by | June 6, 2017 · 3:05 PM

And now for something completely different: A good TOSE/Bandai game

Between Game Boy Work (World) and NES Works, I’ve tackled quite a few games developed by the mystery humans at TOSE and the heartless suits at Bandai, and they have universally been pretty bad. Likewise for games from Bandai-affiliated publishers like Banpresto and Bandai Shinsei (which transmuted into Yutaka before our very eyes!). They’re all based on licenses, and they’re all bereft of those little grace notes we expect in our video games. You know, like “fun factor” and “play value”.

Well, there are no such things as absolutes in this world, as we see with Ninja Kid. It’s a TOSE/Bandai joint based on a license, yes, but it’s shockingly decent.

As in, I genuinely enjoyed the time I spent capturing footage for this one! I didn’t think such a thing was possible, but here we are. After the miserable bitterness of M.U.S.C.L.E. and Chubby Cherub (and Tag Team Wrestling, though that was someone else’s fault), this game proved to be a refreshing sorbet of completely tolerable design choices and competent programming. Is it a classic for the ages? No, but even in the year 2017, you could play it and not feel like someone was trying to destroy your zest for life. Sometimes, you gotta take victory where you can find it.

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by | · 12:00 PM

Disney Afternoon Collection: The Retronauts review

The announcement of Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 yesterday reminded that I’ve never quite understood the enormous amount of hate gamers directed at the first Legacy Collection a couple of years ago. Featuring six games for a tidy price — a fact specifically highlighted by the 3DS version, whose physical release clocked in at $10 less than buying the six included titles a la carte on Virtual Console — it made for a pretty respectable deal. On top of that, the Legacy Collection offered hands-down the best and most faithful rendition of those six games that has been available in a commercial product since the original carts; the only productions that even came close were those PlayStation remakes in Japan, which sold for $30 apiece and were reprogrammed rather than emulated. Despite a few small glitches here and there, the Legacy Collection absolutely blew away previous offerings, from the deeply flawed Mega Man Anniversary Collection to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console. Given the historic stature of those games and their glaring lack of a proper reissue for so many years, the Legacy Collection should have been embraced with open arms. Instead, it was greeted with anger, intense criticism, and general hatred.As far as I can tell, all that rage had very little to do with the Legacy Collection itself, or with the quality of the product. Instead, it appears to have resulted from resentment at Capcom’s apparent abandonment of the Mega Man franchise in the wake of Keiji Inafune’s departure from the company, combined with a desire for games not already available via Virtual Console. The Legacy Collection‘s announcement was greeted with anger, with every minor flaw in the collection inflated by the internet collective to crisis-level disaster.

My suspicions about hangups surrounding the Legacy Collection look to have been corroborated by its new follow-up, The Disney Afternoon Collection. Featuring the same technology (interpreted NES games) from the same developer (Digital Eclipse) and publisher (Capcom), the Afternoon Collection has been received with almost universal enthusiasm. The biggest complaint I’ve seen directed toward it has been a lot of perfectly understandable confusion about the collection’s failure to appear on a single Nintendo platform despite having its roots on Nintendo Entertainment System. Otherwise, though, it’s been more or less glowing reviews all the way down.

And rightly so. The Afternoon Collection is an excellent compilation of some pretty good games. The games feel spot-on, with no significant visual or audio errors that I can spot. The action has a crisp, lag-free sensation. You also get a pretty healthy little museum of archival art and trivia as part of the deal. (My favorite nugget: The unused DuckTales illustration that was clearly penned by Inafune, who got his start in the biz creating the packaging and manual illustrations for the Famicom Mega Man games.)

The Afternoon Collection includes a few improvements over the Legacy Collection. Digital Eclipse appears to have cleaned up the handful of glitches that showed up in the previous anthology. You also get a handful of presentation options, including borders, true-pixel scaling, and even fake scanlines (which can help break up the chunky-pixel visuals on a huge screen). Even more welcome: They’ve integrated a brilliant rewind feature that comes in handy during some of the games’ more hateful sequences. I mean, yes, these are Disney creations and are entirely kid friendly, but they’re still 8-bit action games… so you do occasionally come across moments that make you feel like the designers had some sort of deep grudge against you personally. The mine cart sequences in DuckTales in particular benefit from this emulator-like rewind option, as do the bosses in Darkwing Duck. But I stress the word option; if you hold to a purist perspective (or are one of those snobs who uses the phrase git good without irony), you don’t have to make use of the rewind.

Other than these tweaks, though, the only thing the Afternoon Collection really offers over Legacy Collection is the fact that you can’t otherwise buy the six games compiled here without shelling out for the original NES carts… the cheapest of which costs about as much as the entire Afternoon Collection, and the most expensive of which runs several hundred dollars. The Disney connection has prevented these NES games from appearing on archival releases or services until now, due to rights issues and licensing costs; this release amends that. It’s pretty unusual to see vintage games based on major licenses reissued years later, and the Afternoon Collection is genuinely special in that regard.

This new collection is on par, quality-wise, with the Mega Man anthology — a good thing, despite some internet grumbling that would suggest otherwise. And on a personal level, The Disney Afternoon Collection has provided me an opportunity for me to become acquainted with games I have only passing familiarity with. The only one of the titles gathered here that I played during the NES era was the original Rescue Rangers, which did a reasonable job of providing cooperative action filler for me and my best NES-loving friend until the next Contra sequel arrived. Since I lack a personal connection to the material here, it became more of a historical artifact for me (as opposed to the warm journey into nostalgia that the Mega Man set was).

For fans who cut their teeth on these classics, the Afternoon Collection does them justice. For others like me, who who never played some of the deeper cuts in Capcom’s Disney/NES library, it’s instead a great opportunity to get to know them better. These games have a certain universal quality to them; despite being the products of different development teams, they all hail from Capcom during the company’s time at the top of the NES third-party heap. Visually, musically, and mechanically, NES owners could bank on the certainty that the Capcom name guaranteed a certain unflagging standard of production excellence. These games bear that out… well, mostly.

DuckTales is by far the best-known title on this compilation. Not only was it tied to the biggest of Disney’s afternoon cartoons — big enough to inspire its own motion picture adaptation! — it’s also the one game here to ever have been remade beyond the 8-bit era (courtesy of WayForward Technologies). While DuckTales Remastered demonstrated an enormous amount of love and respect for the source material and its property, it always felt like WayForward got a little lost in their own fandom for the originals. Remastered wandered into the weeds to become bogged down with entirely too many intrusive cut scenes. Yes, it’s marvelous that the original cartoon cast recorded new dialogue for the game, but all that mandatory voiced text disrupted the flow of what should be a zippy, fast-paced platformer. Revisiting the no-frills NES version serves as a gentle reminder that a snappy vintage action game definitely works best when the pacing isn’t all jacked up by excessive conversation.

Another reason people love DuckTales for NES so much: Its unique play mechanics. It wouldn’t make sense for elderly Scrooge McDuck to be the violent brawling type or to run around with a gun, so instead the game turns his cane into a sort of pogo stick to allow him to take out enemies by hopping on their heads. Sure, there’s a bit of Super Mario Bros. to that concept, but the inherent springiness of Scrooge’s cane gives DuckTales a personality all its own; you bound around the screen, bopping enemies, safely passing over dangerous surfaces, revealing hidden treasures, and extending the range of Scrooge’s leaps with strategic bounces off bad guys. And while Scrooge does have the ability to swing his cane like a golf club, this has no use as a direct attack against monsters; it’s strictly used for whacking inanimate objects… though some of those objects can be smacked into projectile status in a pinch.

It’s a fun if sometimes unforgiving game, filled with fan service and classic cartoon and comic references. The game’s structure is unique, too: You can freely select from a number of different stages in any order, with only a handful of gates to progression within, and your ultimate goal is not simply to beat the game but rather to do so with the greatest possible amount of treasure in Scrooge’s vault. After all, it wouldn’t do for Scrooge to save the world. No, he’s all about avarice and grasping wealth, and DuckTales holds true to that characterization.

Its sequel — 1992’s DuckTales 2 — offers more of the same in general, but it also includes some improvements. It looks nicer, as you’d expect for a game produced several years later, but at the same time it simplifies the original’s slightly clunky pogo-cane control scheme. This makes for an even breezier play experience, elevating memorable action game design to near-perfection. Unlike the first DuckTales, the sequel has never been remade, and its late release and relative scarcity versus the original (which launched at the NES’s peak rather than in its twilight era) make it an awfully pricey pick-up nowadays. Having it available on an inexpensive collection like this is a real boon for NES and Disney fans alike.

The Rescue Rangers duology demonstrates a similar relationship between the two games: The second one refines the ideas and presentation of the first, but it doesn’t really change up the concept. Which is fine, really. Nintendo pretty much nailed it right out of the gate.

Based on the cartoon by the same name, Rescue Rangers and it sequel star Disney’s two chipmunk characters (Chip and Dale, no relationship to the exotic dancers) in an adventure scaled to their diminutive height. As always, there’s a certain charm about playing as little characters in a gigantic world; the platforming hazards here involve things like water taps, kitchen range burners, science lab flasks, and library books. Sure, you’re doing the same things you would in any platformer — running, jumping over obstacles, chucking projectiles at enemies — but the change in visual context adds a welcome twist of novelty.

However, what really sells the Rescue Rangers titles, both then and now, is their cooperative play. As a solo experience, the games are perfectly decent; play with a friend, however, and the games gain far more substance and depth. Everything about the game (including managing on-screen space, sharing the limited number of projectile weapons on a given screen, and strategizing the acquisition of collectibles) becomes either a point of collaboration or a point of contention between the two players. Playing Rescue Rangers cooperatively is by far the best thing the Afternoon Collection has to offer… which, again, makes Capcom’s decision not to bring the compilation to Switch all the more baffling, given the fundamental nature of the platform.

Then there’s Darkwing Duck, the one game on this collection I really need to spend more time with. It’s probably the most substantially Capcom-like title compiled here, sending out major Bionic Commando and Mega Man vibes. It looks and sounds better than any other Disney Afternoon title, and it has a compact platform-shooter feel. Unfortunately, it also has a really off-putting mechanic that causes the protagonist to cling to any horizontal surface he comes into contact with when he jumps — it’s like the overhead bars in Contra III, except that you have no control over when and how you stick to them. It happens automatically.  As with the pogo mechanic in DuckTales, it forces players to rethink their expectations and reset their gaming instincts. I still haven’t quite made the adjustment… but, since I own the game now thanks to this compilation, I can certainly afford to take the time to do so.

The one genuine dud on this collection comes in the form of TailSpin, a shoot-em-up based on an odd cartoon spinoff of The Jungle Book, which saw Baloo the Bear trade in his Mother Nature’s recipes in favor of a cargo plane. Capcom built its business on shooters, but this one badly misses the mark thanks to its reliance on a strange and cumbersome central mechanic: Though the action scrolls forward (generally either to the right or downward) automatically, you can reverse it by performing a 180º and turning your plane upside down.

The concept of a horizontal shooter with specifically directional controls was very much a Capcom concept in the ’80s. See Section Z, Forgotten Worlds, or even certain sequences in U.N. Squadron. TailSpin feels very much like an attempt to build on that legacy, but the gimmick in place here (which often sees Baloo flying upside-down) combined with the slightly awkward shooting controls which see you firing at an angle which you change altitude (think Time Pilot rather than Gradius) and you have the formula for failure. I’d like to call this a misunderstood classic, but in fact it’s simply a mess.

I can’t really hold this one misstep against the Afternoon Collection, though; despite its mediocrity, TailSpin feels like a required inclusion in order to fulfill the package’s mandate of collecting all the Capcom-developed games based on Disney’s afternoon cartoon lineup from the ’80s. It’s no fault of this particular omnibus that one of those games didn’t turn out well. And you’re still left with five other games ranging from good to excellent, all reproduced with great accuracy and a respectable number of features and bonuses.

Arriving with the Mega Man Legacy Collection fresh in memory, Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection genuinely feels like at least one corporation is starting to get this whole “preserving game history” thing right. Pulling together multiple high-quality games that aren’t otherwise easily available to purchase or play into a single, thoughtfully curated release supplemented with archival material and some welcome quality-of-life features like scanlines and rewinding… it hits a sweet spot of quality versus value, in my opinion. Hopefully this is simply the beginning of a much larger initiative to treat classic games as though they have actual value and merit… though the news that the upcoming second Mega Man collection won’t be developed by Digital Eclipse does raise cause for concern. Capcom perfectly lined up its pieces and players in place here; hopefully the change in developers doesn’t mean they’re starting over from zero again. But even if it turns out to be a fluke, a mere flirtation with a better way of looking at gaming’s past, at least we have the Afternoon Collection.

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by | June 5, 2017 · 4:29 PM

With Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Capcom has some oversize robot boots to fill

This morning, Capcom announced Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 after a listing by South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee leaked its existence back in April. Following 2015’s Mega Man Legacy Collection, which comprised the first six Mega Man games, Legacy Collection 2 will make up the remainder of the original series’ ten core games, from 1995’s Mega Man 7 to 2010’s Mega Man 10.

These games represent a time when the Mega Man series was at loose ends: After sticking with the NES to the bitter end, with Mega Man 6 releasing extremely late in the system’s life (so late that Capcom wouldn’t even publish it outside Japan, leaving Nintendo to pick up the slack), it struggled to find a place to call home. Mega Man 7 came to the Super NES, as one would expect, but then Mega Man 8 jumped to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Capcom backpedaled a bit with Rockman & Forte,  a Super Famicom release as late as Mega Man 6 had been on NES; internally labeled “Rockman 8.5,” Capcom intended it as a consolation prize for fans who hadn’t yet graduated to 32-bit consoles. Unfortunately, no one would save this one from a  Japan-only release (at least not until ), and the main series went quiet for a decade while Capcom focused on spin-offs like Mega Man X, Legends, Zero, and Battle Network. It finally resurfaced to great acclaim with Mega Man 9 and 10, both of which were released for Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. All told, the post-NES series produced fewer games in more than twice the time, on six different platforms.

Even limiting Mega Man 8, 9, and 10 to just one platform, Legacy Collection 2 still promises games from three disparate sources. This comes as a surprise considering developer Digital Eclipse intentionally limited the original Legacy Collection to the Blue Bomber’s NES outings in order to ensure accurate reproductions of how each game looked, sounded, and behaved on the original hardware. That should be a familiar line if you followed that release at the time, as they had to repeat it constantly as fans decried the exclusion of this or that other Mega Man game. And the final product was indeed the archive-quality production they promised, so their narrow focus evidently paid off. Legacy Collection 2, then, appears to be a case of Capcom giving fans what they’ve demanded even if it runs counter to Digital Eclipse’s philosophy, as evinced by Frank Cifaldi revealing that they’re not involved with this one.

The official Digital Eclipse Twitter later stated that Capcom is developing Legacy Collection 2 themselves, raising the question of whether they’ll be as painstakingly authentic in their presentation as Digital Eclipse has been. Their announcement promises similar features, including art galleries and music players for each game, as well as a Challenge Mode remixing sections of the original games, but that’s just one piece of the picture. One of the brief glimpses at Mega Man 8 shown in the trailer depicts an underwater scene without a wavy filter over the background—one of the tell-tale differences between the PlayStation and Saturn versions. Other differences include include run-ins with Cut Man and Wood Man and a gallery of boss submissions from fans in the Saturn version, as well as FMV scenes with superior compression in the PlayStation version. A true archival release would include both, but that seems sadly unlikely as getting the Saturn version running could require as much effort as adding another game entirely. We can at least hope the Japanese versions of the games will be included, as they were added to the first Legacy Collection in an update and the 3DS release. I just gotta have my Electrical Communication.

Authenticity concerns are less of a factor for Mega Man 9 and 10, which were originally released on post-HD hardware and hardly differed at all from one platform to the next. While the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One lack universal backwards compatibility, many titles from the last generation have made the leap to this one, so it’s a relief to see this pair join the crowd—especially Mega Man 9, which is arguably the best game in the whole series. (And those who found it too tough the first time around may appreciate it better thanks to Legacy Collection 2‘s Extra Armor feature, which reduces damage by half.) Legacy Collection 2 also includes all the DLC for both games, adding up to a thirty-six dollar value; this compilation will sell for twenty, making it a great deal for 9 and 10 alone.

Capcom has Digital Eclipse to thank for laying such solid groundwork for this venture, but at the same time, Legacy Collection 2 will inevitably be judged by the precedent they’ve set. Cifaldi and company not only brought technical know-how to the table but also a burning passion for game preservation , and I won’t be surprised if an absence of the latter is felt one way or another in the final product. Then again, that’s not to say Legacy Collection 2 will necessarily disappoint: Digital Eclipse is one part of an ongoing trend toward high fidelity in rereleases of classic games, as opposed to the focus on sheer quantity found in past compilations like Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection or 2004’s Mega Man Anniversary Collection. As Capcom producer Rey Jimenez admitted in a 2015 interview with USgamer, “While it wasn’t just a cash-in . . . the idea was to give more content.” As times change, more and more classic games are receiving the individual care they deserve—and while limiting Legacy Collection 2 to just four games may be disappointing to some, it might also be a sign that Capcom have taken Digital Eclipse’s standards to heart. If so, we need only hope their internal developers have what it takes to follow the opening act.

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by | · 7:52 AM

Retronauts Episode 102: The Legend of Zelda – Link’s Awakening

We didn’t deliberately time this episode to launch at the same time as the new season of Twin Peaks, but I’m always willing to embrace a happy accident. No classic game could be a better companion for the return of David Lynch’s surreal television masterpiece than Link’s Awakening: The Zelda game whose creators were specifically inspired by the show’s dreamlike atmosphere to create a trippy game whose entire world was — spoilers! — nothing but a dream. One dreamed by a giant fish. Sleeping in an egg at the top of a mountain. Because why not?

Regulars Kat Bailey and Henry Gilbert join us this week to reflect on this odd duck in the Zelda universe. It’s not as revolutionary a work as the likes of A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time; not as divisive as Zelda II; not as workmanlike as many other Zelda sequels. It brought the ideas of A Link to the Past forward and took the series into a portable format — and, I suspect, for the former reason it tends to be regarded as somewhat derivative, while for the latter reason it tends to be dismissed as a frivolity (anti-handheld snobbery is real!). Its plotline has no bearing on the larger Zelda universe, taking place entirely in a self-contained space that, it turns out in the end, doesn’t even really exist.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of love for Link’s Awakening out in the world, as this episode neatly demonstrates. We received a lot of letters from you guys (and gals) about the game. It has a special something about it, I think. It’s not the most popular or best-selling entry in the series, and Nintendo themselves tend to give it short shrift… but those who gave it their time fell in love with it and carry that affection to this day. Anyway, give the episode a listen and check out the original game (available on 3DS eShop for a few bucks!) if you haven’t played it before.

MP3, 53.5 MB | 1:39:57
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Episode description: Jeremy and Bob wax rhapsodic with Henry Gilbert and Kat Bailey as they harmonize to sing the praises of the first portable Zelda: The iconoclastic and frequently surreal Link’s Awakening.

 

Music in this episode comes from Link’s Awakening, of course. It’s a game whose entire premise revolves around performing a song. It has great music.

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by | · 5:43 AM

Let’s all go off to an orphanage in FFVIII

It’s Monday, which means that it’s time for another Kim Justice video to come roaring down the pipe — more specifically, the 2nd part of my somewhat lengthy Final Fantasy VIII review. It’s 45 minutes long so not quite as lengthy as the last, but still a pretty decent chunk of video to fit into your day. The part covers *most* of Disc 2 story-wise, right up to one of the game’s biggest and most infamous plot twists. I’m sure that said twist will be heavily spoiled in the comments section, but for the benefits of those like me who are/were largely blind with regards to the game’s story and had no idea what was going to happen when they were playing, I won’t do it in the article.

It’s not exactly a liked twist, mind you — which makes me contemplate how much of an effect it’s had on people’s opinions of the game. Since releasing the first part of my FFVIII video series last Monday, the debate has been white hot — I knew the game was a divisive one and even said so in the video but my word, the clashes that this game can inspire…you simply have to mention the name “FFVIII!” in some quarters, and its an immediate pagga starter. A lot of the debate’s been fun! A good twist can inspire lots of debate as well, of course — but a bad one can be the big thing that sticks out in people’s minds, convincing them not to take anything else in the game seriously. My stance on FFVIII’s big twist is kind of mixed, although for the sake of moving the plot forward most of the analysis of where it seriously goes wrong is coming in the 3rd video.

There’s a lot more to the video than just a twist, however — there’s a run through the plot of the 2nd disc, more quality flashback time with Laguna, a look at the best character in the whole game who isn’t named Squall — as well as a more thorough look at our main protag — and some thoughts on the quality of Final Fantasy VIII’s dungeons and gameplay as we get to the game’s halfway point. Hopefully the video will continue to inspire pages of chat about this really quite strange little RPG — and if you ever think at any point that the game’s events are getting a little bit over the top? Chances are you probably haven’t seen anything yet.

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by | June 4, 2017 · 12:45 PM

One more call for listener mail: Kabuki Quantum Fighter!?

Yep, it’s another mailbag solicitation for an upcoming Retronauts episode — in this case, a Retronauts Micro. We’re going to be talking briefly about one of the NES’s wackiest cult favorites: The HAL-published Kabuki Quantum Fighter, a platform combat game in the Ninja Gaiden/Batman mold, boasting one of the oddest story premises of all time. You play the virtual avatar of a U.S. army soldier whose digital self is a kabuki stage actor that fights evil by smacking it with his air. It makes no sense! But it’s pretty good regardless.

So, if you have fond memories or other pithy remarks to make about this deliriously zany NES creation, drop me an email at jparish [at] retronauts [dot] com by Tuesday for inclusion in our episode.

And if you have thoughts about 8-bit metroidvanias/exploratory platformers/action RPGs, we could use a few more comments for that upcoming episode as well — please send over your interesting opinions on that topic as well!

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by | June 3, 2017 · 2:42 AM

Taito Classics dredges up the deepest of cuts

Back in April, Taito’s mobile division announced Taito Classics, a line of beloved Taito games coming to Android and iOS. Of course, the Taito that actually made these games dissolved back in 2006 when Square Enix bought them out, but SE have acknowledged the cultural significance of their acquisition, who released such influential titles as Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble, and granted them a modicum of independence. To this day, the wholly-owned Taito Corporation continues producing new games using Taito’s intellectual property, released under the Taito brand. Even Taito’s arcades have remained up and running in Japan. This approach has largely allowed the public to ignore the fact that the once-great industry giant ever changed hands at all (and it’s certainly preferable to the way Konami acquired Hudson only to lock up their library in the same vault where they threw their own games). Now they’re leveraging that visibility by bringing games that helped put Taito on the map to modern platforms.

The first game to receive the Classics treatment was Time Gal—which may seem like an odd place to start, but the idea for Taito Classics spun out from plans for a stand-alone release of Time Gal sometime last year, so you could say it deserves the honor. Originally released in 1985, Time Gal was part of a brief trend of arcade games kicked off by Dragon’s Lair, where players are presented with a pre-recorded video streaming off a LaserDisc and interact solely by pressing a button when prompted. The right input prompts the video to continue playing or advance to the next vignette, while a wrong choice or missed timing switches the track to a clip of the player character arriving at an ignominious end. With nothing else to do and nothing to differentiate these games except the video itself, the genre quickly ceased to draw crowds once people got the idea.

Even so, these games can still be worth revisiting; they’re awfully fun to look at, if nothing else. Time Gal in particular is a lush hand-drawn anime production with a distinctly ’80s aesthetic, following a futuristic hero named Reika as she evades peril across a number of questionably researched points in history. The arcade version is a rare sight to say the least these days, and the handful of console ports released over the years have struggled to measure up, quite possibly making the Taito Classics version the one to get. Touch controls are no problem since your interactions with the game are so perfunctory, and while the app’s file size weighs in at over a gig, it’s a small price to pay for that LaserDisc quality. Three days ago, Taito also updated the game with a gallery of its original production materials, including scripts and character model sheets.

Also three days ago, Taito served up the second release in the Classics line: RayForce, the first in a series of vertical shoot-’em-ups that garnered a dedicated following when the genre died down during the PlayStation era. RayForce was already released on mobile back in 2012, but players who already bought in can gain access to this new version through an update. The Taito Classics release retains all the same features and adds more, such as controller support for those who don’t care for the touch screen’s handling. While the previous version suffered from an inconsistent frame rate and dropped inputs, this one appears to have solved these performance issues; that by itself makes it worth another look. Taito has already announced their intent to follow up RayForce with its sequels, RayStorm and RayCrisis; the former was also released in 2012, but RayCrisis will be a newcomer to the mobile space. All three games will feature musical tracks arranged by members of Zuntata, Taito’s legendary in-house band. Shōhei Tsuchiya has remade RayForce‘s Area 1 track, “Penetration”; Masaki Mori will tackle RayStorm; and an unnamed, newly joined member of the band will be in charge of RayCrisis.

The last title on the docket is strange even by Time Gal standards: Takeshi no Chōsenjō, the infamously inscrutable Famicom game designed by Japanese celebrity Beat Takeshi. Stepping into the shoes of an ordinary salaryman, your success relies on committing a sequence of inexplicable acts, such as quitting your job, getting into an alleyway brawl, presenting your wife with divorce papers, and singing in a karaoke bar (actually singing, using the microphone in the Famicom’s second controller). It’s the definition of a game worth more for the curiosity of its existence than for the fun of playing it, but it’s relevant at the moment for serving as the subject of Taito’s April fool this year: a supposed VR remake for VIPs only, involving a tuxedo wired with sensors, Hollywood makeup artists to paint realistic bruises on you based on how beat-up you get in the game, and Zuntata listening in to personally score your karaoke performance. The bottom of the page parodies the actual game’s coda, asking not “Why are you taking this game so seriously?” but instead “Why are you taking this lie so seriously? It’s not VR, but the game really is coming out. Announcing Takeshi no Chōsenjō‘s release as a Taito Classics app!” So it basically gets a spot on the lineup in return for introducing Taito Classics to the world, although producer Nikkō Yamashita is having fun figuring out how to make the game work on mobile. The karaoke bit is taken care of thanks to microphones in devices, but only time will tell how they’ll pull off the part where you have to go an hour without touching the controls on a device that puts itself to sleep after a minute.

Your options in this scene include “request PTO,” “tender resignation,” and “punch the CEO.”

With regards to overseas releases, Yamashita is hopeful for Time Gal. Only the Sega CD port ever got a localization with English voice acting, and that was handled by Telenet (via Wolf Team) rather than Taito themselves. Still, he hasn’t ruled out a release outside Japan even if it means recording a new dub for a thirty-year-old game. He’s less certain about bringing Takeshi no Chōsenjō to countries that lack the historical context to appreciate its quirkily hostile design, not to mention the extra effort that would be required to localize the Japanese Caesar cipher the player must puzzle out at one point. As for RayForce? Thanks to the universal language of shooting games, it’s available right now, and RayStorm and RayCrisis are sure to follow.

RayStorm is due out before the end of spring, and RayCrisis and Takeshi no Chōsenjō are scheduled for summer. No more titles have been announced yet, but it’s safe to say Taito Classics will continue well beyond these five games. Taito’s back catalog is nothing to sneeze at, and they’ve already shown they won’t constrain themselves to games of any particular origin. Takeshi no Chōsenjō is a Famicom game, and while Time Gal and the Ray trilogy are all arcade games, each one of them was developed on different proprietary hardware, from the LaserDisc-based LG System to the polygon-pushing G-NET board. Yamashita has said he wants to conduct a survey on what titles people want to see, and it’s exciting to know a game’s original platform needn’t be an excluding factor. Everything from Raimais to Psychic Force is potentially on the table. It’s a good time for reissues of classic games in general, from M2 Shot Triggers to Hamster Corporation’s Arcade Archives series, and hopefully we’ll see Taito Classics develop a selection as prolific as the best of them. And for those of you lamenting that it’s all going down on mobile, Yamashita has noted the possibility of extending the series to PC and consoles at some point down the line. Don’t go getting your hopes up…but don’t lose the faith, either.

Time Gal image courtesy of Hardcore Gaming 101

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by | June 2, 2017 · 10:34 AM

Let’s revisit the TI-99/4A with Retronauts Micro 62

You may recall that once, a long, long time ago, we launched a biweekly podcast called Retronauts Micro. And if you think back to that dim and distant time, you might remember that we kicked the whole thing off with a look at a fairly obscure ’80s personal computer from Texas Instruments known as the TI-99/4A. I even put together a video version of that episode!

But these days, Retronauts Micro has changed. It’s bigger. More expansive. And they’re no longer just me or Bob yammering by ourselves into a mic for 10 minutes. Honestly, we probably ought to go back to calling them “Retronauts Pocket” the way we did during our Kickstarter run, but that would probably be more confusing than explanatory.

Anyway. The point is, now that Retronauts Micro isn’t so micro, we’ll probably be revisiting some of those early topics to give them a more thorough treatment. Example: This week’s Micro, wherein the Retronauts East crew gathers together to talk about the TI-99/4A for 50 minutes rather than 10.

MP3, 25.9 MB | 52:29
Direct download
Retronauts on iTunes
Retronauts at PodcastOne

Episode description: We circle back to the original Retronauts Micro topic to do it proper justice. Ben, Benj, and Jeremy tackle the TI99/4A: Its history, its games, and… well, that’s about it.

Consider the original TI micro a sort of appetizer for this, the main course. I am pretty sure that this episode covers the topic exhaustively, so I can’t imagine this won’t be our final word on TI’s home computer project! Now, their calculator games, on the other hand… that could make for an interesting episode someday.

And don’t forget to check out Kirin’s Retro Closet, where Ben has been posting visual supplements to our episodes!

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by | · 8:09 AM

The best of old SEGA, as shown by an old home video

Something nice to round off the week — YouTuber iretrogamer has released an old home video that shows off the once huge presence that SEGA had at the Epcot Innoventions pavillion in Walt Disney World Florida, as experienced by a much smaller and younger version of himself and shot by his father. SEGA were known for having their arcades in the West at the time — over here in the UK we had SEGA World at the Trocadero, not to mention numerous SEGA Parks dotted around the country — but the Innovations residence is something special seeing as its a showcase mostly of software and hardware that at the time wasn’t even out yet.

There’s a lot of cool things in this video — without spoiling everything that’s here, you get to see the Sega Channel in action. You also get to see the 32X before it came out, when there was still hype for it — it’s there, complete with a naked version of the game DarXide sticking out of it. That might be a game that virtually nobody remembers today — it was basically a rubbish 3D version of Asteroids — but to a lil’ kid in 1994 it was awesome no matter what. It’s a very fun video indeed to check out, with arcade games and preview copies all over the shop, a clearly excited child who likes to shout “SEGA” in the style of the popular commercials, and plenty of narration after the fact. It’s sweet and nice, and at the very least it could be something good to start off your day with. Enjoy!

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by | June 1, 2017 · 5:59 AM

A great licensed game is 25 years old this month! But so is a terrible one.

This June marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the LucasArts classic, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis…pretty good game, innit? I’m sure there’ll be plenty of pieces to mark this — it’s one of LucasArts’ best, after all. Before Atlantis, no-one had ever managed to nail such a popular and well-loved movie character in a video game quite so well, and in an entirely original story too. It’s a game that even I can appreciate, although the in-depth writing about it is probably best left to those more versed in the world of point-and-click adventures. However, the other game that came out under the name of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis? That I can write about.

The other Fate of Atlantis game, released at the same time as the Adventure game, is very obscure. It seems that LucasArts’ plan was to cover all their bases and try to appease everyone with both an adventure game and an action title, both covering the same plot — it didn’t work out that well because the Adventure Game and the Action Game were simply not on the same level, and the adventure immediately received all the attention. Those who dared to look at the action title may have just been confused — it’s a loose, barebones adaptation of the plot of the adventure, essentially a licensed video game adaptaton of a licensed game. That and it’s simply not very good.

A common theme of the Fate of Atlantis action game is that you end up whipping the crap out of someone you can’t actually see.

What we have here is less of a full-on action game, and more an isometric version of the adventure with flick-screen graphics, and the ability to whip most anything you can see on the screen. In the majority of levels you can switch between good ol’ Indy and Sophia Hapgood — unlike Indy she can only kick enemies in the shins for the most part, but it still turns out to be quite effective…at first the game appears promising with levels like the casino that make something of a decent fist of incorporating the adventure game’s puzzles into a more action-based title, but it soon descends into generic maze-based guff with the added nuisance of whipping endless enemies…or kick them. One of the main criticisms of this game? That the supposed “Action” version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis had significantly worse action than the adventure game it was spinning off from — and let’s face it, great action is not the first thing you’d think of when the subject of Fate of Atlantis comes up. In any case a criticism doesn’t come more damning than that, and the Action Game was immediately doomed to obscurity. The developers, Attention to Detail, would later go on to make the classic Rollcage for the PS1! Oh, and the wheredidyoulearntofly-tastic Jaguar launch title Cybermorph.

The Amstrad CPC version. If the difference between this and what the PC got didn’t convince you to upgrade, then nothing would.

However, that’s not all there is to the story — while the PC-DOS version of this game was the primary one, it’s also how The Fate of Atlantis was represented on 8-bit microcomputers too. It is strange how LucasArts decided to promote this game in such a way, almost as if Fate of Atlantis was actually a film. Such thinking is surely the only justification for Fate of Atlantis appearing on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC — coming out as late as 1992, they’re amongst the final crop of commercial releases for the Speccy and the Amstrad in particular. Spare a thought as well for the poor Atari ST owners — while the Amiga did get a port of the point-and-click adventure (albeit on eleven whole floppy disks, meaning more time was spent switching than playing), Atari owners were stuck with this strange and poorly done obscurity that, as a game of the game, may just have less of a reason to exist than any other licensed title ever made.

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