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.

Wolfenstein 3D was a commercial success, as well as a new standard for 3D action gaming. It prompted developers, including id Software, to ask themselves, “what can we do next?”

The very next year, id answered its own question and made gaming history.

I was ten, not much older than I was in the previous article’s flashback. I had a buddy in school (we both liked video games) who handed me another set of blue 3.5” floppies one day. “Don’t let the teacher see,” he said softly under his breath. “It’s doom.” Little did I know this was a proper noun, not just some dire warning. I played the shareware version through in two days, out of both grim fascination and obsession.

Welcome to Phobos. We hope you survive your stay!

Released in December of 1993, Doom is still played today by more people than you’d think. Once again, pioneer John Carmack devised a versatile 3D game engine from scratch. id’s team used this game engine to tell a grim story, a tale of pyrrhic victory in the face of demonic horror. Doom came under fire often for its intense level of violence, even being tied to the infamous Columbine shootings. However, even 22 years after its release, the original game still has a loyal following and a lively community.

The id team began working on Doom even as they were putting the finishing touches on Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack had already begun work on an even more advanced rendering engine, one with far less limits and far more detail than what had come before. Floors and ceilings could be on different elevations, even rising and falling during play if programmed to do so. Walls no longer had to be at 90 degree angles, either. This was done by dividing the map into “sectors,” each of which had its own set of data (floor/ceiling levels, lighting, etc.). In addition to more dynamic lighting options, the engine also boasted the capacity to texture all surfaces visible in the game, adding a new level of immersive detail. While the enemies and objects in Doom were still represented by 2 dimensional sprites, the art team created many of them by photo-scanning sculptures, resulting in some truly impressive monster graphics. All this art was painstakingly produced by the team of Adrian Carmack (no relation to John, believe it or not), Kevin Cloud, and Gregor Punchatz. The game had much richer sound and music, as well; Bobby Prince made a return as the composer, borrowing licks (within legal boundaries) from some popular heavy metal bands to fill out a soundtrack that is still hailed today as one of the most lush scores in 1990s gaming.

Doom’s story is split up into three episodes. You play the role of a marine sent to investigate strange messages coming from Mars’s twin moons, Phobos and Deimos. The UAC has been developing teleportation technology there, and recent messages indicate that something’s gone terribly wrong. In the first episode, “Knee Deep in the Dead,” you arrive on Phobos, only to find out that the messages were right on the money; the UAC base is crawling with undead humans and what can only be demonic creatures. By fighting your way to the source of the infestation on Phobos, you are transported to the other moon, Deimos… and “The Shores of Hell.” In this second episode, your marine must forge through increasingly ominous and Hell-like landscapes to reach the Tower of Babel, where the cyberdemon awaits. At the end of this struggle, you discover that Deimos floats above Hell itself. In “Inferno,” you seek nothing less than to cut the head off the invasion; you must reach Dis, the capital of Hell, and destroy the spider mastermind. As you move through the last two episodes, you see less and less of the possessed humans and many more of the various types of demons.

Between levels, you are shown your percentages of kills, items, and secrets. you are also treated to a bird’s eye view of the region you’re in.

Speaking of the monsters, they take various forms… and present a variety of threats. Your stock enemies are possessed human soldiers, some of whom carry shotguns that make them significantly more dangerous than their bottom-tier cousins. The first demonic foes you encounter are the imps. Not the little red men of folklore, these big brown bastards hurl fireballs and possess claws like Ginsu blades. There’s big pink-skinned demons, whose bite can put a serious hurt on any marine who lingers too close. The bosses of the first episode, the Barons of Hell, become rank-and-file heavies in the other two chapters of the game. They behave much like the imps do, but these massive goat-headed thugs are much more adept and both dishing it out and taking it. Some enemies fly, making them even more of a pain in the ass; the pumpkin-like cacodemons belch electricity, and the flaming skulls known as Lost Souls simply launch themselves at you like maniacal little cannon balls. The cyberdemon at the end of episode 2 is a sight to behold, and he’s also quickly lethal if you don’t watch out for his constant barrage of rockets. The spider boss in episode 3’s last hurrah is slow and ponderous, but if it draws a bead on you with its massive multi-barrel cannon, you’re toast.

Top row, left to right: Barons of Hell, Cacodemons, Lost souls. Bottom row: Demons, Imps, and the two varieties of possessed soldier.

Don’t go thinking that the monsters are the only thing that can kill you in Hell… Various environmental hazards present themselves, from acidic chemicals to lava to the incredibly unpleasant crushing ceilings that pepper the game’s corridors. Walls and surfaces can also shift, trapping you in hopeless ambushes that pit you against superior numbers. Doom is one of the most entertaining games I’ve ever played, but it is not a friendly game. It’s actively trying to kill you. All the time.

Not pictured: the turds falling into your marine’s pants during this final moment.

You start each episode with naught but a wee pistol (which looks to be modeled loosely off a Beretta M9, but I’m not a firearms expert). However, some of the zombies drop shotguns, and there are even better weapons waiting to be found. Chain linked machine guns, rocket launchers, and even experimental plasma weapons like the BFG 9000 can be discovered. They appear both conspicuously and in the secret areas that dot each level. You’ll also want to keep an eye out for a chainsaw, which not only beats your puny fist in terms of damage output but drags the targeted enemy into it while you carve up some meat. Since you’ll also be hurt on a regular basis, it helps to look around for medical kits… and there’s also a big blue ball that does more than any doctor could ever do. Armor will help too; it comes in two varieties, and absorbs a fraction of the damage you take from certain sources. There are also various powerups and tools to help you, like night vision goggles and hazard suits. If you find a black medkit, it not only fills your health, but gives your punch the force of a rocket as you blitz out on the adrenaline high. There are even green spheres that render you temporarily invulnerable, at the small cost of forcing you to see in high-contrast monochrome for the duration. Another sphere turns you temporarily hazy, almost invisible. I stress “almost.” This makes it slightly harder for the enemy to target you, but it’s more effective in multiplayer deathmatch against actual humans.

Some military men are stone-faced, but your marine is very expressive. Rage, horror, and even a little grim joy. All in a day’s work. This concept was a carry-over from Wolfenstein 3D.

Doom also pioneered the multiplayer deathmatch. Via modem or other means, players could face off not against demons, but one another. Much of this is self explanatory, but suffice it to say that even a rookie deathmatch opponent presents a much more tangible threat than any demon. Players could also progress through the normal game together, but deathmatch was (and is) considered much more fun.

Doom’s success was monumental, but the game also fell under the same crosshairs so many violent games do; public outcry over the gore and (vaguely) Satanic imagery led to widespread controversy. Doom was even implicated in the 1999 Columbine shootings, as both shooters were not only avid players but also dabbled in editing it and creating maps. Harvard, the Secret Service, and the US Department of Education all did studies that eventually showed no real correlation between video games and real-life violent crime, but the stigma remains. Overall, this didn’t hurt Doom’s popularity; if anything, it boosted its signal.

“This is an adult situation.” Another pre-mortem screenshot from some fool about to get ground into red mist.

In response to fan-made editing tools for Wolfenstein 3D, id purposefully made Doom’s content easy to access and edit. To this day, a diligent Internet search will turn up great vaults of user-made maps, graphics, and even sound effects for the game. In more recent years, Doom even got a loving overhaul when ZDoom was developed. Along with its direct descendents Skulltag and Zandronum, ZDoom added modern FPS elements to the game, such as bots, better multiplayer functionality, and (in the case of Skulltag) more game-types. Skulltag also added new weapons and enemies, most of which are variants on the original content. To this day, the game is modded, added to, and expanded.

Doom spawned a sequel, which itself is considered the standard for fans of the series. Doom II features additional types of enemies, a double-barreled shotgun, and 32 new levels. Doom II was used to make Final Doom, two more 32-level installments that ramp up the challenge for hardened marines ready to test themselves. There was also The Master Levels; I’ll admit that I never played them, but by all accounts, they are insanely difficult. The original Doom was re-released in 1995 with an extra episode, “Thy Flesh Consumed.” The game engine was used to make many other titles, which I will not attempt to list at length. Notable among them are Heretic and Hexen, dark fantasy spins on the FPS experience. In 2004, Doom 3 hit the shelves, and while it was considered a very good game, hardcore fans (including yours truly) felt like it wasn’t really a Doom game. It just lacked the distinctive feel.

The dim lighting in certain areas made this a lot scarier than it probably seems to us now. I can’t tell you how many times I muttered “oh, shit” playing through all three episodes.

A new reboot looms on the horizon, and if you’re into gaming, you’ve seen the trailer, the E3 gameplay, and everything else. I, for one, can’t wait to dive into Hell again. Doom was a world-shaker back in 1993, and I have no doubt it will shake 2016 just as violently. That said, nothing can beat that initial rush when I ran into the hangar on Phobos and fought my first zombie soldiers. The original Doom can be outdone with more modern technology, but it can never be truly eclipsed in terms of impact or quality.

Every time I try making a bulleted list on here, it refuses to show the bullets. Below is a “bulleted list” of neat stuff for you to check out if you’d like.

• Designer Tom Hall had a far more grandiose vision for the game, and outlined it in a document. Conflicts over the direction of the game led to Hall resigning.
• The name of the game was inspired by a scene from the film The Color of Money.
• Some of the weapons are scans of toy guns. The plasma rifle’s barrel is actually part of an M-60 machine gun toy that come apart, turned backwards.
• I didn’t go into a lot of detail about the game’s engine this time, but if you’re interested in the technological bits, here’s another big chunk of what made the game work like it did.
• Level 4 in the first episode originally contained a structure that lowered to display a swastika symbol on the floor. This was later removed.
• Someone created isometric views of every map. Enjoy.

Thanks for reading, RetroManiacs!