I figured I’d be safe going to the well again with the NES games. We love to come back here. We love the thunder. The light. It’s just what we know. I’ll skip a lengthy introduction; I’m after my familiar methods today, bringing you three more games for the NES/Famicom.

BURAI FIGHTER

Taxan, 1990

Burai Fighter is another one of the great shmups for the NES. The plot is pretty formulaic (alien warfare, you’re the only one who can save us, yada yada), but playing this one is a ton of fun. You can move and fire in different directions, which allows for great control of the battlefield. And this shit does get rough. The bosses are particularly interesting in Burai Fighter, but there’s never a dull moment. Between the fighting and the goodies you can grab, it’s a thriller once you get the hang of it.

This is a moving Dio song right here. Poetry in motion.

The game looks great, nothing too fancy but crisp and clean. The soundtrack is one I can enjoy; some of it is squeaky high-end-heavy filler, but for the most part it keeps up. I give Burai Fighter 7 out of 10. An admitted bias for the genre and an appreciation for the cool bosses has me digging this one from Taxan.

DIRTY HARRY

Gray Matter, 1990

This shit is for real. You want a mean, wild game? Get in on my dude Harry here.

You are marching around kicking furniture, shooting men in the face, stomping on snakes, leaping over floor lasers. Just ducking makes you immune to ball bats. Oh, and you can swap your blue and white suits out. Suffice it to say this plays a little more like you’d expect an adaptation of Bad Lieutenant to play. It’s still a lot of fun. It’s ordered chaos in a manageable package. My only minor gripe is that it’s one of those games where so many of the scenes look the same that it can get mildly disorienting. Whatever. So would an actual city. Well done. Pretty fun active gameplay makes up for a lot though. I like kicking around in Dirty Harry. You can get pretty sick gun power ups, and it’s fun to just plow through.

He’s not even worried. He’s adjusting his collar. Fuck your gasoline in a bottle.

There’s nothing too spit-and-polish about the graphics but they get the job done. The music is kind of loud, but it’s pretty good, written by composers Steven Samler and Elliot Delman. This game, in fact, is the only NES title to credit the composers not only in the manual, but on the back of the game’s box.

Dirty Harry gets 7 out of 10 in my book. Only the eventual monotony counts against it; otherwise it’s an entertaining title with a lot of sit-and-play value to it.

TASAC

Thin Chen, 1992

Sometimes it’s important to draw attention to something because it embodies an idea, principle, or concept in action. An icon of its kind. Sometimes an object lesson.

Tasac is an object lesson in really not trying very hard.

This game was produced and released in 1992. Let’s have a look at it, item by item. Gameplay? An oversimplified, lazy version of a genre it’s hard to fuck up. The plot is kind of cool, according to a snippet I found from GameFAQs:

“In A.D. 20XX, humans are engaged in fierce warfare with TASAC – the alien bionic mutants. Landsy and Dagrel, commanders of Earth Defense Arms, are encountering the toughest enemies known to man. They must destroy TASAC to rescue the Earth, otherwise humans will be turned into slaves under the TASAC terrorism!”

The graphics? Are you kidding? Unforgivably lazy. Music and sound? 1986 sound while clumsy circus-like music meanders across the drab play space. It’s really the kind of soundtrack that belongs in a McDonald’s Playland.

Christmas candy choo choo train colors and big clunky crunchy -looking fuckery. Hudson had this kind of shit beat in 1987. This is out of some kind of mill. Some kind of terror-basement. I never.

This is two steps up from Galaga. Not to talk shit on Galaga, even. Galaga outshines this easily. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Game FAQs rates it 2.5 out of 5. I’m giving Tasac a 2 out of 10. It is a game. I’m not willing to give it much else.

Thanks for tuning in again. We’ll do three more on Thursday. Stay Retro!

I’m also going to try out a new rating system, a little more in-depth than my usual screed of just rating a game using one lazy star-rating. I will rate individual aspects on their own, and then use these to evaluate the overall picture of the game.

Phantom Fighter

Marionette/Ponycanyon (FCI)

1988 (1990 US)

When I say that they should have just called this game Straight-Up Just Kicking Ghosts in the Fucking Face, I don’t mean to cheapen or degrade it. The activity mentioned in my suggested title is what you end up spending 90% of your time doing, but it actually totally rules. Various reviews before mine have consistently given Phantom Fighter slightly above-average ratings overall, and I’d have to concur with the prevailing opinion here.

This is the game in one image. It’s not even a bad game, though! It’s just… I mean, this is it. This is what you came to town for. You’re doing this. A lot of this.

Apparently based off a 1985 film called Reigen Dōshi in Japan and Mr. Vampire in English, Phantom Fighter places you in the role of a kung fu master who has the special gift of placing his foot right into ghosts and making their trick asses regret being ghosts in the first place. Several villages nearby have been having problems with “kyonshi” (which I think is just a Japanese-ized rendition of the Chinese word “jiangshi,” a type of undead creature commonly described as a hopping vampire) and have petitioned you for help. Since you are a man of virtue and can kick the unliving shit out of undead monsters, the adventure begins.

I gradually cleared out the first village and people kept giving me scrolls. I wasn’t entirely sure what they were for until later I used several of them to learn things called “High Jump” and “Wolf Move.” Apparently, you expand your repertoire of sick techniques by studying with a master, and the scrolls are currency. I also had to collect some “jades” that unlock a seal so I could kick something else’s ass (a boss ghost who left Alucard-style movement trails behind him).

He thinks he’s got tricks. His actual trick is hitting really fucking hard despite moving in slow motion. 

There’s not a ton of variance in the enemy except for how powerful they are, but fighting the kyonshi is fun once you get the timing and spacing down. It’s nice that the items and upgrades don’t overwhelm the game, but I wish things progressed faster on that end… the sprawl seems a little unrewarding, especially early on when you could struggle a bit.

Gameplay 7/10 (it’s fun to beat the shit out of Wuxia vampires)

Audio 8/10 (pretty good OST, especially the combat music)

Graphics 6/10 (good for NES type stuff)

Theme 8/10 (I’m a sucker for the M.A./horror blend)

Big Picture: 7/10 (A bit underrated!)

The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants

Imagineering/Arc Developments/Acclaim

1991

This is a polarizing title in the NES library. A lot of players love it because it’s 1) the first Simpsons video game 2) brutally “challenging.” Another camp despises it because it’s 1) banked completely on its licensing 2) fucking stupid hard, not to mention boring.

I played it for about 20 minutes and fell into the second category.

Bart has all the maneuverability of an overripe fruit someone dropped on a hot day. He lopes and bumbles through a perpetually overactive environment as he tries to turn purple objects red. Purple objects are apparently one crucial ingredient necessary for the space mutants (the only well-rendered things in the game) need for some kind of devastating weapon.

Well-drawn, but yeah, they’re doing this. I mean, I know The Simpsons is goofy and silly. But this is the nadir, I think.

You can get on a skateboard, which helps you get hurt more and faster. You also pick up various implements that I guess are supposed to help you, but really don’t unless they are oriented toward a specific puzzle solution. Toy stores and tool stores sell them to you, and you buy them using mystery money that just tumbles out of random shit. You’re able to stand on things that make no sense and can’t stand on surfaces that make perfect sense. This game is an affront to the platform genre, AND I HOPE YOU LIKE THE SIMPSONS THEME BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT PLAYS OVER AND OVER AND OVER, AN 8 BIT VERSION OF THE SIMPSONS THEME.

I’m standing on a non-surface, the point where a surface terminates and becomes a nearly sheer vertical edge. Non-Euclidean geometry? Demoniac defiance of physics? Both equally likely.

I am unashamed to admit that I did not finish the first level. I’m sure if I asked the Pope he’d give me an indulgence on that one. No sane or virtuous human being would willingly smash themselves into this hellmouth more than once.

Gameplay 2/10 (Bart needs to go see a middle ear doctor or be evaluated for head trauma)

Audio 1/10 (fuck you)

Graphics 5/10 (it has moments, and I can’t fault it on authenticity either)

Theme 4/10 (eh, I think they just knew we’d buy a Simpsons game)

Big Picture: 2/10 (Skip it. If you’re into it, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and also agree that I worry about your well-being.)

Holy Diver

Irem Corp.

1989

Let me jump right on the tiger, to quote the Man Himself… the Wikipedia article claims there is no relationship between this game and the Ronnie James Dio album.

Nah, bruh… I’m sorry… that’s motherfucking DIO.

Here’s my interpretation of this awesome (and sadly non-export) platform game: You play as Ronnie James Dio, champion of humanity and righteous heavy metal. You murder every evil thing you find with outrageous magic and basically nothing can stop you. That’s all the story I need, man. I am an unironic and unashamed fan of all things Dio. Plug me in. It’s time to rock.

“Between the velvet lies / there’s a truth that’s hard as steel / the vision never dies / life’s a neverending wheel”

This game is actually pretty good. It’s a solid blaster-platformer, with a reasonable difficulty curve and a good sense of accomplishment. As you utterly destroy more and more of the wicked demonic creatures, you find power-ups and new spells that make you even more undeniably rad. I was throwing several different kinds of magic into the face of evil and changing forms by the time I needed to stop and write this article.

A lot of the imagery makes it completely clear that this game is directly inspired by Dio and Dio-era Sabbath. I mean, stylized crosses with skulls that look like they could come right off of an early-80s Sabbath album cover? Come on. In other ways, the game reminds me visually of another Japanese game, Getsu Fuuma Den, except more crisp and polished. If I could say anything negative about this game, it’s that I wish it had a little more variety and depth when it came to the magic and power Dio could wield against the forces of evil. He is, after all, master of the fucking moon. The audio is also a bit below standard for a game where you play as Dio.

It’s the sign of the southern cross / Fade away, fade away / Break the crystal ball / Fade away, fade away / I can’t accept it anymore

And you are playing as Dio. We’re not gonna screw around on that point. That is exactly what is up in this game.

Gameplay 7/10 (it’s not absolutely perfect but it’s a lot of fun)

Audio 5/10 (sadly, this part does not rock like Dio, but I can live with it, it’s not awful)

Graphics 8/10 (heavy metal!!!)

Theme 10/10 (RONNIE JAMES DIO IS DESTROYING DEMONS WITH WIZARD POWERS.)

Big Picture: 8/10 (I want to send away for a FC cart of this, shadowbox-frame it, and put it on my wall. It is a fucking cool piece of retro VG history.)

Thanks for reading, and I’ll fill another suspicious paper bag with games real soon!

“You are the strongest chain / and you’re not just some reflection / so never hide again”

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.

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.

When we were kids, and we first beheld the wonder of console video games, the entire thing would sometimes seem like one huge river – no, an ocean is more appropriate. One deluge of games would be released, then another, and we’d still be tackling the first. Then here, a whole new system, and there, crazy new peripherals we never even knew we wanted (but we wanted them). It was like we could never run out of choices. The best (but perhaps most bewildering) part: we were duplicating a primary cycle that was approximately 3 years ahead of us in Japan, where all (most) of this stuff was getting made. One thing most of us were guilty of, though, at least until we were older, was that we’d make strong mental associations with the games and characters, but maybe not the great companies creating them. Now, as a grown-ass man writing about video games three times a month, I try to explore what I clearly missed as a child… the mostly unsung sagas of these companies, some of whom came from humble beginnings and seemingly faded away without the public noticing.

Hudson Soft is a tale that begins with Hiroshi and Yuji Kudo. In May of 1973, they opened a simple shop called CQ Hudson, which sold radio equipment and also had some nice art photographs. You know, stop in for a transistor, get a nice shot of the ocean for your mom as a gift. It’s worth noting that the company was named after a train, specifically the Japanese C62 which had been produced originally by Hudson Locomotives. Japan saw a lot of railway growth after the Second World War, which was when the Kudo boys were coming up.

The post-war choo choo that inspired two young Japanese boys to innovate and entertain.

Things went well for the Kudo brothers, and in 1975, they began selling products for personal computers. Around ’78, Hudson began inching into video games. At first, the firm was putting out around 25-30 titles a month, which sounds impossible; given the simplicity of the platforms in that era, however, it was far from it. Needless to say, this clone-vat approach bore only modest fruit, so Hudson leaped at the opportunity when given a shot a developing for Nintendo’s new Family Computer. Let me re-phrase that: Hudson strode confidently into video game history by becoming Nintendo’s FIRST third-party developer. They immediately met with strong success; both their port of Lode Runner and their self-conceived game Bomberman sold over 1 million copies. Bomberman had been released previously for Microsoft’s Japan-geared MSX computer, and Broderbund had done well with Lode Runner in the US and Europe, but the Famicom was the desired platform and the timing was just right.

Two titles that solidified Hudson Soft’s position in the top tier.

From its new office in Midtown Tower in Tokyo, Hudson continued to carve a place for itself in video game history. Starting in 1985, the company began doing something we wouldn’t even think of until the early 1990s: tournament-style video game competitions. Their first one revolved around the Hudson title Star Force in Summer of ’85; its sequel Star Soldier was used in ’86 and even had 2 and 5 minute modes built into its home version to reflect its status as a competitive game. These remarkable yearly events, which took a much less competitive tone after 1992, solidified Hudson Soft’s notoriety and popularity at home.

In 1987, Hudson teamed with NEC to create perhaps the greatest dark-horse console of the 20th Century: The PC Engine. Known in the West as the Turbo Grafx 16. I’ve already written a love letter to that console, so I’ll spare you the gushing… but it’s important to remember a few things. With this platform, Hudson Soft beat both Nintendo and Sega at a few things. The PC Engine set the record at the time for the smallest console. It also achieved graphically what the Mega Drive did, except almost three years earlier. Lastly, the portable version of the PC Engine wasn’t using its own pared-down set of games. This wasn’t some wrap-it-up Game Boy shit. It was using the same media as its mother system. It did this five years before Sega could pull off the same thing by producing the Nomad. There’s more to how awesome the PC-Engine is, but you’d be better served by reading my original article.

You’re not losing a whole lot visually, either.  Sorry, I just like rubbing this in because so many Sega partisans tend to studiously overlook it.

Other memorable titles from Hudson Soft (many of which saw multi-platform release) were Starship Hector, the Adventure Island series, Faxanadu, Milon’s Secret Castle, and my two favorites of theirs… Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu and Felix the Cat.

Hudson Soft’s main bank collapsed during a financial crisis around the turn of the millennium, driving the firm to offer itself on the Japanese stock market. To speed up a sad and tedious tale, Konami bought majority stock in Hudson; the two companies had worked amicably with each other since the early 80s and Konami sought to help give lift to the tired bee’s wings. Hudson still self-published until 2011-2012, when Konami bought what was left and absorbed it into itself. The final vestiges of Hudson Soft vanished in 2014, when its website began redirecting to Konami’s. Officially, the Hudson brand still exists, but it is part of Konami Digital Publishing.

The Hudson Bee about to be taken down from over the firm’s original HQ in Sapporo, 2/29/12.

I tell myself sometimes (And I’m sure someone reading this will laugh at me) that I’m helping preserve and curate history when I write articles like this. I know it’s not terribly significant stuff to the world at large, but it is to me… and to any gamer who likes knowing where things started. Thank you, Kudo Brothers. Thank you for starting a radio parts shop in 1973 and naming it after a train.

Thank you for everything.

More in February! Take care until then!

Part of why so many of us love video games is that they’re a release. They release tension. They give us an outlet. Have you ever just wanted to, like, throw a trash can at a guy, or kick and punch him until he passes out? You might not have been there, but I doubt that. If you denied it, I wouldn’t believe you.

River City Ransom was one of those releases for a lot of gamers in 1989. Made by Technos, the same company that developed Double Dragon, RCR plays similarly to that game, although several elements have been added. The best way to describe River City Ransom is that it is a scrolling beat-em-up, but with faint hints of RPG inserted throughout. For instance, the gameplay is non-linear, meaning you can wander about, even backtracking. You don’t “level-up,” at least not by the strict definition of that term. Instead, when you beat the crap out of hooligans, they drop money, and you use that money to buy both temporary and permanent powerups.

In Japan, River City Ransom is called Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, or “Downtown Hot-Blooded Story,” and is part of the Kunio-kun series. Several of these games, when localized for the American market, were renamed and retooled to stand alone. Examples are Renegade, Nintendo World Cup, and Super Dodge Ball. Astute observation reveals similarities in graphics, of course. River City Ransom revolves around rescuing your character’s girlfriend from Slick, the main villain. To do this, you must battle your way through River City, slamming the members of various gangs and learning new techniques to toughen yourself up for the final ascent into River City High School. You need not do this alone, as a second player is able to play as the friend of the main protagonist (who is basically identical for gameplay purposes).  As mentioned above, your character has a set of stats, such as Stamina (which acts as a life bar), strength (which governs how much your attacks hurt people), and proficiency levels with various attacks and weapons. Like many other beat-em-up games, enemies will drop weapons they’re using when you defeat them, and you can wield them afterwards, even throwing them at range. The thugs also drop money, varying in value depending on how tough they are. At intervals throughout the town, you are able to spend this cash in strip malls. There are both take-out and dine-in restaurants, where you can buy powerups in the form of food. Most food simply refills lost Stamina, but some of it also increases stats slightly. Of paramount importance are books, which are expensive but allow you to learn special techniques or improve your basic attacks. The need for these items leads to a form of “grinding,” not unlike certain RPGs, where you are wandering about, getting in fights for the money you’ll find.

Here is a short video of gameplay.

River City Ransom is well-known to gamers for its colorful and humorous nature. As you fight, messages appear across the bottom of the screen. When you enter an area, you’re told which gang controls it. When you KO an adversary, he usually has something to say about it.  Occasionally there is a cutscene, where dialog will be displayed across this area as well. The game’s graphics are standard for a late NES-era game, but what really shines visually is the animation and art style of the game. The violence is portrayed in a delightfully cartoonish fashion, all bugged-out eyes and motion lines. The sound effects aren’t anything to write home about, but the music is quite good; there aren’t many separate tracks, but what you hear is arranged with skill and dramatically appropriate. Have a listen below!

River City Ransom has been remade and ported a few times; notable among these is the remake for the Game Boy Advance, River City Ransom EX. This expansion upon the original game adds a great deal of configurable options and extra perks, as well as improved graphics and smoother controls. The general idea, however, is much the same. The original has also been released for download on the 3DS and the Wii, so a whole new generation of gamers can get in on the brutal action.

Perhaps not as widely known as its cousin Double Dragon, River City Ransom is nonetheless a notable title for its bold crossover into RPG-style gameplay. Other franchises and genres would experiment with this idea later in the history of video gaming, and those titles owe a nod to River City Ransom.