool for getting around and can also be used to get the drop on enemies while minimizing the risk of reprisal. Clever combat is worth considering, since the variety of enemy monsters in Rastan looks like someone held a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual over this world and shook it until everything fell out. Lizard men, undead wizards, an astounding volume of dog-sized chimaeras, and gargoyle swordsmen make up a small sliver of the creatures trying to end your quest with a trip to an early grave. Thankfully, in addition to being a huge badass, Rastan also has periodic access to some power ups found throughout the game’s environments. While most of them only work for a limited amount of time, all of them are worth having. Armor (something Rastan should should have thought about while getting dressed for this trip) can help absorb some of the punishment you’ll take. There are three different weapons, too: a mace, an axe, and the sword you start with. There are also potions, but beware – Taito decided to be shitheads and make some of them deplete your health instead of restore it!

I was gonna think of some joke to crack, but I’m at a loss. This shit just may be too awesome to joke about. Rastan is a murderer born. These three screenshots speak for both the game and the character.

One look at any screenshot or video of the arcade version will tell you that Rastan was well ahead of its time in 1987. The level of detail and the color depth are astounding, and animation is very smooth. Rastan‘s movements are especially fluid, which really enhances the playing experience. Most ports don’t reproduce it fully (or at all), but the weather even changes over time in the arcade original. This is done very smoothly and gradually, and adds a subtle but noticeable layer of visual richness to outdoor levels. The sound effects, while far closer to average for the time, are still well done. Rastan‘s soundtrack isn’t very populated, but this shit is definitely barbarian music! The soundtrack gets faster as you get closer to dying, which is another little touch that makes the game more intense.

In addition to its above-mentioned ports, Rastan was eventually released as part of Taito Legends Vol. 1 for the PS2, Xbox and PC in 2006. There were also two proper sequels; Rastan Saga II (Nastar in North America) was released in ’89, While Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III came out in 1991 and was more of a scrolling beat-em-up.

The unbelievably epic flyer art for Rastan Saga II.

I gladly grant Rastan an 8 out of 10. It’s really fun to play, visually impressive for an arcade title of its era, and there’s nothing like playing as a barbarian who hacks up monsters.

See you at the end of January!