by | June 9, 2017 · 11:59 AM

Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, it turns out, is an internal Capcom joint

One of the most curious revelations about the freshly announced Mega Man Legacy Collection 2? Its developer… or rather, who is not its developer. The original Legacy Collection and its follow-up, The Disney Afternoon Collection, were developed by Digital Eclipse on their purpose-built Eclipse Engine. While those games all originally appeared on Nintendo Entertainment System, my understanding was that the Eclipse Engine was meant to encompass and reproduce a number of additional game platforms — meaning, in theory, it could potentially handle the wide variety of hardware encompassed by Legacy Collection 2. However, according to Digital Eclipse’s Frank Cifaldi, the new anthology will be produced by someone else.

This revelation, of course, raises two big questions. First, if not Digital Eclipse, then who? And second, will this other developer’s work be up to snuff? While the first Legacy Collection had some notable flaws, especially on 3DS, it still presented the first six Mega Man games with remarkable clarity. It’s pretty hard to find retro compilations treated with the same care and respect lavished upon the Legacy Collection. Japanese powerhouse M2 (best known for their incredible SEGA 3D Ages projects) has always been reliable, and Rare did a pretty solid job with Rare Replay a couple of years ago. Beyond that, though, the quality of retro reissues plunges quickly on the other side of Digital Eclipse’s projects, typically relying on shaky emulation and sometimes even stolen code. Unless it was farmed out to M2, how could Legacy Collection 2 begin to hope to match (let alone exceed) the quality of its predecessor?

As it turns out, that may not be an issue after all. I reached out to Capcom to learn more about the origins of the upcoming collection, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Capcom is handling it themselves.

“The original collection was developed using the Eclipse Engine which specialized in faithfully reproducing NES games,” said a company representative. “Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 includes games that span several generations and a number of original platforms, adding to the complexity and scope of the project. This collection is being developed internally at Capcom Japan. Fans can expect a similar approach to the original MMLC, with both collections celebrating the original gameplay experiences in a faithful way.”

While this doesn’t absolutely guarantee quality, the fact that this compilation marks a shift (however temporary) to internal development for retrospective packages seems like good news on several fronts:

  • Internal developers are likely to maintain a high standard of quality. If nothing else, they’ll presumably have access to better resources than an external studio would.
  • Capcom has a fairly proven track record when it comes to dusting off old code, as with the recent (by all accounts internally produced) Ultra Street Fighter II for Switch.
  • In the event of errors, an internally developed product seems more likely to be patched. The minor troubles that affect the original Legacy Collection could have been fixed up after launch, but evidently the logistics and finances of outsourcing material to an external studio prevented that from ever happening.
  • And finally, it suggests that Digital Eclipse’s projects proved successful enough to entice Capcom into bringing compilation projects in-house — which would hint at the prospect of these collections becoming a more significant element of the company’s business as a whole.

Of course, this doesn’t resolve all of our concerns with Legacy Collection 2. For example, regarding the absence of various other Mega Man titles that would have made perfect sense for inclusion in this compilation, Capcom will only say, “Mega Man Legacy Collection and MMLC2 focus on collecting the classic numbered games in the series.” In other words, no Mega Man & Bass for you, despite it falling very much into the core games lineup.

And no, there’ll be no Switch version for you, either… at least, not yet, according to Capcom: “There are no plans for a Nintendo Switch version at this time. Right now we’re focusing on developing the game for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.”

And finally, those hoping for a chance to play the bonus material exclusive to Mega Man 8‘s insanely expensive Saturn version (two extra battles against returning bosses from the original Mega Man) are out of luck. “For Mega Man 8, the team felt it important to use the initial release version of the game,” Capcom’s representative says, “so the PS1 version is included in this collection.”

Oh well. On the plus side, the company confirms that all downloadable content from both Mega Man 9 and 10 will be accounted for. So no, Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 won’t quite hit all the points Mega Man enthusiasts are hoping for… but at the same time, the project still appears to be in good hands.

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by | · 10:15 AM

Hey, Pikmin! feels like a flashback to the old days of handheld adaptations

I demoed the next entry in Nintendo’s Pikmin series — Hey, Pikmin!, not the long-promised Pikmin 4 — back at the same event where I took the 2DS XL handheld system for a test drive. Of all the games Nintendo showed off at that press event, Hey, Pikmin! left me the most bemused. There was something naggingly familiar about it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what, precisely, that was.

As denoted by the lack of a numeral in its title, Hey, Pikmin! doesn’t go out of its way to be a proper follow-up to Wii U’s Pikmin 3. On the contrary, while it carries forward certain key franchise concepts — you control tiny Captain Olimar and coax a tiny army of colorful plant people to do your bidding — it plays nothing at all like the innovative series whose name and visuals it adopts. In place of Pikmin‘s usual sprawling mix of real-time strategy and top-down action, Hey, Pikmin! swings the camera down and locks it perpendicular to the ground, effectively transforming its viewpoint into that of a 2D platformer.

Except Captain Olimar isn’t really the platformer action type; he wears a jetpack that can allow him to hover momentarily and reach higher ground. However, the jetpack responds sluggishly and has considerable recovery time, so it’s hard to imagine Hey, Pikmin! will contain much white-knuckle platform action. Besides, the game does carry over one critical element from the console originals: Making your way through the world involves the recruitment, use, and occasional sacrifice of countless little colorful plant-men.

In practice, this means Hey, Pikmin! amounts to a sort of puzzle platformer set in the Pikmin universe. Olimar remains about as helpless as ever, so you’ll need to toss and summon pikmin in order to accomplish everything from clearing paths to fighting huge monsters. The game makes interesting use of the dual-screen nature of the 3DS (or 2DS, as the case may be): Controls are based around a touch interface, so Olimar himself appears to be effectively restricted to the lower screen. However, many elements critical to completing a given stage — be they bombs needed for blasting strategic points or debris needed to create bridges — appear on the upper screen. To manipulate them, you need to lob pikmin up there… maybe one at a time, maybe a dozen.

Everything works more or less as you’d expect it to in a Pikmin game. Differently colored pikmin possess different strengths and weaknesses, and they’ll all stand around lost and helpless if you stray too far from them. Your pikmin pals will lift and carry objects, perform simple tasks of engineering, and basically pathfind their way around. They’ll also go to the mats with any creatures they find roaming around, launching into an attack that will either result in their own deaths or the transmutation of waddling monsters into valuable resources. The biggest difference is that the side-scrolling 2D perspective changes the fundamental nature of the game from a free-roaming quest to forage for goods across a massive world into a linear stage-by-stage journey.

Will it work? It’s hard to say. The demo stages I’ve played seem to unwind well enough, but I can’t honestly predict whether or not this limited approach to Pikmin will maintain interest for a couple dozen stages. A big part of what makes the console originals interesting comes down to the persistence of and planning required to navigate large spaces. Which route do you take, and which pikmin do you bring with you? Can you venture forth, accomplish a critical task, and make it safely back to your base before dark? By breaking your actions into small, self-contained stages, the need for long-term management largely evaporates. It’ll take some legitimate effort to ensure Hey, Pikmin! sustains its appeal throughout its latter stages, and developer Arzest doesn’t have the most inspiring track record in that regard.

Still, it’s not impossible to think Hey, Pikmin! could work out. I eventually managed to pin down the nagging sense of familiarity this game gave me, and I realized this entire endeavor is a flashback to the Game Boy Color era. Think back to handheld games from 1998 to 2001: Console games had made the transition to polygons and 3D, but the Game Boy hardware remained mired in its decade-old 8-bit design. Game Boy had always played host to scaled-down conversions of console titles, but the technological delta between Nintendo 64 and Game Boy was much, much larger than the one we’d seen between the NES and Game Boy back when the handheld system made its debut. Rather than giving us the visually cramped ports of console hits we saw in the early Game Boy era, GBC developers generally created entirely new games with their “ports” of N64 and PlayStation hits.

First-person shooters became slow-paced top-down action games. 3D adventures became sidescrollers. And so forth. Most of these reinventions left Game Boy owners scratching their heads — Perfect Dark as a clumsy isometric shooter? Turok as an NES-style side-scroller? — but every once in a while, the overhaul worked. I was always impressed by how well Tomb Raider scaled down to handheld; Core Design very sensibly took stock of the franchise and unraveled the fundamental concept back to its origin point. The result was a game that played very much like Prince of Persia, which had largely inspired the design of the original Tomb Raider in the first place. It wasn’t as good as Prince of Persia (in large part due to the decision to make Lara Croft’s sprite take up as much of the screen as was physically possible, leaving the action cramped and uncomfortable), but it was a far sight better than most 3D-to-2D console-to-handheld conversions of the era.

I suppose the question now is: Will Hey, Pikmin! follow in the steps of Tomb Raider for Game Boy Color and stand on its own merits? Or will it be as unsatisfying and off-the-mark as that Perfect Dark conversion? Given the methodical, puzzle-like design I experienced in the Hey, Pikmin! demo, it definitely falls closer in spirit to the former. Still, Nintendo has attempted to squeeze an open-world console adventure into a 2D portable format once already in recent memory, with the lackluster Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash. Hopefully Hey, Pikmin! will fare better. And hopefully the dual console/handheld nature of Nintendo’s Switch means that once the 3Ds family fades away, the Game Boy-era rule of compromised portable conversions will at last be dead and buried. We’re all for respecting the medium’s heritage here at Retronauts (obviously), but some traditions are better off abandoned.

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by | · 5:42 AM

Bubsy returns. There’s not much more to say other than that.

My lord, Bubsy is back. Think of all the platformers from the ’90s to the early ’00s that you would want to see return…Earthworm Jim? Klonoa? Pandemonium? Even Boogerman? Nope — it’s Bubsy the Bobcat who’s going to get another shot in the spotlight. Lord knows he has something of a point to prove — what with two rather bad 16-bit sidescrollers, a failed attempt at a cartoon series, and a 3D title that’s often regarded as one of the worst games ever to his name? Maybe Bubsy should actually get a chance to finally prove himself. It is completely random, mind you…still, you can see it for yourself in the teaser trailer below — Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back is coming out in 2017, for PlayStation 4 and PC, with the Accolade name on it.

So, considering the pedigree that Bubsy has as a series, is there anything interesting about this revival, or indeed anything that could make someone optimistic about it? Well, the interesting part is seeing Accolade’s branding again — Accolade, the studio who were originally responsible for these “Games with Purrsonality!”, haven’t released anything since 2000. Of course, the main reason for that is they’ve been defunct since that time — in 2000 they were one of the many studios acquired by Infogrames in their bid to become a major player in the world of games, but their branding was never used. It seems as though the branding and license was acquired some time ago by a company called Billionsoft, who have amassed the branding (and presumably licenses) of other long-defunct studios acquired by Infogrames such as Humongous, GT Interactive, MicroProse and Spectrum Holobyte…that’s certainly interesting, if nothing else.

A picture of Bubsy in what was, for lack of a better word, his prime.

But is there any reason to think that Bubsy, having batted a grand total of .000 since his birth, could actually produce a good game now after all these years? Actually there is one — it seems as though the actual development work is being done by Black Forest Games. That name might be familiar to you — they’ve already had experience resurrecting another old platformer from the grave…these were the guys behind the excellent Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams a few years back, and looking at the trailer for this game it seems as though the new Bubsy has a few things in common with that — it could well end up being a modernish platformer where our Bobcat hero collects hundreds of balls of twine. If that is the case, then hey — perhaps there is a chance that the new Bubsy could be a decent game.

A picture of the gameplay from a new Bubsy game, that will be released in 2017. Video games, eh? Bloody hell.

Mind you, it doesn’t seem as though Bubsy’s lost all that much of his signature Purrsonality in the years since his last game — he’s still clearly full of catchy quotes and “what could possibly go wrong?” one-liners. One quite amusing thing to note is that Bubsy says that he’s been waiting for this opportunity since 1993 — meaning quite clearly that Bubsy 3D, a 1996 release, has fallen down the memory hole and never actually existed in his mind…plenty of us know better, mind you. There’s always many a weird thing that happens in video games, and in the end maybe someone getting the bright idea that Bubsy the Bobcat, of all things, deserves a second chance ISN’T the strangest thing that’s happened to video games in 2017…regardless of his reputation though, Black Forest Games might just make the game worth a shot if they can do what they did with Giana Sisters. What a time to be alive, eh?

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by | June 8, 2017 · 5:41 AM

What can a 30-year old Spectrum game tell us about the election?

Well, today’s general election day here in the UK — obviously there’ll be plenty of news articles about that everywhere, but here on Retronauts I wanted to use today to highlight…well, one of the weirdest ZX Spectrum games ever released — it’s 30 years old this year, and oddly enough it’s about elections! You’d hope so anyway, seeing as it’s called Election. Why is it so weird? Well, the best way to demonstrate that is through video:

The thing with ZX Spectrum games is that there’s plenty of them where you just take one look at it, or try to play it, and you have absolutely no idea what on earth’s going on or what you have to do. You might just put that down to the game being old, but don’t — because no-one had much of a clue what Election was about back then either. According to Virgin Games, it’s an electioneering game where you take control of one of various candidates and try to influence other people to vote for you in various ways — either traditional or through more underhanded techniques. I guess it’s some sort of satire? That would make sense as an aim of the game, even if little else about the game does.

It is curious in that the game is very much an open world that apparently boasts 40 intelligent people (or rather heads that move around) that you can influence or can be influenced by the other candidates, and it’s not like Virgin didn’t push the game hard — this was a full price game back in the day costing £9.95, and Virgin certainly advertised it a lot. As far as Virgin Games in the 1980’s goes, it’s not actually that weird — they also published games like indie band simulator The Biz (written by Frank Sidebottom, and a game that will certainly be talked about here soon), an adaptation of Adrian Edmondson’s book How to Be A Complete Bastard, and a licensed game based around Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This screen seems to suggest that monetary incentives can be offered in order to gain votes. Tut-tut.

Some of those games were actually alright, and Virgin carved some sort of niche as an “alternative” games publisher, albeit one with a hell of a lot of money behind it — but then that fit the image of Sir Richard Branson at the time. Election is most certainly not alright, but it’s a strange artifact…and can it tell us anything about the General Election today? Well, not really — but in the end despite all the hustings and opinion polls and speculation, there’s not an awful lot out there that can, so a lousy 30 year old ZX Spectrum game is probably as good a choice as any.

 

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by | June 7, 2017 · 10:00 AM

The ridiculous new frontier in game music fandom

Next week’s episode of the podcast — the one currently up on Patreon for cool people who support the show that way — will be another Retronauts Radio entry. This one’s a little different than usual, though. While it does present an overview of a few new classic game music releases (DataDiscs’ Gunstar Heroes and Ship to Shore’s Darius), the bulk of the episode consists of music collector and expert James Eldred walking me through the basics and the ProTips of collecting and enjoying game music, whatever the preferred format.

Mostly, we cover the ins and outs vinyl LPs, compact discs, and digital releases. However, there is one other music format that gets a brief mention, and, well… it’s frankly kind of ludicrous.

As it happens, James was kind of enough to share an example of this format — which, it turns out, has become all the rage over in Japan of late. He had a copy of Symphonic Suite: Dragon Quest IV on hand that he didn’t want anymore and passed it along to me. It comes in a nice-looking plastic clamshell case imprinted with the game’s logo in gold, a typical Dragon Quest class act for sure.

At first glance, this looks like a very nice, minimalist CD collection. Alas! That is not the case at all. Instead, you open up the set and find…

…cassette tapes? Yes indeed. This is an aspect of classic game music releases I’ve never really thought to consider before; I didn’t start importing game music until the late ’90s, by which point the CD ruled all. And while I’ve occasionally spotted vintage game music LPs from the early ’80s, it never quite occurred to me to question whether LPs were the primary delivery format for game soundtracks and arranged albums in that late ’80s interim period as vinyl faded but CDs hadn’t quite gone mainstream.

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise. The late ’80s was when I began acquiring music I liked in earnest, and I wasn’t buying records; the format was already on the outs by then. I certainly couldn’t afford CDs at that point. They were incredibly expensive circa 1987, like $18-25 apiece… and that’s in actual 1980s money, not inflation-adjusted prices. So like most kids, I bought cassette tapes of the music I loved. More portable than records, half the price of CDs, and easily copied and swapped with friends, tapes were the de facto music format for teens between the mid ’80s and mid ’90s. That’s 10 years of tape dominance! And while Japan tended to be ahead of the curve for consumer tech than the U.S. in that period, it’s not like our respective markets were that different. So of course Japan had a booming cassette tape music market… which means, of course, that commercial game soundtrack releases were shipping on tape as well.

Not only that, but as the Symphonic Suite demonstrates, they were being treated with the same love and respect as any other format. Enix put some real effort into these tapes, disposable as the format may seem. Both of the cassettes come with elaborate fold-over liners that wrap around the outside of their respective cases. The set also contains a booklet of sheet music in case you want to play along to the recordings with the your own personal orchestra, as well as some stickers and other ephemera.

According to James, tape collecting is the hot thing in Japan right now. I know there’s a bit of hipster interest here in the states in reviving the cassette format, but it seems Japan beat you guys to the punch. Not only are vintage tapes incredibly sought after, they’re also incredibly expensive. I’d never seen a cassette section in Japanese music shops prior to my visits this year — which isn’t to say they weren’t there, simply that they didn’t stand out — but now entire walls are given over to the format. Would you pay $20-30 dollars for a used tape manufactured in 1991? A format that degrades with use and time alike? I wouldn’t, but evidently quite a few people would.

For a very brief moment after opening up this soundtrack box, I had an urge to pick up a handful of vintage game soundtracks on cassette — literal game tapes, if you will — as I figured it would be a cheap way to add a few amusing curios to my collection. But no, vintage game soundtrack cassettes run anywhere from $20-50 (and up) depending on condition, scarcity, and desirability. That’s far too steep to work as a whimsical pick-up, I’m afraid. I’m only too happy to leave cassettes to the cassette collectors. Nostalgia may be a hell of a drug, but I’d definitely have to be high to pine for the days of fragile, noisy, clumsy tape cassettes.

Besides, I only have the one tape deck these days.

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by | · 7:08 AM

Kim recommends…Grange Hill (ZX Spectrum, 1987)

The advent of the point-and-click adventure really changed a lot of things for PC gaming, didn’t it? Suddenly there was fancy graphics for the time, interesting stories, annoying puzzles — all sorts of things that make it a great development. Alas, we didn’t have all that much like it on the Spectrum — although that’s not to say we didn’t try. Aside from all the text adventures that were released on the system (and could easily be made with programs like Quill), there was the odd side-scrolling adventure, such as Gargoyle Games’ celebrated Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach, filled with Ye Olde English and Celtic mythos, or – in the RPG mold – you had Mike Singleton’s seminal The Lords of Midnight and Dark Sceptre…these are all great games, none of which I intend to talk about. Instead, I intend to talk about Grange Hill, a side-scrolling adventure based on a BBC kids’ show set in a secondary school.

In Grange Hill, you – the wonderfully named Gonch – and your friend Hollo have to go on an epic after-school adventure from your house back to school in order to break in and retrieve your expensive new walkman, which was confiscated during the course of the day. Along the way you will meet some interesting characters — there’s Mr. Griffiths, the curmudgeonly old caretaker who’s sick of pupils hanging around the bins, Imelda the somewhat stroppy fellow pupil who wants a word with you, and the mysterious pusher who, if you say “yes” to his offer, is responsible for one of the starkest and most depressing deaths in computer game history — that can be seen in the picture below.

As the Grange Hill kids once famously sang in song: No! Just sayyy no…

The game itself isn’t without its charm, especially if you so happened to grow up with Grange Hill at any point — the time that I spent with the long-running BBC series was in the mid ’90s, a few years removed from the glory days that this game represented, but it was still a fair enough after-school watch. The game’s not without its massive frustrations though – why, there’s a box of matches that requires a very specific text string (from an oversensitive keyboard) to obtain! There’s a set of false teeth positioned just so that if you walk on the next screen instead of jumping on them, you’ll die immediately because they apparently bite you to death. And of course, there’s Hollo — your friend, who always stops following you and says the whole thing’s a waste of time, meaning that you have to type in “Come on Hollo” every couple of screens or so as you need him for the walkman…that’s kind of annoying.

Come on Hollo. Come on Hollo. COME ON HOLLO…this isn’t at all annoying.

So…it’s a little difficult for me to actually recommend Grange Hill as such — it’s a very flawed and quite basic adventure game, complete with a license and a general style that never caught on…it’s still one of my favourite games from the Spectrum era though, if only because it was one that I’d always play with my dad — we’d spend ages trying to beat it, usually getting stuck on the damn matches which was unbelievably simple in the end…we’d end up typing in all these elaborate strings when the one we needed was “throw plane at matches” (a paper one, obviously). We never beat it then, which perhaps goes to show how rubbish we both were at actually playing games, and while I’d probably give us fair odds on being able to do it now it wouldn’t be all that fun. And it’s worth it for that ridiculous death alone, to be honest. Just say no, kids!

 

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by | · 1:07 AM

Pokémon arrival on Virtual Console reveals the choice in how the series reflects on itself

In the latest Nintendo Direct presentation, Game Freak director Junichi Masuda revealed that Pokémon Gold Version and Silver Version will be rereleased on the 3DS Virtual Console this September. Originally released for the Game Boy Color in 1999, this pair of games formed the second generation of the Pokémon series following the runaway success of Pokémon Red Version and Blue Version. Red, Blue, and the “Special Pikachu Edition” Yellow Version were similarly released on 3DS in early 2016 in commemoration of the series’ twentieth anniversary, and these versions were updated with special functionality for trading Pokémon wirelessly (in absence of the original Game Boy’s Game Link Cable) as well as transferring Pokémon caught in the Generation I games to the newest installments via the Pokémon Bank app. These updates go a long way toward making the original games relevant to players of the modern games beyond their value as historical curios, and they represent a rare case of Nintendo going above and beyond the effort they ordinarily devote to Virtual Console releases; so naturally, Gold and Silver will include them as well. All that’s missing is Pokémon Crystal Version, the third game that capped off Generation II with a various aesthetic and mechanical tweaks—not to mention the introduction of features that have since become standard for the series, like the option to play with a female avatar.

Even with that glaring omission, this return of the core Generation II games is a notable one. Unlike the Generation I games last year, Gold and Silver aren’t celebrating any particular anniversary, so Nintendo et al. have apparently realized rereleasing older Pokémon games is a worthwhile move any day of the year—no special occasion needed.  This could indicate a changing trend in the way the series’ history is curated, as full remakes of previous generations of games have served that purpose in the past. Since Generation III, each generation has included both a main pair of games and second pair released later, with the latter usually consisting of remakes of a previous generation’s main pair. Generation III featured remakes of Red and Blue as Pokémon FireRed Version and LeafGreen Version, Generation IV remade Gold and Silver as Pokémon HeartGold Version and SoulSilver Version, and then Generation VI remade Generation III’s Pokémon Ruby Version and Sapphire Version as Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. However, the same Nintendo Direct announcing the rerelease of Gold and Silver also revealed Generation VII’s second pair of games,  Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, will not continue with the remakes, instead serving as direct sequels to the first pair, Pokémon Sun and Moon.

This won’t be the first time this has happened, as Generation V’s second pair used the same concept—expanding the concept of a third game like Generation I’s Yellow or Generation II’s Crystal into a pair of games unto itself—so it’s not a sure sign that more remakes won’t come to later generations. Yet the fact remains that no remakes have been announced since Nintendo began rereleasing the older games as-is, and now they’re continuing the practice. If this becomes the norm, it could completely supplant the role the remakes have played up to this point. Rereleasing the Generation III games could prove difficult since there’s no Game Boy Advance Virtual Console on 3DS, but the extra care lavished upon the Generation I and II rereleases indicates nothing’s impossible where Pokémon is concerned.

On one hand, focusing on rereleases of the classics would leave new generations free to continue looking forward with games like Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon rather than back; on the other, Pokémon remakes have always offered more than just the same old games with a fresh coat of paint, updating them with modern interfaces, adjusted gameplay mechanics, new story events, and long lists of miscellaneous changes. Maybe Generation VII will simply turn out to be the continuation of a pattern started in Generation V, where odd-numbered generations take a break from remakes while even numbers return to them. Considering the legions of players who keep coming back for remakes and rereleases alike, it’s far from unthinkable that there’s room in fans’ hearts for both approaches to persist side-by-side.

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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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