Back from the ether and here on the nostalgia streets with another bundle of retro content to think back on.

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime is the recent film by Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Shin Ultraman, Shin Godzilla) and the newest live-action interpretation of the beloved Kamen Rider franchise.

Sosuke Ikematsu stars as our masked rider, Takeshi Hong. Hong is a motorcycle enthusiast that after being abducted experimented and turned into an augmented hybrid cyborg that is enlisted in the fight against an evil organization of “Augs” threatening to take over the world by any means necessary.

The film does start off slow and will have moments where the characters and story can breathe and flesh themselves out. But, make no mistake this is an action movie. In fact – this is probably one of the best superhero films on the year (in my opinion). The action is brutal and visceral and well filmed; the whole movie is filmed very well with decent pacing. For a live-action Japanese movie Shin Masked Rider is outstanding.

Based on the manga by Shotaro Ishinomori , this entry in the franchise celebrates 50 years of Kamen Rider that consists of numerous television series and feature films. It was released in Japan on March of 2023, earning $16 million dollars making it the highest grossing film in the series and receiving positive reviews from critics.  

Currently available to view Free on Amazon PRIME with original Japanese dialogue with English subtitles optional.

Shin Masked Rider is a definite recommendation and worthy of your time.

Stay Tuned tomorrow for the return of the Retro Movie handpicked by yours truly. Until then, stay cool, stay dry and always keep your finger on that REWIND button.  

SAILORWAVE III by MACROSS 82-99

Macross 82-99 ‘Sailorwave III’ is out now via Bandcamp

Seems like the people that brought us Atomic Blonde (2017) teamed up with some other folks and dipped their hands into buckets of Netflix cash to give us – KATE.

A one word title for a simple story that could be wrapped up in just one word –
“No-nonsense”. Yes, technically that’s two words but, you get the point.

• “Directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and written by Umair Aleem. The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead
  (Death Proof, Scott Pilgrim, Fargo: the series) , Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson (Venom 2, NBK), Tadanobu Asano, Michiel Huisman, Miyavi and Jun Kunimura (The Wailing, Shin Godzilla). The film follows Kate (Winstead), an assassin, whose mentor and handler (Harrelson) assigns her to kill a high-ranking Yakuza boss. During Kate’s final mission, she finds out that she has been poisoned and only has 24 hours to live, so she uses her last hours to get revenge and find out who set her up.”
• Wikipedia.org

This is a no-nonsense, hyper stylized, female revenge film set in Japan. No, not KILL BILL. No; not HAYWIRE. Kate is more obviously inspired by anime and video games. 

It’s more anime than you’d expect and more video game than John Wick. The injections she takes to extend her life-bar that reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 4 (Every time she was on the verge of dying I called out, “snake?” “Snake?”, “ Snaaaaaaake?”). Another nod to video-game/anime culture being the car chase that sounds like the opening credits to some new racing themed Shonen  anime similar to Initial –D, and don’t forget the tons and tons of Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner inspired scenery.  Yes, this movie is CYBERPUNK as fuck.

More low life than Hi-Tech and cyberpunk from the prospective of a High-rolling mercenary caught in the middle of a Yakuza clan war in the nocturnal underbelly of Tokyo, Japan after being poisoned by radioactive material. Kate is determined to weave, stab and shoot her way through the back streets of Japan and eliminate any Yakuza responsible or in the way of her wrath. You can easily create a character based on Kate for your next table-top cyberpunk RED campaign in cooperation or in secrecy subverting your friends.  

Soundtrack is serviceable to the overall setting of the film piece. Band-maid, Okinawa Electric Girl Saya, OOIOO, Sakurako Ohara, MoNa a.k.a. Sad Girl, and one of my favorite j-pop groups Aural Vampire.

Kate was released on Sept 10^th, 2021 and received mixed to not so flattering reviews and reactions from audiences. Some film critics were dismissive of Kate. In my opinion, this is a better film than Gunpowder Milkshake. Gunpowder with all this style and flash and star power failed to engage me with its action set-pieces. Action scenes need to have emotional content. If the film doesn’t keep your interest with its story (regardless of its originality or lack of) and the fight scenes aren’t edited or filmed well then, you might as well watch a televised ballet; it doesn’t matter if they are choreographed superbly. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times may disagree with me since he enjoyed Gunpowder’s flashy fantastical acrylic gloss dripping all over its shallow exterior. Kate to me is what a live-action retro cyberpunk OVA would look like (OEDO 808 (1990), ANGEL COP (1989)). Like I said, this whole piece feels like a gumbo of video-game and anime. I enjoyed it. It was simple and at its core the story although unoriginal was acted well-enough for me to be engaged. The visuals alone is worthy of a blu-ray or 4K purchase. I liked it and can’t wait to own it.

Stay sleek, stay free, stay safe, stay healthy and always keep your finger on that REWIND Button. 

I’m back bitches. And here we are – together again. Forever.
Here this December 2020 the movie pick is the live action adaptation 20^TH CENTURY BOYS directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi and based on the classic manga written & illustrated by Naoki Urasawa(Monster, Pluto). This is the first film in the trilogy and was released in 2008 through TOHO.

20^th Century Boys main plot as it remains pretty damn close to the source material revolves around a middle aged store clerk who is drawn into a conspiracy somehow involving his childhood friends.
The story and characters can be a bit overwhelming if you’ve never read the manga however, the film does serve well to entertain its viewers. There is some good genuine moments between long lost friends. There is a flavor of Stephen King here with its flashbacks and the idea of a group of childhood friends coming together to solve a mystery from their past…. That mystery being the string of bizarre attacks and disappearances that may or may not have to do with a popular cult lead by a mysterious figure known as FRIEND.

The film quality is of its time. The acting is actually pretty good. The limited special effects are nice and not distracting. I really enjoyed this and will proceed to watch the next two films in the trilogy; all films are available on YOUTUBE for now. I recommend anyone interested to go find them and watch – before youtube decides it not acceptable.

20^th Century Boys the Beginning is well worth its duration and very fun. I also recommend picking up any of the printed volumes, omnibuses or special editions of the MANGA at your nearest comic book retailer or Barnes n Nobles.

Be SAFE this NEW YEARS, Covid isn’t gone yet and you’re government is not in your corner through this – no matter what they say. Stay cool and stay refined and keep your finger on that REWIND button.

Produced by her husband Tatsuro Yamashita and released in 1984, the song, the song has come to be known as one of the most popular examples of the City pop musical aesthetic thanks to a remix of the song whose viewership was heavily boosted by Youtube’s recommendation algorithm. The artists associated with the genre have earned themselves newfound international popularity, thanks in part to their influence on Vaporwave and Future Funk artists.

Full-length releases by artists associated with the genre remain sparse on the streaming platform but have been emerging sporadically in recent years, sparking hopes of more widespread distribution of City Pop music overseas. Taeko Onuki, another major figure in the City Pop genre, has been earning streams in the six-figures since having made her albums available on Spotify. Will the stats behind these streaming numbers be enough to provoke a response from the Major Labels in charge? We’ll just have to wait and see…

Thumbnail photo credit: Alan Levenson

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 Internet and emulation have become prevalent in gamers’ lives (especially mine), I’ve had plenty of moments when I’ve been exposed to something that never left Japan and thought, “you know, this would have really done well in the West. It’s a shame we’ll never know because they didn’t try.” Import retro gaming and emulation has always been a super-niche aspect of the hobby, a place where the mystical ley-lines of japanophilia and completionism cross at a right angle. Some people are so devoted to the cult that they translate ROMs and keep lovingly curated translations of the games’ plots and stories. Characters and worlds unheard of outside Japan have slowly gained life in the West as the Information Age has taken hold and rendered localization a mere formality.

Which is great, because otherwise I’d probably never have gotten to play Valkyrie no Densetsu.

I won’t say how I got a hold of the English translated ROM for the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16 version, but I will say that if you join the right forum on the right popular emulation website, you can probably find it if you look around. I was overjoyed to find it, as I’d seen bits of the original Japanese source material and even had an untouched ROM… but I won’t pretend I’m able to read Japanese in any form. Any discussion among hardcore PC Engine or Namco fans was likely to bring up the character of Valkyrie; I was intrigued to the point that I started hunting down an English translation. Apparently a decent official one exists on a PlayStation compilation disc called Namco Museum Vol 5, but PlayStation’s a little past what we cover here. My best hope was a translated ROM of the arcade or PC Engine version. I found the latter after extensive looking, and was not disappointed.

Kurino and Valkyrie bravely fend off flying mandrills. Clearly, Valkyrie’s not even worried. I mean, the weather’s nice out, she’s being launched through the sky somehow… this is a great day. She doesn’t even have time for this shit to drag her down.

As it turns out, Valkyrie no Densetsu (Legend of Valkyrie) is part of a series of games. Its prequel, Valkyrie no Boken: Toki no Kagi Densetsu (Adventure of Valkyrie: Legend of the Key of Time) was released for the Famicom in 1986 and became very popular in Japan. It contained several RPG elements that would later be matched by games like Dragon Quest/Warrior, but also bore a striking similarity in some ways to Legend of Zelda. It wasn’t a hit overnight, but it gained popularity due to its characters and story. What’s most important in the context of this article is that Valkyrie makes a friend during this first quest: a chubby little lizard dude named Kurino Sandra (sometimes called Whirlo in US-release Namco products). He would go on to feature prominently in the plot of Valkyrie no Densetsu in 1989.

In the spotty prologue of Valkyrie no Densetsu, Kurino Sandra has been living peacefully at home since the events of the prequel, but hears about a golden seed that can grant wishes. He decides to go on a quest for it alone, as Valkyrie has ascended back into the heavens. In the process, Sandra finds a magical trident embedded in a block of solid gold.

Just… right there. Among some rocks. No one ever noticed it or bothered with it. Certainly not the head-sized block of pure gold it’s stuck in. Congratulations, Kurino!

He and some companions from the first game end up in a ruined town near a clock tower, and are confronted by a powerful warrior in service to some jerk named Kamuz. Of course, this results in a violent confrontation unfavorable to Kurino and his friends, but what do you know? Having seen the strife caused by the golden seed, the heavens have seen fit to send Valkyrie down once more.

One player or two, this is where the game picks up. The eight stages take you across a wide swathe of the world of Marvel Land (no authoritative source confirms or denies this being related to the Genesis title of that name produced by Namco), from meadows and forests to lava caves and lands of ice. After exhaustive comparison, I can’t see any real difference in mechanical game function between Valkyrie and Kurino; both of them jump the same, cast spells (yes, cast spells) the same, and shoot energy bolts out of their weapons. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. The game is top-down but contains plenty of jump-hazards, so mastering the distance and timing of that jump is essential. Battling small crowds of low-tier enemies isn’t too hard; in fact, it’s pretty fun. The control response is good, and you just point and click. The spells you learn (see below) can do things like turn you bigger and stronger, create whirls of flame, allow you to float in midair, and even summon little versions of yourselves to help deal out punishment. (This last one is actually called “Option Magic,” a reference to similar abilities in various shoot-em-up games.) Health and magic power are both measured with little icons, and the game is generous enough to use half-units as an increment.

Waiting for the duo are ogres, goblins, robots, and various kinds of boss monsters, some of whom are so large that the screen has to zoom out a little to let you fight them. Most non-boss monsters aren’t too dangerous individually or in small groups, but seeing as Valkyrie no Densetsu is originally an arcade title, the swarm effect will be noticeable at regular intervals. Most enemies drop gold in varying amounts, which makes one wonder just what to do with all the loot earned through righteous murder.

Thankfully, A merchant, an old lady, and a little girl are constantly hanging around these dangerous places with the intent of doing business with you (or just giving you shit). The little girl usually just has story items, but the old woman teaches you some bad-ass spells and the merchant guy sells you some useful stuff (including shooter-style power-ups).

From a scan of the Japanese manual for the PC Engine version. 

The game’s soundtrack is pretty good, the obvious best example being the arcade version. The prologue and main theme music are what I’d call “charming” if I were pretending not to like them as much as I do; they’re adorable, uplifting, and delightful. For a game so grand in overall scale, it’s unfortunate there isn’t more there, but what IS there is a wonderful fit for the theme.

Valkyrie no Densetsu clearly exhibits hybrid traits; it is both a top-down “platform” game and a less-than-conventional shooter when held to examination. Larger-than-life bosses, an involved yet approachable in-game economy, and stage features like catapults you must use to get from area to area are just some of the game’s appealing side-dressing. It’s no wonder Valkyrie no Densetsu made it to the PC Engine in 1990, taking a tiny hit in graphics and sound but retaining the bulk of its charm and playability. The Wii Virtual Console released a fairly faithful version of the original in 2009 (after emulating the PC Engine version the year before). As mentioned before, 1997 saw the release of the only official English translation on a PS1 disc called Namco Museum Vol 5, but I’m told the disc was (and is) both rare and expensive. The saga of Marvel Land’s heroes continued with a Kurino-centered entry for the Super Famicom in 1992, which did see release in Europe as Whirlo, but was drastically different from previous games in the series. Valkyrie herself has made various cameos in other Namco franchises: in the Mr. Driller series; in Soul Calibur II as an alternate costume for Cassandra; and as a relative staple in the company’s Tales of… franchise.

Screenshots from the English fan translation of the PC Engine version.

It really makes me wonder what heights she could have reached if she’d ever been let loose in the West. To most gamers, she’s just one of those characters in Namco vs Capcom that you’ve never heard of.

But if you’re a real blood-in member of the cult of retro gaming, you know who she is. At least, you do now. You’re welcome.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back in March with more! As usual, feel free to email me or visit the page on Facebook if you have feedback, questions, or (best of all) a juicy game you think I should hear about.

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!

Hello, nice to meet you too and thank you very much for the interview! It is an honor.

Straight to the answer – we are a duo. The band consists of me – Pasha Star, and my friend Pavel Saushkin. We’ve met when I was searching for a musician to start my own music project. I really loved the way he perceives the music, the way he treats melody and can play with bits of sound creating our unique sound. That is what I like about our partnership – I create songs in my head and Pavel manages to transfer it in reality as I have pictured it. Nonetheless, his own work is very nice and I do not create all of the songs of course. The band formed in July 2014, after we tried to make couple of songs together. It was like a trial period to test whether we can manage cooperation and do something really interesting. It worked out as you may see. After some paperwork we started to build our name.

2. Can each of you (band members) give us 5 interesting facts about yourselves.

Pasha Star

: Ok, I will try first. Most of it is somehow connected to Japan, because I started my singing career there.

1 – I can speak and write lyrics in Japanese;

2 – Failed at Sony Music Audition Japan in the finals, because I was so nervous I strained my voice.

3 – I took part in variety of Japanese TV shows and commercials as a model and a singer during my time in Japan.

4 – I am Russian but my background is a mixture of different ethnicities.

5 – I am almost 6’4 tall.

Pavel Saushkin

:

Well, as for me….

1 -hmmm

2 -well….

3 -……

4 -….I

5 -…..Hmmm

Pasha Star

: He is a genius!

Actually it was harder than I thought because when it comes to describing oneself all of the memory just disappears into somewhere and at the same time nobody wants to look like a boaster

3. How would you describe your sound? 

Pasha Star

: Right now, we have no particular genre in mind. We do identify ourselves as an electropop band, but our upcoming album will consist from different music genres – starting from synth pop and/or nu-disco ending with witch house. We want it to be a like a space travel – each song is a different planet.

Pavel Saushkin

: Eventually, we believe, this should bring us to something even more interesting in terms of genres and style. Let’s see where it takes us.

4

. The video for “Black Tears” is immense, but it also seems like there is a hidden meaning behind the video. Could you explain what we witness?

Pasha Star

: Actually, it is a start of our Black Tears Saga project. We are planning to create and include a game and some short animation clips coupled with our music. It is a highly metaphysical, surreal, and allegorical story about a girl named Destiny. She is blind but she can see the world through the sounds, spoken words and her own imagination. The music video puts a viewer in a scene where she has fallen into the lies of a Dark One, who has deceived her into thinking that the Saint – the guy in white – is in fact a Liar and that false “truth” makes her cry the tears of grief empowering the Dark One. The guy in white is the Truth as he carries the attributes of strength and weakness at the same time: a strong body but he is handicapped. There is a lot of symbolism such as the table that represents life and the masks that carry the idea that the whole world is a theatre and etc.

There will be a continue which will cast some light on the plot we are trying to represent.

5. How did you guys get to work with Origa?! THATS A PRETTY BIG FEATURE!

Pasha Star

: I admired her music since I was a child. At that time, I did not realize I would be able to record a song with her someday. When I have started doing my own music, I have decided to send one of my demos to her and she, to my utter astonishment, responded. Since then we’ve worked together on some of her songs (I was responsible for writing some of the lyrics) and when we were about to release our debut single “Black Tears” I asked her whether she can add some vocals to it. She agreed and the result turned out really great.

6. What more can we expect from you in the near future?

Pasha Star

: In terms of music – we have many ambitions and we will surely release something really good in the near future. As our band’s name stands for eXperimental Electronic Sound we plan to experiment and make something unique and at the same time pleasant to listen to. As for the rest, as I already mentioned – we are going to continue developing our music story, and most important we are soon to start performing live, so do not forget to check our social networks for information and updates.

7. Where can the retro scene stay connected with you?

Pavel Saushkin

: We are gradually developing our network. Therefore, at the moment you can find us online at

 http://www.xes.fm/

which has links to all our social network groups, including our

YouTube channel

http://youtu.be/8VOBvlXFJXI

,

our Facebook group (

https://www.facebook.com/Xes.fm

;

https://www.facebook.com/iampashastar

),

VK group (

https://vk.com/xesmusic

), Instagram (

http://instagram.com/xes_music

)

and Soundcloud (

https://soundcloud.com/x_e_s

).

 Also, you can find us on many other popular websites just look for us online and you will definitely find us.

Check out XES hot single and video “Black Tears” below. A great new boost for the retro scene!!

😉