megamoses

[megamoses]

Backblog #18 - Suishou no Dragon (FDS)

Because it is a pre-Final Fantasy SquareSoft title, I had a feeling that this next game I played, Suishou no Dragon (or Crystal Dragon in the English fan translation) would be rough.  Turns out I was right.  It was developed by Square and published under their Disk Original Group (DOG) imprint for the Famicom Disk System on December 15, 1986.  It was never released in English, of course, since there was never a non-Japanese equivalent of the Famicom Disk System at all, but I was able to play it in English courtesy of Mute’s translation patch.  It is a science fiction-themed visual novel; visual novels being the genre that Square got its start with, with The Death Trap as their first game in late 1984.

The story of the game is very simple for a visual novel and I’m assuming there has to be some more context given in the manual (which I wasn’t able to find any scans of) since the game starts you off in the middle of the action and never really fully tells you what’s going on.  The notes that came with the fan translation establish that you are searching for your two friends, whose interstellar shuttle has mysteriously disappeared.  While searching for them, you are ambushed by a space dragon (which is where the game picks up) and rescued by a mysterious woman named Jean.  You spend the game traveling between a few different planets searching for your friends.  It’s an extremely short and bare-bones story, almost feeling like they established the framework for a story and never really filled it out with anything substantial.  You can see everything the game has to offer in terms of its script inside of an hour.  It’s honestly pretty bad.

More than any of the other games I’ve played so far, this one makes use of a point-and-click interface.  All of the commands (look, talk, use, etc.) are executed based on the position of your cursor on the screen.  The commands themselves are toggled by holding the B button and using the D-pad.  It’s a bit clunky but not nearly as unintuitive as the controls for the move command.  When you select move you can toggle between different destinations represented as arrows on the screen.  You’re actually meant to press B to cycle through these, but when I first started the game and was trying to figure the controls out, I thought that maybe you need to hold B and use the D-pad (since the D-pad by itself does nothing).  And this does actually visually cycle between the different destinations but does not actually select them, leading to a confusing moment where I thought both exits from one of the early areas led to the same place. 

As I stated above, the game is very short and it seems like the strategy Square used to pad out the length is a couple of maze sections (one when navigating the depths of space and one when navigating Alias’s desert moon).  But they aren’t real mazes like the ones in Portopia or Princess Tomato.  It’s more like a series of screens that look exactly the same that give you three directions to go in.  Since you can’t really tell where you are or where you’re supposed to be going, you just kind of have to bumble around until you find your destination.  The closest thing it really has to tough puzzles is a sequence where if you do anything but use your gun on a character, they immediately kill you.  But you can continue again from right outside the room where that takes place so it’s no big deal anyway.

The character designs of the game were actually done by none other than Sunrise (known for Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) and they look fine for the most part.  The character portraits are the only thing in the game that look halfway decent.  All of the background art, which is what you’re looking at for most of the game, looks very crude.  The only character graphics which I don’t like at all are Jean’s, which have an atrocious white and bright teal color palette.  The game has only minimal sound effects and only one song that plays during the title screen.  The sole piece of music in the game is actually pretty good though, one of Nobuo Uematsu’s earliest music credits.

So, obviously I don’t care for this game very much.  But it’s just because there’s nothing to it.  It offers nothing substantial in terms of story, characters, gameplay, graphics, sound, or anything else.  Hell, I barely have anything to say about it at all.  But it’s short and it’s one of Square’s earliest games, so maybe it’s interesting as an oddity?  I dunno, but next time I’ll be playing something with much more meat to it, mostly because it’s actually a compilation including six different games - Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #17 - J.B. Harold Murder Club (TCD)

After Princess Tomato, I decided to play J.B. Harold Murder Club, a game that I knew pretty much nothing about and kind of added on a whim.  It was developed by Riverhillsoft, former members of which went on to form Level-5 and Cing (who ended up making their own series of mystery games: the Kyle Hyde series).  It was originally self-published by them in August of 1986 for the NEC PC-88 and various other Japanese PCs.  This was then followed by a number of other ports published by various parties, including SETA Corporation for the Famicom, Broderbund for MS-DOS, Hudson Soft for the TurboGrafx-CD, and eventually FonFun for the Nintendo DS and Mebius for the Nintendo Switch as full remakes.  It is a mystery visual novel, similar in a lot of ways to Portopia.  It is also known for its localization.  Even many of the Japanese releases (starting with the DX release for the Sharp X68000) have dual-language options which can be switched on the fly, but only the MS-DOS and TurboGrafx-CD versions were actually released in English-speaking territories.  The TurboGrafx-CD version is the version I played.

The setup of the game is a simple murder mystery: Bill Robbins, a wealthy businessman in the town of Liberty, was found dead of multiple stab wounds to the back and it’s up to J.B. Harold to bring the perpetrator of this brutal crime to justice.  The manual provides a bit more context, adding that it was Jad Gregory, a retired detective who acted as J.B.’s mentor, who asked him to take the case.  The game itself cold opens into a protracted noir-soaked opening set to some sexy sax music then plays some narration providing the details of the murder and pretty much throws you into the deep end.  There’s not even a title screen really, which is pretty strange.  Every time you boot up the game, you need to skip the opening cutscene, after which you’ll be in a new game.  And from there you go into the options screen and load your save file.  You also need to turn on the voice acting from here every time, since it’s off by default and the option does not save.

The majority of the game is spent traveling the city and interviewing the many, many people that are connected to the murder, many of which are Bill’s extended family and friends.  You can ask them about their personal details (name, occupation, blood type, alibi, etc.), their relationship with any of the other characters you know of, and about any other miscellaneous topics you’ve learned about, such as other crimes that have taken place.  Eventually, you’ll learn something through these interviews, such as that a character was sighted near the murder site near the time of the murder, that will justify a search warrant, which you need to request from the prosecutor’s office.  This will allow you to actually find evidence in the various locations which may allow you to request an arrest warrant.  And once you start making arrests and further pressing people in the interrogation room, you gain even more information and are able to start the cycle all over again until you are able to finally piece together who the true culprit behind the murder is.

It’s an extremely open-ended game, almost to the point of seeming structure-less.  Unlike in Portopia, where you can go pretty much anywhere from the start but are kept steered in the right direction by events that occur at the police station, everything in Murder Club comes down to the player’s own intuition.  At no point after learning a piece of information during an interview does J.B. narrate to himself that this makes such-and-such seem suspicious enough to justify a search or anything like that, you the player have to reach that conclusion on your own.  This is both good and bad.  It makes the game very difficult without brute forcing it (ask everyone about everything then request search/arrest warrants for everything, rinse, repeat).  The analysis and investigation screens (accessed from the options menu in the police station) provide some automated notes: a character relationship chart and metrics on how much evidence, information, etc. you have (as well as a vague hint from Jad Gregory) respectively, but they’re not really helpful.

But on the flip-side, the lack of feedback from J.B. as a character or from the game at all makes it feel somewhat empty.  The majority of the game is spent interviewing suspects, but because J.B. lacks any dialogue of his own and you’re just hearing a one-sided conversation, it feels a bit dull, like you might as well just be reading their LinkedIn profiles or something.  It really feels like it would benefit from some dialogue to characterize J.B. or at least an intermediary character who is with you throughout the game, adding a bit of flavor, like Yasu or Percy from Portopia and Princess Tomato respectively.  The fact that they give him a name and establish that this is his first case (as if setting up that this is the prologue to the career of a legendary detective) rather than just having him be a nameless detective for the player to project onto (like Boss in Portopia) and then having him act like a blank slate anyway seems weird.

It’s a shame, because despite the somewhat flawed execution, the twists and turns and ultimate conclusion of the case are very good.  It’s a classic example of a murder mystery going deep enough to become tangled in another unsolved mystery which must also be solved to bring both cases to a close (think the DL-6 Incident in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney).  Of course, this conspiracy involves the titular Murder Club.  While the game is difficult, its title provides a bit of meta-knowledge that gives the player sort of an artificial lead early on.  Anytime a character mentioned that they were a part of some strange club I had never heard of, I immediately became suspicious of that.  But I’m sure the writers accounted for this, since there are multiple suspicious sounding clubs like this in the game, only one of which is the Murder Club.

Unfortunately, the graphics and sound of the game (at least this version) also leave a bit to be desired.  The majority of the graphics in the game resemble digitized photographs of the various locations and characters you meet, with the only outlier being the map of the city which resembles a map in a strategy game more than anything.  The photorealistic look is an obvious choice to make, since the game is going for a more serious noir feel, but the TurboGrafx doesn’t really have the color depth to do this justice, so the character portraits often end up looking somewhat washed out and bland.

The game has three CD audio music tracks: "Quivive” which plays during the opening, “Gimlet” which plays on the options menu, and “The Long Good-Bye” which plays during the end credits.  All three of these songs are pretty good and wholly appropriate for the genre, with “Quivive” sounding exactly as moody as a noir game needs to and “Gimlet” resembling lounge music.  However, the majority of the time you’ll be hearing the various PSG tracks played elsewhere in the game, which get pretty repetitive.  The voice acting, on the other hand, isn’t half bad, especially for the time.  In 1991, the game was light years ahead of some of its peers in this regard.

Ultimately, while I did enjoy the narrative that this game laid out and the challenge it presented, I felt myself wanting to know more about this J.B. Harold guy, since the game is named after him after all.  But really, it’s pointless to wonder about how the game would be if it were written in a completely different manner.  I just wish some of the later versions, like the ones for the DS and Switch, were released here, since the audiovisual presentation of those looks much better from what I’ve seen.  Unfortunately, because the English release of this game was on the TurboGrafx-CD and the English release of its sequel, Manhattan Requiem, was on the Pioneer LaserActive, the series was doomed to obscurity in the West.  So, this will probably be the last I see of old J.B. Harold.  Next time, I’ll be covering Squaresoft’s Crystal Dragon.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #16 - Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (NES)

The game I played immediately after Portopia was Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom.  Developed and published by Hudson Soft in July of 1984, a little over a year after Portopia, it was originally released for various Japanese PCs before being ported to the Famicom in 1988, which itself got an English release for the NES in 1991.  The NES/Famicom version which I played is really almost a completely different game compared to the PC versions, featuring completely redrawn graphics and over twice the amount of chapters.  The Famicom version later received a straight port to the GBA in 2005 as a part of the Hudson Best Collection Vol. 4: Nazotoki Collection, which includes a couple of puzzle games, Nuts & Milk and Binary Land, as well (Nazotoki means to solve a mystery or riddle).  There was also a mobile version released in 2004 with further improved graphics.  I don’t know much else about it beyond that, but I imagine it probably plays the same as the Famicom version.

The story of the game goes that, one day in the Salad Kingdom (which is, uh... mostly inhabited by anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables), Minister Pumpkin betrayed King Broccoli, kidnapping his daughter, Princess Tomato, and stealing the Turnip Emblem, which gives the right to rule.  He then retreated to his castle in the Zucchini Mountains and sent out his farmies (human farmers who eat vegetables, which of course makes them the bad guys) to terrorize the citizens.  It’s up to you, Sir Cucumber, the bravest knight in the land to rescue Princess Tomato and restore peace to the land.  Along to help you is Percy, a young persimmon who you help in the first chapter and becomes your squire, essentially fulfilling the some of the same role as Yasu in Portopia by acting as your narrator and sometimes giving you advice.

You spend the game traveling from location to location, gathering clues and talking to various cute and wacky characters.  Structurally, the game is a lot more linear than Portopia, being divided into nine chapters (or four in the PC versions).  It’s a much longer game too, but thankfully there’s a password system you can use to resume your progress from the beginning of whichever chapter you last reached.  Each chapter takes you to a different location in the Salad Kingdom, from the Celery Forest to the capital city of Saladoria to the resistance base (where you meet Princess Tomato’s sister, who is a regular human for some reason) and eventually to Minister Pumpkin’s castle itself where you finally meet the princess and have a showdown with the villain.

Obviously, it’s a very lighthearted and cutesy game, especially in the Famicom version, which probably contributed to its success with a female audience in Japan (I remember Arino mentioning a few female celebrities that considered this game a favorite of their childhood in the game’s GameCenter CX episode).  It’s also a pretty humorous game, with a few gags that actually made me laugh out loud.  While Sir Cucumber acts as the silent protagonist, Percy actually has a fairly fleshed out personality thanks to all of his dialogue over the course of the game, coming across as a bit cowardly.  There’s also a gameplay purpose he serves at the end of every chapter where he gets rid of all the items in your inventory that are no longer necessary.  But because of the way its presented, usually as him losing the items, it makes him seem like a bit of a fuck up.

The game itself plays very similarly to Portopia, seeming to wear the influence on its sleeve in a couple of ways.  The original PC versions, like the PC versions of Portopia, featured a simple “verb noun” text parser.  And like the Famicom version of Portopia, the Famicom version of this game replaced that with a menu, with the overall HUD even looking kinda similar..  Also like Portopia, the Famicom version added a few first-person mazes, but apart from the third one they’re actually much simpler to navigate than the one in Portopia, though it can still be somewhat easy to become disoriented.

Another thing the Famicom version added, which is very strange, is the combat system.  The combat, or finger wars as the game calls them, plays out as rock-paper-scissors.  Specifically it uses what I’m assuming is an additional Japanese rule where, after somebody loses the toss, the winner points in a certain direction and at the same time the loser looks in a certain direction, and if the loser looked in the same direction as the winner pointed then they actually fully lose the point.  It’s a pretty strange addition, but most encounters have some sort of pattern you can exploit or a weakness such as always throwing the same sign or looking in the same direction.  If not, then it really just comes down to luck, which can be a bit frustrating.

The graphics of the PC versions have a somewhat similar style to the PC versions of Portopia in how they’re drawn, with very simple lineart with solid fills.  But the sillier tone of this game allows that graphical style to work very much to its advantage compared to Portopia.  The characters are very colorfully drawn with some really out there designs.  Overall the game looks very stylish but also completely weird and crazy, similar to a couple of Hudson’s other visual novels from this era: Dezeni Land and Dezeni World.  The Famicom version on the other hand ended up having to redraw the graphics, mostly due to the fact that they had to be crammed into a smaller area to make room for the new menu elements.  The graphics in this version turned down the crazy and turned up the cute, which I’m sure gave it some wider appeal.  And the characters really do look cute, especially Princess Tomato herself, who is just precious.

The game, at least the Famicom version, also has a huge leg up on Portopia in that it features music.  It’s pretty serviceable and mostly has the same cute feel as the rest of the game, with the exception of the music used in the maze sequences which sounds appropriately mysterious and the music that plays in chapter 5 (the resistance base) which sounds way overly dramatic for some reason.  My favorite tracks are probably the songs that play in chapter 2 (Saladoria) and chapter 8 (Minister Pumpkin’s castle).

I think this is a pretty good game and actually wish the PC versions of it or even the two Dezeni games had translations so I could check them out more fully and see just how weird Hudson got with them.  Before playing it, my only experience with the game was the GameCenter CX episode, where it became known as “the game that made Arino fall asleep,” but it probably just isn’t his cup of tea, who knows.  Anyway, next time I’ll be tackling either J.B. Harold Murder Club or Crystal Dragon, neither of which I really know anything about.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #15 - Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (NES)

As mentioned previously, this time we have Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken, known in English as The Portopia Serial Murder Case.  Developed by Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest fame (and the Famicom version by Chunsoft) and published by Enix in June of 1983, it was originally released on the NEC PC-6001 before being ported to numerous other Japanese PCs and then eventually the Famicom (the version I played, thanks to a translation patch from DvD Translations), all in Japan only, of course.  More recently, a full remake was released on Japanese mobile phones alongside two other games (Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin: Ohotsk ni Kiyu and Karuizawa Yuukai Annai) from the Yuji Horii.  It is among the earliest games in the visual novel genre (the only games on vndb.org actually listed as being released earlier are Lolita: Yakyuuken and Lolita 2 by PSK and only the second one of those is anything more than strip rock-paper-scissors).  For this and a litany of other reasons, it is among the most important early releases in Japanese gaming history.

During his time as a journalist for a video game column for Shonen Jump, Yuji Horii entered a game programming contest held by the then brand new company, Enix, in order to source talented developers and build their initial library of games.  Horii managed to place in this contest with Love Match Tennis.  Another big player also came out of the contest in the form of Koichi Nakamura with his puzzle game, Door Door, which featured a player character named Chun, who ended up becoming the namesake of Nakamura’s development contracting company, Chunsoft.  Together, the winners of the contest all used their prize, a trip to the United States, to attend the 1983 Applefest in San Francisco.  It was here that Horii encountered the western computer RPG, Wizardry, which proves to be very important later.

Soon after Enix’s initial spree of releasing all of the contest games for a wide variety of Japanese PCs, Horii ended up working on Portopia.  He derived the concept of the game after reading in a PC magazine about interactive fiction games in the west, such as Zork, and deciding it was an untapped market in Japan.  Portopia was designed to be his take on that genre, even featuring a simple “verb noun” text parser.  One of his major additions to that style of game was graphics depicting the current scene in the story: the “visual” part of “visual novel.”  He also wanted to use the opportunity to experiment with more non-linear storytelling, which was sorely lacking in Japanese games at the time.  The game was programmed in BASIC and released for various Japanese PCs over the course of 1983 and 1984 to great success, laying the foundation for the entire visual novel genre.  A lot of early visual novels even share the mystery theme of this one.

After the Famicom was released and Enix started porting some of their games to it, Horii wanted to make a game in the style of Wizardry for it.  However, Enix felt that the Famicom was still too much of an action platform compared to PCs and they weren’t sure how well a game of that type would do.  So, it was decided to first go with the cheaper option of porting Portopia to the Famicom to see how a more adventure-oriented game fared in that market.  Horii teamed up with Nakamura’s Chunsoft and work on the port began.  One of the major additions to this version was an underground maze section in the style of the Wizardry games used to test the Famicom’s ability to handle something like this.  Upon release, the Famicom version of Portopia, of course, also did extremely well and Horii was allowed to work on Dragon Quest along with Chunsoft, which itself became the template for all future JRPGs.  So, in addition to kicking off the visual novel genre, its continued success ultimately led to what we now think of as a JRPG.  Granted, Dragon Quest isn’t the very first Japanese RPG, The Black Onyx predates it by a few years for example, but it was certainly the most influential.  And hell, if that weren’t enough, Portopia is also one of the games that inspired Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear fame to enter the game development scene after he was moved by its storytelling.

The story of the game itself (as told in the manual, since the game itself starts off with the case already having begun with no immediate context) is that Kouzou Yamakawa, the president of a loan shark company in Kobe, was found in his home by his secretary and security guard, dead from a stab wound to the neck.  Because he was found in a room that was locked from the inside, the obvious conclusion is that it was a suicide, but owing to his position, the man did have a lot of enemies, so it falls to you, an unnamed veteran homicide detective to investigate.  You spend the game searching the murder site and the surrounding cities, gathering clues, interviewing suspects, and establishing motives, hoping to determine the culprit of the crime, if there even is one.  It’s a classic sealed-room murder mystery.

As you explore the game and perform your investigation, it is actually your subordinate Yasuhiko Mano (or Yasu for short) through whom you interact with the world by commanding him to perform various functions.  In the original game, as mentioned above, this is done by a simple text parser, but since this isn’t really a possibility for the Famicom, that version instead has a large menu of all of the actions you can ask Yasu to perform.  The actions include: move, ask, investigate someone, show item, look for someone, call out, arrest, investigate thing, evidence, hit, take, theorize, dial phone, and close case.  Some of these are more important than others.  For example, I don’t remember “look for someone” ever being successful over the course of the whole game, whereas investigate someone is important for learning new bits of information and investigate thing is important for gathering new clues.  Theorize is another command that’s never technically necessary during the game but it can serve to give the player some hints.

Possibly the most frustrating facet of the game is the fact that selecting investigate thing and then selecting magnifying glass brings up a magnifying glass cursor that you use to actually select a point on the screen.  I would say this creates an irritating example of pixel-hunting but I can’t even really call it that because sometimes there isn’t even a pixel.  Sometimes when this needs to be done to find a new piece of evidence, you’re required to select a spot on the screen where there doesn’t appear to be anything at all.  Adding to this is the fact that it can be pretty specific where you actually need to search.  It might not be enough to search under a table, instead requiring you to search a pretty small region under the table.  I obviously wouldn’t mind this if there were any visual cue, but sometimes there just isn’t.  It isn’t a huge aspect of the game by any means, but whenever I did get stuck, it was almost always because I didn’t meticulously comb every inch of some screen.  To be fair, I believe every time this comes up is on one of the locations in or around the house where the victim was found dead, so it does make sense that I should have been much more thorough with the magnifying glass there of all places.

The structure of the game is actually surprisingly open.  You can more or less go anywhere in the game and find clues there or interact with the characters at any time.  However, you still have to proceed with the main story linearly.  Oftentimes, the aspect of the game that controls the flow of the story is events that occur in the police station at different times.  For example, one of the suspects is one of Yamakawa’s clients that has been reported as missing and you can learn about him and start to follow that lead pretty early on.  However, until you eliminate suspect of the first act of the game you can’t trigger the flag for the event in the police station that gives you the clue to find out where the missing client is and eliminate him.  This structure is something I experimented with for a while during my playthroughs of the game.  Even though you can almost completely set up the chain of events that ultimately leads to solving the case from the very beginning of the game, you end up missing one tiny little thing that lets you completely follow through with that lead until you proceed as normal.

Another big new aspect of the Famicom version of the game, as mentioned above, is the large Wizardry-style first-person maze located underneath the Yamakawa mansion.  Like a lot of the game, you can access this pretty early on, but the most important part of it is still inaccessible, again via an event at the police station, until you complete the rest of the story.  It’s a fairly complex maze and can be pretty easy to get lost in.  This is mostly because of the sudden transition as you move square to square.  It looks pretty natural when you’re just moving forward, but when doing turns, especially 180-degree turns, you can get pretty disoriented.  To be fair, the same can be said of Wizardry, but it can be pretty hard to get used to after playing something like Phantasy Star where the animation for moving through the maze is much smoother and feels more intuitive.  The maze does contain a Wizardry-style message (that turns out to be graffiti) saying that you were surprised by a monster, which is pretty amusing.

The true culprit, once you finally do cross off all the other suspects and find out who it is, is actually a pretty neat twist.  It was considered so shocking at the time that it pretty quickly became a meme, even appearing as a gag in the manga, Rozen Maiden.  It also served as the namesake for a character in another well-respected mystery visual novel, which I won’t reveal the name of, lest I spoil both of them.  Unfortunately for me, I did go into the game already knowing the identity of the culprit, having been spoiled on it ages before ever even intending to play the game just due to how much of a cultural phenomenon it is, but it’s still a good story, with well thought out character motivations, and the lead-up to that revelation is cool nonetheless.

As mentioned above the graphics pretty much just consist of simple illustrations of the current scene of the story, with minor additions for some scenes, such as the ability for multiple characters to show up in the interview room in the police station.  In the original PC versions, these graphics were drawn using lines and fills, looking somewhat like MS Paint drawings that took quite a while to be drawn on the screen, probably due to having to read from the disk.  The graphics of the Famicom version are still crude (owing to not using any mapper chips to extend the Famicom’s graphical capabilities, which did make the game extremely cheap to produce), but less so, and loaded much faster.  And I can certainly forgive crude graphics for such an early title.  Probably the more unfortunate fact is that the game contains zero music.  The only sound effects in the game at all are the sirens at the beginning and end, the noise that plays for the text scrolling, and a few sound effects in the maze.  It makes the whole thing feel pretty lonely, which may or may not be intentional.  The mobile phone versions did add music though, so there is that if you can find it.

Overall, apart from being an extremely important game it actually is a fun game with a good story.  I’d definitely recommend it, especially if you’ve managed to avoid spoilers.  It’s pretty short and can be beaten in a couple of hours at most, which is good since there’s no save function of any kind.  Up next is a game that I’ve already finished just the other day, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, so the write-up should be rolling out pretty shortly.

Links:

DvD Translations’ Fan Translation - In addition to containing the translation patch itself, the readme also included a lot of contextual information on the game, much of which made it into this post.

[megamoses]

Megaman 3

Hmm…

[megamoses]

Backblog #14 - Zoda's Revenge: Star Tropics II (NES)

Of course, my followup to StarTropics is its one and only sequel, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II.  Developed by Nintendo R&D3 and published by Nintendo in March of 1994 in North America only for the Nintendo Entertainment System, StarTropics II is among the final games released on the console, along with the likes of Wario’s Woods and Adventure Island IV.  Like the first game, it was never released in Japan, even for the Virtual Console releases.  Also like the first game, it is an action-adventure game, but this one arguably trends even more toward the action side of the scale.

The story picks up very shortly after the end of the first game, with Mike back in his hometown of Seattle.  The ending of the first game reveals that the three MacGuffins that Zoda was after contained a time frozen group of children of the alien race he sought to exterminate, the Argonians, including their princess, Mica.  At the beginning of the the second game, Mike is telepathically contacted by Mica and she gives him a clue that she received from her father, Hirocon, in a dream that may help solve the cipher that was etched into the escape pod they were sent away in.  Mike immediately goes to see his uncle, the archaeologist from the first game, Dr. Jones, and relays the clue to him.  After they solve the cipher, Mike reads it aloud and is flung by its power into the distant past, into the Stone Ages.

Here, Mike is able to help a group of friendly cavemen he meets by defeating a gigantic beast that had been plotting to eat their children, and finds a strange object shaped like a Tetris piece in the beast’s cave.  Mica manages to contact Mike again and informs him that the object is called is called a tetrad (or a “block” in the Virtual Console releases, which is a change that certainly makes more sense than calling a yo-yo an “island star”).  She postulates that Hirocon probably intended for Mike to seek all seven of them out and that they are hidden across the Earth throughout time.

And this is the basic structure of them game.  Each chapter (nine in total including the first one which just comprises the intro cutscene with Mike in Seattle) has Mike jumping to a different time, fighting his way through one to two dungeons, and retrieving a tetrad.  The time periods represented range from Ancient Egypt to the Wild West to Renaissance Italy.  You also meet a handful of historical (and one fictional and two legendary) figures in the various time periods: Cleopatra, Sherlock Holmes, Leonardo da Vinci, King Arthur, and Merlin, who all help to guide you through your quest.  At some point you figure out that there is more than one Zoda (Zoda-X, Zoda-Y, and Zoda-Z) and they are all competing with you to find the tetrads.

The game also isn’t without the lighthearted charm that was present in the first game.  The interactions with the historical figures are often comical, with Cleopatra refusing to help until you find out what’s taking her pizza delivery so long (turns out the delivery man was using a koopa instead of a camel) and Leonardo da Vinci changing the Mona Lisa’s hairstyle to one that Mike comments is “radical” in extremely 90s fashion.  There’s also, of course, the infamous Cactus Dance craze that has been sweeping all the nations of the world since this game was released and continues to do so to this day.

The idea of traveling to different time period setpieces is one that I like a lot in concept, but I don’t think it’s quite used to its full potential here.  Some of the dungeons and bosses feel a little bit disconnected from their time periods.  The dungeons in Renaissance Italy could really just be any castle anywhere and I really don’t know what a rock-throwing cyclops has to do with the Wild West.  The worst offender for this is probably the Sherlock Holmes-era one in London.  This chapter would be a great set-up for a segment that’s more focused on a longer travel stage rather than the action stages, maybe with a very simple mystery for the player to solve.  But instead of anything like that, most of it is two very irritating sewer levels.

However, the setpieces are mostly fine outside of this and they do give the dungeons that little bit more of character I thought they needed in the first game.  That, and the game ends on a very strong note, with you returning to present day C-Island to delve into the first dungeon of the first game and fight a skeletal version of its first boss, followed by a boss rush leading to Zoda-Z.  It’s a pretty cool moment and I like it a lot when games do things like that in general (Dragon Quests II and III do this, for example).  The only damper on this is that I don’t care too much for the remix of the dungeon music from the first game that is used here.  It’s a lot more downbeat and doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as it probably should.

The gameplay of each individual chapter is pretty much structured the same as the first game with travel stages where you adventure around and find your way to action stages where you fight your way through dungeons.  The travel stages feel a bit more pushed to the side in this one, however, with more of them feeling like straight shots to the action stage.  And more often than not, the the travel stage bridging the first and second actions stages really are just short hallways, becoming more like checkpoints.  One somewhat large change to the travel stages is that there are a few chapters that have areas where you will fall into a pit leading to a random miniature action stage in the middle of a travel stage.  This comes to a head in the Renaissance Italy chapter, which is full of this.

The action stages themselves feel very similar to the first game though, being mostly linear gauntlets, and are often pretty challenging. Their design in general feels more streamlined and includes some new elements.  There is now verticality to their design, or as much are there can be in an overhead game.  You sometimes have to jump up a couple of levels higher to cross a series of gaps or are forced to come back into a room from a different, higher up, entrance in order to proceed.  There’s also added elements such as moving platforms (more on those below) and arrow tiles that either move you slightly or sometimes send you hurtling in the direction of the arrow.  There is also even less puzzles to solve now.  The action stages really live up to their name here.

Unlike the first game, instead of the yo-yo you have that gets upgraded over the course of the game, Mike is armed with a regular weapon (initially a stone axe, then a bronze dagger, then a katana) that he just throws infinite amounts of and a psychic shock wave that upgrades twice over the course of the game.  The shock waves are typically the better choice due to being faster and having longer range and even feels more like the yo-yo and its upgrades.  Although, neither of them have as much charm as using a yo-yo as a weapon, I feel.  There also isn’t as much of a variety of subweapons as in the first game, but I guess this is really because you usually have two primary weapons.

The biggest and most frustrating change is, ironically, the fact that the controls are not as rigid as they were in the first game.  Unlike the first game, the movement is no longer tile-based, with Mike able to move pixel-by-pixel and even move diagonally.  He generally feels a lot swifter and it’s easier to out-maneuver enemies.  Which all sounds great, until you factor in the jumping.  The jumping is also a lot less rigid and you are able to adjust jumps in midair, which somehow makes the platforming (which there is a larger emphasis on here) much more irritating to do.  Overhead platforming is already a bit of a pain to judge correctly compared to side-scrolling and the first game gets around this by making it all tile-based.  As long as you’re actually jumping to a tile you can reach and the tile doesn’t disappear, you’re fine.

But here that’s not exactly the case, and the collision for this feels a lot more sensitive than it needs to be.  Oftentimes, the falling to your death animation appears to be overlapping the platform you were attempting to jump to.  At one point I even slipped through a one-pixel gap between a moving platform and the floor because I guess even that much of a pit was enough for Mike to fall into.  The trick to get around this (for non-moving platform jumps at least) is to just completely ignore the fact that you can adjust at all.  If you press a direction and jump, Mike still jumps across a tile just like the first game.  Any aerial adjustments that happen after this can often be fatal and there’s no point really to making them.  But moving platforms throw a wrench into this since you might actually need to adjust in order to account for their movement.  Additionally, they’re the only platforms in the game you’re able to walk off of to your death, compounding the annoyance that comes from them.

Graphically, the game has more or less the same look as the first one, but generally the sprites look a little bit better, especially in the travel stages, which was graphically the weakest part of the first game.  And Mike now even sports a denim jacket instead of just a blue shirt, for maximum 90s aesthetic.  The CGs used during cutscenes have an identical artstyle to the first game, which is fine because they did and still do look great.  Also, the gripe I had about the dungeons mostly looking the same in the first game is mostly solved here, as I mentioned above.  There’s also a lot more of a variety of music which is generally pretty good, outside of the somewhat lame remixes of music from the first game in the final chapter.

There’s often a debate on whether or not this game or the first one is better, and I think it’s probably pretty clear which side of that debate I’m on.  I ultimately prefer the first game and don’t think this one fully stacks up to it.  But this is still worth checking out.  It’s also worth noting, going back to the Zelda comparison I made when talking about the first game, that this game postdates both A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening and certainly feels nothing like either of those games.  Even if the first game could be considered vaguely a Zelda clone, this one didn’t follow through on that at all and continued to just go more in the direction the first game established.

Unfortunately, this pretty much closes the book on this series for me (not counting the StarTropics III fangame which probably won’t ever be finished anyway).  It’s most likely that the game’s very late inclusion in the NES lineup is what ultimately contributed to the downfall of both it and the series as a whole, which is a shame because I do like these games overall.  Oh well.  The next thing on my list is, as of it being translated at the end of this August, Metal Slader Glory.  And it being an early visual novel, of course means I’m going to do another little genre detour.  So, the next game I’m actually going to play is most likely going to be Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #13 - StarTropics (NES)

The game I played for this entry is StarTropics.  StarTropics is somewhat unique in that it was developed in Japan by Nintendo R&D3, but was made specifically for western audiences.  It was published by Nintendo on December 1, 1990 in North America and a couple of years later in Europe.  It actually was never released in Japan at all, even when the game was re-released on the Virtual Console for Wii and Wii U.  It is an action-adventure game, but more specifically, it is often considered to be Nintendo’s clone of their own game: The Legend of Zelda.

The story of the game sees you as Mike Jones, a high school student in Seattle and ace pitcher for his baseball team, visiting his uncle Dr. Steven Jones, a famous archaeologist, on his tropical island home on C-Island in the South Seas. Upon arriving you are informed by the chief of the nearby village of Coralcola that your uncle has been kidnapped.  The chief gives you your primary weapon, an island yo-yo (renamed an “island star” in the Virtual Console releases, strangely), warning you that the underground regions of the islands have been full of monsters recently.  Later, Dr. Jones’s assistant, Baboo, grants you use of his submarine, the Sub-C (which contains a navigational computer named Nav-Com that resembles Nintendo's R.O.B. peripheral), to aid you in your search for your uncle.

Throughout his journey across eight chapters and numerous tropical islands, Mike ends up on many little misadventures.  These include rescuing a young dolphin from a monster (which definitely pays off for him during the ending), needing to dress in drag to enter a castle populated entirely by female warriors, and even finding himself swallowed by an immense whale.  Ultimately, you discover that the kidnapping was done by a race of evil aliens led by a tyrant named Zoda and end up both rescuing your uncle and foiling their plans.  It’s a pretty simple setup and is executed in a pretty lighthearted and goofy manner, with lots of silly interactions with NPCs.  There’s even a weird running joke about Mike putting bananas in his ears.  At first, when characters bring it up early on, it’s just referring to him not listening and things like that, but at the end of the game he literally shoves bananas in his ears to prevent Zoda from invading his mind. There's also numerous little details that make clear the game's intent to appeal to a western audience. These range from little things like Nav-Com codes being important dates from American history (1492 and 1776) to the multiple references to cola to a reference to Nester from Nintendo Power.

Each of the chapters is split into adventure segments (which the manual refers to as travel stages) where you move around the overworld, talk to friendly NPCs, and gather clues, and one or more action segments (referred to as battle stages) where you fight your way through dungeons.  The sole chapter to not have a single battle stage is chapter four, where you just need to find your way out of the inside of a whale.  But the chapter directly prior to that one is the longest in the game, with a total of five dungeons, so that’s okay.  The overall structure of the game is much, much more linear than the original Zelda, which is the biggest and most important difference between the two.  The game being structured into different chapters (each with their own locales, no less) means that the game only ever moves forward.  The only way to revisit locations from previous chapters is to select them via a “Review Mode” from the file select menu.  However, doing this doesn’t let you collect optional items (such as heart containers) that you missed on your first time through.  Even if you collect them during your Review Mode replay, they aren’t saved, so it really is just for if you want to replay a certain part.

The travel stages are very straightforward.  You usually just have a single little village to visit and one or two NPCs you need to talk to and key items to get that separate you from the next dungeon.  There are a few puzzles here such as hidden passages in walls, a music puzzle, and an infamous one that requires you to physically dip a letter that came with the game in water to reveal a frequency you need (747).  Digital versions of the game on Virtual Console or NES Classic luckily include a little animation of the letter being dipped in the digital manual to accommodate this puzzle.  You’re also never in any danger on the overworld, unlike in Zelda.  Likewise, the battle stages are typically structured more like linear gauntlets, with most of the difficulty coming from dealing with the enemies and platforming (more on that later).  There is some minor puzzle solving here and there.  If the path forward isn’t immediately apparent you might have to step on a hidden switch or use an item to reveal a hidden ghost that you need to defeat for a door to open.  Granted, Zelda’s dungeons didn’t start to get particularly complicated with the puzzles until A Link to the Past.  In the first one if killing all the enemies or pushing a block didn’t work, you probably just need to check to see if the walls can be bombed or walked through and that’s about it.  But the original Zelda’s dungeons were structured more like labyrinths than linear gauntlets so that’s where their complexity came from.

But this game’s lack of the original Zelda’s nonlinearity or obtuseness doesn’t mean it’s an easy game.  It just puts more of its chips into the action side of things.  There are a couple of comically unfair traps early on (walk into the wrong room or go north to the next screen in the wrong way to just die immediately), but a lot of this difficulty can come from trying to get used to the strange, almost restrictive, controls at first.  Unlike a lot of games, even for that era, Mike’s movement is entirely based around tiles.  He can’t slightly move forward a mere partial tile’s distance and furthermore, once you perform the input to trigger the movement, you’re stuck in the animation until he walks that entire tile.  You can actually turn during the walk animation which you can use to orient yourself in the next direction you want to walk (which is kinda fun, because it feels like you’re making Mike drift) or to attack enemies as you walk by them.  You also have to hold the direction down for a split second before Mike actually starts moving, since it’s also possible to turn in place, which is useful in its own right, but adds to the overall sluggish feeling of the movement.

Most of the time though, even though the movement takes a lot of getting used to, it feels like the game is balanced around it.  Mike also has a very useful jump he can use which really helps in this regard.  Usually, if an enemy is too swift for Mike’s slow ass or has a very quick projectile, you’re meant to neutral jump over it to dodge.  But more than being used a defensive move, the jump is used for the game’s basic platforming.  Mike can jump over one tile wide gaps (or more, but only with the help of a certain item) and you often find yourself jumping between the game’s many tiles looking for hidden switches.  It’s also possible to turn in midair in order to attack enemies to your sides, which is sometimes necessary.  Also, if you mess up the platforming by jumping in the wrong direction or attempting to jump on a platform after it’s disappeared or something like that, Mike will die instantly, so caution is advised.

Mike’s health is represented through hearts, the maximum of which increase after each dungeon and by finding heart containers on the overworld, again like in Zelda.  The hearts can be restored either by enemies either dropping them directly (which is quite rare) or dropping stars, five of which restore a single heart.  But more often than not, they’re restored by just finding them in the dungeon or using potions.  Mike also has a stock of lives that allow him to continue from checkpoints within the dungeon, but running out kicks him all the way to the beginning of it.  Your primary method of attack is with your yo-yo/island star which is relatively weak and short-ranged.  You get a couple of upgrades over the course of the game, the Shooting Star and then the Super Nova, but they only work if you have enough health.  If your health drops below the threshold, your weapon will be downgraded.  In the later stages of the game, losing enough health to get dropped all the way back to the yo-yo can feel like a death sentence if you don’t have any special weapons and you may as well just reset.

The special weapons include things such as baseball bats, bolas, and even laser guns.  All of them have ammunition, even where it doesn’t make sense like the baseball bat (maybe it breaks after so many swings?), so use them wisely.  There are also magic items that need to be used from the pause screen such as the aforementioned potions, snowmen that freeze all enemies onscreen, or rods of sight that reveal the locations of otherwise invisible ghosts.  It’s also noteworthy that these items do not transfer from dungeon to dungeon or even life to life (so don’t bother trying to save them, use them if you need them!).  This is another thing that makes the game not really feel much like Zelda to me.  Unlike that game where you’re slowly building a large stock of weapons and items that you sometimes need to go out of your way to get, the only thing Mike really permanently gets to keep is his primary weapon and hearts.

The graphics of the game also differentiate the adventure and action segments of the gameplay.  The travel stages actually resemble early 8-bit JRPGs more than anything and honestly could probably look a better for as late in the NES’s lifecycle as the game released.  Once you enter a dungeon, however, the game adopts a more zoomed-in perspective and looks a ton better.  In particular, the monsters and especially the bosses all look great, with special commendations to Maxie the Ghost and the second form of Zoda.  The only problem I have with the dungeons is, save for the ones in the final two chapters, that they all look very samey visually, with nearly all of them just resembling green caves.  One major graphical nicety the game has is CGs for when you’re talking to important NPCs (such as Chief Coralcola or your uncle) and during the ending, all of which look very impressive and showcase the more western artstyle they were going for.  The music in the game is one of its strongest assets, with the standout track being the primary dungeon theme, which is extremely catchy and even sounds kind of cute (the same could even be said of the sound effects).  However, like the visual feel of the dungeons, it can get a little old since it’s used in all of them except the ones in the final two chapters.

I mentioned a few times that the game has major differences from the original Zelda that almost make it feel like a different kind of game.  The superficial similarities are definitely there for a reason though, the developers clearly set out to make a Zelda clone (this is clear from the moment you hit the file select screen, which looks almost exactly the same), but maybe didn’t understand exactly what it was that made the original Zelda so special.  It could also be argued, of course, that while the first Zelda obviously wasn’t even close to being the first action-adventure game or even the first action-RPG, it made such waves in the genre that everything we think of as just being a staple of the genre now was more or less pioneered by Zelda, so that all you really needed to be considered a clone is to just be in the same genre.  I’m honestly not sure, because I don’t really have enough pre-Zelda action-adventure context to know.  Either way, even though I feel like this game is actually pretty different, it’s definitely a great game in its own right, if a bit frustrating in some spots with its difficulty.  It’s a shame it didn’t catch on as well as Nintendo seemed to want it to, but this is probably due to its very late release.  In any case, next time I’ll be closing the book on this sadly short-lived series with Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II.

[megamoses]

Backblog #12 - Dr. Mario (NES)

Finally, I’m back to the game that led me down this puzzle gauntlet in the first place: Dr. Mario.  Dr. Mario is a falling block puzzle game developed by Nintendo R&D1 for the Famicom and published by Nintendo in Japan on July 27, 1990.  It was released for the NES in other regions and ported to many other Nintendo systems (such as the Nintendo Vs. and PlayChoice-10 arcade systems, the Game Boy, and even as part of an SNES compilation with the Nintendo version of Tetris) soon after.  I ended up playing the original NES version, although I did consider the SNES compilation, since it would’ve been fun to briefly revisit Tetris, since I did essentially play all of those Tetris versions because of this game being on my list.

Like most games of this type, it is a very simple game.  In it you play as Mario assuming the role of a doctor.  Dr. Mario continually throws bicolored pills called megavitamins into the pill bottle shaped playing field.  The field also contains three different colored viruses (blue, red, and yellow which were named Chill, Fever, and Weird respectively in a Nintendo comic) up to a certain height, depending on what level you select, similar to the height option found in other games like this.  The objective of each level is to completely eliminate all of the viruses using the megavitamins by lining up four of the same color in a row horizontally or vertically (no diagonals).  If a megavitamin ends up blocking the opening of the bottle then it’s game over.  Like Columns and Klax, combos are possible, but, amusingly, clearing too many blocks at once causes the game to crash.

When the game starts, you are given the option to select a 1 player or 2 player game.  Both modes begin with an options screen where the player(s) can select from 21 virus levels (from 0 to 20) which determines how many viruses there are in the field, the game speed from low to high (though the speed does gradually increase as you play no matter what starting speed you select), and the music selection.  Although on two player mode, both players can select virus levels and speed independently of one another, in case one player requires a handicap or something like that.

In single player mode, completing each level allows you to proceed to the next one, with every fifth level cleared showing a short cutscene of the three viruses sitting in a tree and some kind of object flying by.  After the final cutscene that plays after level 20, the game does continue but only goes up to level 24 and loops that level from there.  Two player is a head-to-head versus mode seen in other games like this where the objective is to either clear your screen of viruses first or to just outlast the other player.  Getting combos causes garbage blocks to drop on the opposing player’s field (although the system doesn’t always place the garbage intelligently and it is possible for these blocks to clear something for the other player).  The versus matches are best of five so they can run a little long and the number of rounds unfortunately cannot be adjusted in the options.

The game is pretty appealing visually.  As mentioned above, the playing field is supposed to be a pill bottle, though I always thought it was supposed to be the inside of whatever person you’re trying to cure (in fact, beta versions of the game, known as Virus, seem to support this by showing a sick animal that you’re supposed to be curing).  In the top right, you can see Dr. Mario himself in a typical doctor getup actually throwing the pills into the field.  And in the bottom left you can see the viruses themselves, which have very cute classic alien or monster designs, dancing around and taunting you (until you gradually get rid of all of the viruses of a certain color, which removes them from this view).  The viruses are seen under a magnifying glass instead of something like a microscope, implying that they’re enormous.  I guess this is true, since they can be seen from the naked eye in a tree in the endings.  Also, in the level 20 ending, the thing which flies by the tree is a UFO, which picks the viruses up.  So, I guess they actually are aliens.  Maybe Tatanga did Dr. Mario.

Of the two selectable songs in the game that play during actual gameplay, “Fever”, with its upbeat and extremely catchy tune, is by far the more recognizable song and is generally thought of as being the Dr. Mario theme.  “Chill” is a much more downtempo theme and, although I don’t think it exactly works for something that gets as fast paced as this game often does, I think it’s a fine song in its own right.  And the verses of it where the tempo picks up sound pretty, uh... cool.  Both songs have moments where they sound sort of deliberately chaotic or off-key, which works since they’re supposed to be the theme songs of these weird alien viruses that I guess are causing havoc on some dogs or something if the aforementioned beta version is anything to go by.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a third song called “Weird” for the yellow virus.  It’s a shame, because I really would’ve liked to hear a song like that.

Overall, this is a very good game, though simple like all games of this type.  Not that its simplicity is a bad thing in the least.  That’s actually the greatest strength of games like this.  Anyone can pick them up and instantly understand the rules.  It’s easy to learn but hard to master, which is pretty much exactly where you want a game to be, especially if it has a multiplayer versus mode like this one does.  Though this game, being height based, is very easy in the early levels when there are barely any viruses.  Even in later levels where there are quite a few more, it gets much easier as soon as you are able to break through the first layer or so of viruses.  But level 19 is about where I fall apart completely and am barely able to progress in eliminating viruses at all, so it’s definitely no cakewalk, it just feels a little easier than similar games.  Next time, I’ll finally be moving past puzzle games and to one that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now: StarTropics.

[megamoses]

Backblog #11 - Klax (Lynx)

It is the nineties and there is time for...

Klax is the game I played this time (and so soon after the last one!).  It is a falling block puzzle game developed and published by Atari for the arcades on June 4, 1990.  The arcade release was followed by a large number of ports, many of which were handled by Atari’s console/computer game publishing division, Tengen.  Among the systems it came out for were the Atari 2600 (in fact, it was the last game officially published for the platform), the NES, the Genesis / Mega Drive, the TurboGrafx-16, the Lynx, the Atari ST and many others.  It also had fanmade and prototype versions made for the Atari 5200 and 7800 repsectively.  The version I ended up playing was the Lynx version, both because it’s one of the better versions and it’s one on one of Atari’s own consoles, so it just seemed right.

Klax was originally meant to be the follow-up to Atari’s popular arcade conversion of Tetris, but ended up becoming more of its own thing due to the legal dispute.  Like Tetris and Columns, Klax has tiles coming from the top of the screen (though it’s a bit visually distinct from the others in that they’re actually tumbling down a conveyor belt).  The difference is how you control them, and it is actually a pretty major difference.  You don’t have any control over the tiles until they land on the paddle you control at the bottom of the screen.

You use this to catch them and arrange them in the 5 by 5 well below.  The paddle can hold up to five tiles at once and places them starting from the top of the stack.  It is also possible to bounce pieces back up the conveyor belt and catch them again if you need to shift your pieces around, but attempting to juggle them this way can cause further complications if you’re not careful.  Any pieces that aren’t caught by the paddle are considered drops.  Running out of drops or completely filling up the well results in a game over.

The paddle is used to create vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines of at least three, known as a Klax.  Verticals are worth the least amount of points and diagonals are worth the most.  Certain moves such as getting lines of four or five or getting multiple lines (such two diagonals at once) with one piece counts for more Klaxes than normal.  Also like in Columns, it is possible to achieve combos, though because of the smaller well of pieces they can’t be quite as long.  Of course, the longer you play the faster and more numerous the pieces get.  They also start appearing in more colors.  There are also flashing wildcard pieces that can easily be used to get multiple Klaxes in one move.

The major gameplay distinction Klax has over Tetris is the way it is structured overall.  The gameplay is divided into 100 waves (making this a rare puzzle game that doesn’t actually go on forever).  Each wave is cleared by fulfilling a set goal, such as getting a certain number of Klaxes or getting a certain number of points.  After clearing a wave, you are awarded bonus points for the amount of pieces remaining on the conveyor belt and the paddle and for the amount of empty space you left in the well.  Before the first wave and every five waves after, you’re given the option to skip five or ten waves.  Doing so gives you a point bonus and more drops.  Also, during a couple of the early waves, you are given the opportunity to skip 45 entire waves by creating a large X (five piece long diagonal lines going in both directions).  Doing so is easier said than done, of course.

Visually, this has got to be the most 90s puzzle game of all time.  Many versions of the game even open with the quote at the top of the article.  The title screen of the Lynx version has the hand that is typically the K in the logo signing the rest of the letters to make the colorful, multi-hued logo appear before assuming its place as the K.  The background of the title screen consists of a pattern of shapes typical of 90s visuals.  As mentioned above, instead of just dropping down a well like many other games of this type, Klax has the pieces tumbling end over end down a conveyor belt toward your paddle.  The backgrounds, which change after every wave, are sometimes abstract and psychedelic.  My favorite of the early ones is the one that has a large hand wrapping around the bottom of the conveyor belt as if it were the neck of a guitar.  It’s also definitely worth noting that this is one of the games that requires you to rotate your Lynx so that it is in a portrait aspect ratio, which makes sense considering how the screen is laid out.

Unfortunately, in most of the versions I’ve seen including the Lynx version, there is no music during the gameplay.  The sole song seems to be the bassy track that plays during the title screen.  It’s a different song than the one that plays on the NES one for example, and not as good in my opinion.  But it does somewhat make up for the lack of music with a wider array of sound effects than one might expect from a game of this type.  Each different color of piece also makes a different sound as it makes its way down the belt.  The brown pieces even make kind of a splat sound, which I’m not sure was intended as a joke or not.  There’s also voice clips that play announcing what type of wave the upcoming one is and reacting when you pull off long Klaxes or combos.  For such a small system, these voice samples actually sound very impressive.

Overall, this definitely one of the most unique and enjoyable puzzle games I’ve played so far.  It does get pretty hectic very quickly though, since in addition to the pieces coming down you also have to pay attention not only to the pieces already in the well but also the way the pieces on your paddle are arranged.  It’s just a little bit more to keep track of that makes the game that much more difficult.  But hey, I’m not great at these games as it is, so maybe it’s just me.  Anyway, for the next entry, we’ll be moving to the game that sent us through this puzzle game gauntlet in the first place: Dr. Mario.

[megamoses]

Backblog #10 - Columns (Genesis)

Hey, it’s my tenth one of these things.  And of all the games for it to cover, we have Columns.  Columns is a falling block puzzle game originally developed in 1989 by a Hewlett-Packard employee by the name of Jay Geertsen for their proprietary HP-UX operating system.  Of course, it was later ported to several other home computer systems, where it was eventually discovered by Sega.  Sega managed to buy the rights from him and unlike some other puzzle games I could mention, everything went perfectly smoothly.  Sega AM1 went on to develop an arcade port for the Sega System C arcade hardware which was published by Sega in March of 1990 and soon followed by numerous official ports, sequels, and unlicensed clones.

However, the version I played was the Genesis/Mega Drive version.  This version was the first home console version and is a very accurate representation of Sega’s arcade version which it released only months after.  Released very early in the console’s lifetime, it is one of the very first puzzle games on the system, due to the fact that Sega’s earlier Mega Drive port of Tetris ended up being shelved due to the legal issues surrounding it.  This version in particular has appeared in many Genesis compilations including Steam’s SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics, which is how I played it (hence the nice grid borders that actually perfectly match the playfield).

Of these tile-matching puzzle games, Columns is actually one of the earliest, along with Atari’s Klax.  This is especially true when you only consider those in which the tiles are falling from the top of the screen.  The earlier game, SameGame, for example, has you removing a finite number of matching tiles from the screen in an attempt to empty it completely.  So I tend to think of that game as a tile removal puzzle game rather than a falling block puzzle game, but it’s all semantics.

Like Tetris, Columns has tiles falling from the top of the screen in stacks of three.  You can change the order of the tiles within the vertical stack, but you cannot rotate it like you can in say, Puyo Puyo. It's called Columns after all.  The goal is to match at least three of the same tile either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to remove them before the playfield fills up completely.  However, unlike the games Hatris and Faces..tris from the previous entry, this game has more of a chain combo focus.  If you manage to arrange the tiles in such a way that removing one row causes another row to be formed after the first set disappears then you have a combo.  It’s possible to get very long combos in this game, but I’m not especially good at them, and it felt like most of the really long ones I got were mostly luck.

The main mode in all versions is Arcade, which is the typical endurance mode where you just need to survive as long as possible.  There are different levels of speed that rise as you play the game, similarly to Tetris.  Unlike Tetris, however, starting from higher levels (the game gives you the option to start from levels 5 and 10 as the medium and hard difficulties respectively) awards you a starting bonus.  Typically though, I like to start from level 0 even though it is technically the easy mode, just because I like to start from the bottom and try to work my way up as much as possible in these types of games.

The other two major modes, exclusive to the later ports, are Original Game and Flash Columns.  Original Game is pretty much the console version of Arcade mode where you have more options.  It has different difficulty classes: Novice, Amateur, and Pro, which seem to just affect how often you get pieces with more than one of the same color, which makes it much easier to build large combos.  You can select any level from 0 to 9, instead of just 0, 5, or 10.  You have the option to enable a time trial, which gives you three minutes to build as high a score as possible instead of just until the screen fills up.  This option is actually a blessing on lower difficulties since those games can run for so long.  And finally, you are actually given the option to change the music between the three possible tracks.

The second console exclusive mode, Flash Columns, is similar to Sega’s earlier Tetris sequel, Flash Point.  Like in Flash Point, the object is to eliminate a single flashing gem.  The difficulty class and music selection options are present here too, as well as a height option between 2 and 9 that determines how filled the screen is when you begin.  Unlike Flash Point, the levels are not pre-built, but randomly generated based on the height you select.  Also unlike in Flash Point, the score doesn’t really matter at all, since it only keeps track of your best time, so there’s no point in building up toward unnecessary combos that don’t get you any closer to the flashing gem.

Both Original Game and Flash Columns mode have 2-player versus and doubles modes.  Strangely, during the versus mode, it is not possible to attack your opponent using garbage blocks at all, despite the fact that this was present is Sega’s earlier Bloxeed.  This ends up making the multiplayer games feel somewhat slow-paced and boring since you’re just trying to outlast your opponent, especially compared to later games in the series where attacking with the crush bar became a major part of the game.  The doubles mode simply has each player controlling every other piece.  So compared to Atari Tetris where you both control pieces at the same time, it’s a bit easier to cooperate.  But I still like the weirdness of Atari Tetris’s co-op mode.

Visually, the theme of the game is ancient civilizations. This is appropriate, since columns are often associated with classical architecture.  This game specifically is associated with Ancient Phoenicia (the manual claims this is a game Ancient Phoenician merchants played with gems). However, later games are just based around the ancient world in general and have you traveling into Ancient Egyptian pyramids and locales like that.  The title screen depicts vase art of two soldiers holding a bag of gems and the alternative title screen depicts two angels playing the game.  The in-game pieces are all represented by different colored gems.  Graphically, the game looks very accurate to the arcade version.

The three music tracks available during play are called “Clotho”, “Lathesis”, and “Atropos”, after the Moirae Sisters of Greek mythology.  While they do capture the theme of ancient civilization pretty well in the way they sound, none of them really do it for me.  And they definitely get old after playing for as long as some games can last.  The one I come closest to liking is Atropos, which has kind of a nice melody in its intro, but loses me pretty soon after.  Part of it could be the sometimes bad sound emulation in the emulator built into the SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics collection, which sometimes makes the songs sound like they’re descending into complete lunacy to the point of almost being charmingly bad.  But I have heard them properly emulated too and they’re not much better then.

Speaking of that collection, it did receive a pretty major update recently.  I guess they didn’t fix the emulation issues, which obviously should be priority one, but they did add some fun extras.  The games now have achievements and challenges (unfortunately just one of each per game at most) as well as online multiplayer, leaderboards, and region switching where possible.  This game did have a single achievement (getting 5000 points on the novice difficulty class) and a challenge (getting 5000 points from a mid-game save where the gems are nearly at the top of the screen), both of which were fairly easy.  The game also has the leaderboard and online multiplayer functionality.  Unfortunately, the leaderboard is only for the easy difficulty, for some reason.  Probably due both to these features being fairly new and this game being relatively unpopular compared to the others in the collection, my rank on the leaderboard as of now is actually pretty decent.  When I told a friend of mine this, he said I was a real pillar of the Columns community, and I was furious.

Anyway, like all early puzzle games, this one really is a slim package.  Despite having three major modes, there’s really not much to it and you can see everything it has to offer in a single session.  But like all of these games, if the main gameplay entices you enough, then the lasting appeal becomes chasing higher and higher scores.  Unfortunately, like a lot of early console puzzle games, this game lacks a battery save, so your high scores won’t last beyond a single session anyway.  But it’s still a decent enough foundation for the series.  I do like the later ones, though not as much as Puyo Puyo.  Next time, rather than going after the other early Columns games (hitting this one did take me out of my current console generation, after all), I’ll be playing Atari’s Klax.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

New post, new computer #2

About SEVEN FUCKING YEARS AGO I made this post about putting together a new computer.  It was my first one and it had some issues, but it lasted me that entire time.  Recently though, it started to show its age, so I figured it was about time for a new one.  So here it is (minus side panels for the case):

Specs are:

Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2

CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz

HSF: be Quiet! BK021 Dark Rock 4

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming LGA1151

RAM: G.SKILL 16GB (2 x 8GB) Ripjaws V Series DDR4

Storage

SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 1TB

HDD1: Western Digital Red 6TB NAS

HDD2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB (pulled from the old computer and repartitioned after I got everything I need from it)

External HDD: Western Digital MyBook 3TB (also something I’ve had since the old computer)

Optical Drive: LG Electronics 14x SATA Blu-ray Internal Rewriter

Power Supply: CORSAIR HX850

Case: be quiet! BGW12 Dark Base PRO 900

Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit

It was actually put together about a week ago, but I’ve been messing around with it installing stuff and things like that.  Once again, huge shoutout to the much more experienced @dowmein​ for essentially building it for me.  Only real problems we had was stuff like forgetting that the M.2 slot for the SSD is under a panel that we needed to remove.  Other than that everything went perfectly smoothly.

I gotta say, out of all the parts I feel like I’m most impressed with the case.  Apart from being extremely spacious, having easy to use wire management and hard drive/optical drive bays, and including a wi-fi antenna, it also has a built-in wireless charging panel built into the top of it, which is pretty cool.  But I also haven’t really gotten a chance to play any extremely graphically intensive games, so I’m sure the GPU will end up being the most impressive thing when I do.

Speaking of which, I did also get a monitor: an ASUS ROG SWIFT 27-inch 1440p 144Hz.  I plan to buy a second one, but the first one is large enough that I bough a second desk alongside it just to have the monitors and keyboard/mouse on, with the computer itself on my old desk to the right.  I’ll probably get a nicer keyboard and mouse (since right now I just have some cheapo ones) along with the second monitor and then stick with that for a while.  For now though, I’m pretty satisfied with this system now that I’ve gotten everything I need installed on it.  So now I can get back to playing old ass games on way overkill hardware.  (But also Doom 2016 and eventually RE2make).

[megamoses]

Backblog #9 - Early Tetris Sequels (Various)

Welltris by Spectrum HoloByte (MS-DOS)

As mentioned toward the end of the previous entry, Spectrum HoloByte was one of the companies to come out of the big legal battle relatively unscathed.  And it was thanks to this that they were able to release the first official Tetris sequel: Welltris.  It was designed by Alexey Pajitnov himself, developed both by Russian company Doka and by Sphere (which was associated with Spectrum HoloByte), and published by Spectrum HoloByte in the United States, Infogrames in Europe, and Bullet-Proof Software in Japan.  It was originally released for MS-DOS (the version I played, as usual) and Mac in 1989 and was followed up by releases for all of the other major 8 and 16-bit computers of the time (including the PC-98 in Japan) as well as a release for arcades.

Graphically, it has the Russian personality typical of early Tetris games, especially the Spectrum HoloByte one.  The title screen depicts the usual Saint Basil’s Cathedral, though this time seen with a few other iconic Moscow buildings from across a sun-drenched Moskva River.  The game itself again depicts Russian scenes which cycle as you rise in level.  Although this game has a lot more every day scenes, such as the one below depicting a park.  Although maybe it’s a famous park in Moscow that I just don’t recognize or something, I don’t know.  Unfortunately, like the previous Spectrum HoloByte game, there is again no music and only minimal sound, which is disappointing.

The game is, of course, called Welltris because the pieces are falling down a pseudo-3D well.  Although, the pieces do fall down a well in the original, it’s not as big of a graphical focus.  The game is a bit like Blockout, which was released at around the same time, close enough that this probably wasn’t a case of one company ripping off another.  The major difference is that you only operate on one layer of pieces at the very bottom of the well and that the pieces are actually still two-dimensional, as opposed to the multiple layers of pseudo-3D blocks seen in Blockout.  The pieces slide down the walls of the well and once they reach the bottom, they continue to slide until stopping at the opposite wall or at another piece.  You can move and rotate the pieces as usual and if you make a line either horizontally or vertically, it’s cleared and the pieces shift to fill the space.  Although, I never quite got a handle on how exactly they shifted.  For example, if you make a vertical line, whether it would be the blocks to the left or to the right of it which moved.

Strangely, you can’t move the pieces once they are on the floor, you can only rotate them.  Presumably this is to encourage you to use the fact that you can come at the playfield from any direction to your advantage, since that is where a lot of the challenge and strategy comes in.  The game also allows you to “break” pieces by letting them reach the floor while they are at a corner, in between two walls.  This causes both halves of the piece to go sliding in different directions across the floor, something which I was never really able to take advantage of at all.  Once you reach a new level, you get a weird bonus piece with more blocks than usual and receive a small score bonus if you manage to use it successfully.  If any of your pieces are unable to fully slide onto the floor and have even a single block that remains on a wall, the wall turns pink and becomes temporarily disabled, making you unable to move pieces into it.  If all four become disabled in this way, it’s game over.

All in all, this is a pretty fun game, though I can’t really see myself playing much more of it than I did.  The unique perspective makes it fairly challenging to try and wrap your brain around.  It also has multiple difficulties, with the easy difficulty throwing in easier to use three block pieces and the hard difficulty doing just the opposite.  I can’t say I quite ever figured out what the metagame for getting high scores in this particular game was.  I guess you’d maybe just have to pick one direction for your pieces to fall and then just play it like normal Tetris.  But that’s boring.  And it probably wouldn’t work since you don’t have nearly as much space.

Flash Point by Sega (Genesis)

Sega also managed to escape a lot of the legal wrath.  Since Atari was at some point (retroactively) granted the rights to the arcade version of Tetris, Sega’s own arcade version remained legal.  Owing to the extreme success of their version in Japanese arcades, Sega ended up developing a couple of sequels of their own.  Flash Point was developed by Sega AM1 and published by Sega for their Sega System 16 arcade hardware in July of 1989.  However, the version I played was the Mega Drive port, which remained unreleased and only exists in prototype form due to the lawsuit.  Interestingly, there is also a pair of unlicensed versions for the MSX and Sega Master System by a Korean company called Zemina, who are more known for creating the Super Boy series of unlicensed Super Mario Bros. clones.

The title screen is very minimal: just the logo over a background of blue blocks.  All of the in-game backgrounds are recycled from another Sega game, Fantasy Zone, though with a somewhat more washed out palette.  They look very nice, but since they are re-used, they don’t give the game much personality of its own.  The graphics of the pieces themselves are also re-used from Sega’s previous game.  Though ultimately, I’m just nitpicking at this point since it’s really not a huge deal in a game like this.  The arcade version also features a few different Sega characters such as Alex Kidd, Flicky, or Opa-Opa (also from Fantasy Zone) wishing you good luck at the beginning of each round, which is cute.  And I actually quite like the song used during gameplay, titled "Yosha! Ikeei!" no Uta.

The main gameplay gimmick of this game, known as Ojama Mode, is that you have 91 (100 in the arcade version, which is less of a strange number), pre-built Tetris puzzles.  Each has a bunch of pre-set blocks already on screen, with one or more of those blocks being flashing blocks known as “flashing points.”  The objective of each round is to clear all of these flashing points from the screen by including them in cleared lines.  This is often easier said than done, with other large sections of blocks getting in the way of doing this.  Although it does allow you to play the puzzles in any order, which gives you full reign to practice the difficult ones as much as you want.

The game uses the Sega rotation system seen in the previous game, though strangely the scoring is not based on line clears at all.  This is probably to encourage players to just go for clearing the flashing points as quickly as possible, since you are scored based on time, with a bonus that counts down.  The level still increases based on the number of lines cleared, though, which means the only thing a lot of lines really gets you is more difficulty.  Another somewhat unique scoring factor is that it grades you on the number of attempts for a single puzzle, so while you can practice them, this will affect your final score.  The game also actually features a variety of different gameplay modes.  You can play either head-to-head multiplayer or the play using the same co-op multiplayer seen in the Tengen version of Tetris, though without the much larger playfield.  The game even has a construction mode, allowing you to put together your own puzzles, which you can also play (and even construct) in multiplayer.

While this is an enjoyable enough game, I probably won’t be going for completion of all 91 puzzles anytime soon.  Some of them are pretty frustrating.  It is kinda sad that this game never got the original home release Sega was planning, but it did eventually get one in the form of the same Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 28: Tetris Collection compilation for the PS2 that Sega’s Tetris was featured on, which even included the unreleased Mega Drive ports of both games.

Bloxeed by Sega (Arcade)

Their second Tetris sequel, Bloxeed, was developed again by Sega AM1 and published by Sega for their System 16, System 18, and System C arcade hardware in 1989, with the System C port even getting an international release (though the version I played was the Japanese System 18 version).  Unfortunately, this version never received any ports, not even unlicensed ones, until the eventual Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 28: Tetris Collection compilation which it was included in.

The graphics of the game are back to using the backgrounds resembling digitized photographs seen in Sega’s version of Tetris.  The title screen features the logo over a view of the Earth with Mars in the background.  All of the in-game backgrounds feature scenes of nature or of space such as sun-drenched savannas, volcanoes, or even spiral galaxies.  The pieces themselves retain the same look seen in the previous Sega Tetris games.  While I do still like the theme of this game, “O Tawamure,” more than the song, “Tetremix,” heard in Sega’s original Tetris game, I still like the Flash Point theme a little more.

In terms of gameplay, I think this is probably Sega’s strongest Tetris game.  It is once again back to the basic marathon-style seen in their original game, but with much more refined gameplay.  The power blocks from the original make a return here but a much more useful.  If any of the blocks with a specific letter are cleared as part of a line, the player will receive a temporary power associated with the letter.  F blocks summon the Sega character Flicky who can drop single blocks while slowly descending, S summons a ship which can shoot to destroy single blocks while slowly descending (basically the opposite of Flicky), B summons a bomb which destroys a circular area of blocks, 16 summons a 16 ton weight which drops and destroys 3 columns of blocks, and 4 instantly clears 4 lines.

But not everything added is to your advantage.  In addition to these, a line of garbage blocks is added to the playfield after every five pieces, similar to Atari’s arcade version.  On a similar note, in the multiplayer versus mode of this game, clearing two or more lines at once allows you to send rows of garbage pieces to your opponent’s screen and also remove the piece they are currently about to use from play.  This makes this one of the earliest Tetris games to feature garbage attacks, along with Nintendo’s Game Boy version which was released around the same time.

The game is actually a pretty great extension of Sega’s Tetris formula.  If it had more of a variety of modes or an Ojama Mode like those seen in Flash Point it’d almost feel definitive for the time, but Sega probably wanted each of the games to stand out from one another.  That, and something like the construction mode, which only appeared on Flash Point’s Mega Drive prototype, wouldn’t really work at all in an arcade setting.

Hatris by Bullet-Proof Software (NES)

Bullet-Proof Software presents: Hatris.

It’s like Tetris... with hats.

What the fuck.  What the fuck!?  Hey- what the fuck!?  WHAT THE FUCK!?  WHAT THE FU-

What the heck?  atafa

-- videogamedunkey, 2011

I mean that pretty much says it all, honestly.  Dunkey memes aside, Hatris was Bullet-Proof Software’s first stab at a Tetris sequel.  Again designed by Alexey Pajitnov himself, it was developed and published by Bullet-Proof Software on July 6, 1990 in Japan and in 1992 in the United States for the NES/Famicom, which was the version I played.  There were also ports made for arcades, PC Engine, Game Boy, and PC-98.  This game represents a pretty different gameplay style compared to all the previous Tetris games covered, but it’s actually not all that bad.  The concept of the game is that you’re dropping hats onto six disembodied heads at the bottom of the screen.  Which, while less abstract than basic Tetris, is still pretty out there.

The graphics are fairly nice.  The title screen features a depiction of a couple of the hats, two wizard hats and a crown, against a checkerboard background.  Like in the Bullet-Proof Software version of Tetris, there are no changing backgrounds for each new level (or shop as they’re called in this game), but just a simple brick frame around the playfield with a couple of bearded workers apparently controlling the action by working some levers.  Every time the shop level goes up, the design of the six disembodied heads change.  They start out as normal bearded men, then Frankenstein’s Monster heads, then smiling faces, then Dracula heads, and so on.  And every ten levels the color of the bricks change after a little animation of the workers pulling stuff out of hats and chasing each other around.  And I have no idea what any of the songs in the game are called, but they’re pretty cute little songs and they change every shop so there’s a good amount of them.

The gameplay in this game, despite it being sort of an official Tetris sequel, is pretty drastically different from any of the previous games covered.  All of the games covered so far are more about managing blocks in order to fill space, with the criteria for clearing them just that you make a complete row.  This game still has falling blocks (well, hats) but the criteria for clearing them is matching a stack of the same five hats in a row, which is really the more common type of gameplay seen in this genre of game.  As the hats fall down in pairs you can rotate their positions and move them left and right together in order to try to stack them in this way.  The goal of each “shop” is to clear a set number of hats, though sets of larger hats such as the tall top hats or wizard hats count for more and are more useful to clear.  Each new shop introduces more types of hats into the mix, complicating things.  Confusingly, when starting the game, increasing the “shop” seems to increase the number of hats already on the screen and increasing the “stage” increases the level of difficulty or “shop” as seen on screen during gameplay.

You also have a couple of special actions you can take known as worker moves.  As you clear hats, two meters on the right of the screen fill up, giving you worker move icons above which you can use.  One worker allows you to pick up an entire stack of hats and switch its place with another and the other worker removes hats from the bottom of a pile entirely one at a time.  Both of these are pretty useful.  Of course, you can also spend these worker moves at the end of a shop without using them to get pretty large cash bonuses.  Another pretty useful strategy you can use that doesn’t require spending anything is to split the hats by letting one of them land on a taller stack and then moving the one remaining hat by itself to a more suitable location.

Although I didn’t really care for this game the first time I played it ages ago, after learning better how to play it, I actually had a pretty good time with it.  But like any of these kinds of games I can’t really see myself playing very much of it outside of this.  But the time I did spend with it, I did enjoy, which is more than I can really say for our final game in this article...

Faces... Tris III by Spectrum HoloByte (MS-DOS)

Following up presumably on their success with Welltris, Spectrum Holobyte ended up making this third entry into their series: Faces... Tris III, which is somehow really the title.  It was again designed by Alexey Pajitnov, developed by Sphere, and published by Spectrum HoloByte in 1990 originally for MS-DOS (the version I played, of course) and Mac, with an Amiga port soon after.  However, unlike Welltris, this game only saw release in the United States.

The game is available in both CGA and VGA graphic modes for MS-DOS, with the VGA version having the greater color depth.  It also allows for several different sound modes, depending on what sort of audio capabilities your system had.  This, finally, allowed for some music.  If I had to describe this game in one word, it would be creepy.  The title screen depicts a strange rectangular prism with a bunch of different faces on each of its, well... faces, with five sections rotating, causing the different faces to be mixed up.  I guess this is accurate to the gameplay, but it really does look creepy.  And it’s all against a flat red background with the logo, which has the hammer and sickle as the C.  The action takes place against grayscale landscape backgrounds such as a cityscape or cemetery.  Again, all the faces themselves, which depict historical figures (although they depict horror icons like Dracula when on the cemetery background, which is kind of fun), look weird as hell.  And although we finally have music in a Spectrum HoloByte Tris game, it’s honestly not very good.

The game is a little bit like Hatris in that it has you matching pieces instead of trying to create a single row of pieces.  The major difference is that instead of trying to match five of the same piece, you’re trying to use them to create a single complete face.  It doesn’t matter if it’s all pieces from the same face, they can be as mixed up as the one on the title screen, as long as there’s a chin, lips, a nose, eyes, and the top of the head.  The game even shows the last two fucked up looking face abominations you’ve created to the left.  Any mistakes you make, such as putting a nose on top of eyes, causes them to become garbage pieces which you can only get rid of by completing a face on top of them.

The problem is this really does seem like it’s much easier said than done.  Like in Hatris, the face pieces come down in pairs and you can switch their places and move them left and right.  The thing that really messed me up much more than I feel like it should have is that there’s a full space in between your two face pieces that you can’t easily get rid of.  It seems to cause you to have to force yourself into untenable situations more often than not.  You can sort of deal with it by splitting the pieces like in Hatris, but I couldn’t get nearly as much use out of it here.  But who knows, maybe I just suck at this one in particular.

The problem is, unlike Hatris and really any of the other games I played for this entry, there’s not a whole lot to the game beyond its strange premise.  This seems like it’d be true for the other games but there’s little things in those games that give them a lot more depth than this one and push you to keep trying, even if its just a result of them sticking to the very much tried and true Tetris formula.  Unfortunately, it just comes off as a little boring.

And that’s really it for the Tetris sequels for now.  The later entries start getting more into the Super Nintendo era, so I’ll be saving those for later.  But even though this entry is ending on a somewhat dour note, the puzzle game gauntlet will be continuing into the next one with Sega’s Columns series.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #8 - Tetris (Various)

If ever there were a game in no need of introduction, it's the game I played this time: Tetris.  But I'll give one anyway.  Tetris is a falling block puzzle game, originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov for the Electronika 60 computer on June 6, 1984 in the then Soviet Union.  Afterward it quickly became one of the most widely ported and best-selling games of all time.  It has been ported to many different computers, arcade machines, consoles, cell phones, calculators, mp3 players, PDAs, and pretty much anything else with a screen, by innumerable companies, often illegally!  Especially before 1996, when the rights finally reverted back to Pajitnov from the state and he was able to co-found The Tetris Company and start bringing the hammer down.

The original version (seen above) was programmed for the Russian Electronika 60 terminal computer by Pajitnov while working at the Computer Center in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in order to test the capabilities of the new hardware, which he often did by creating computer games.  It was an extremely simple version graphically owing to the fact that the Electronika 60 had no graphical capabilities.  Everything was represented in text, with the tetrominoes being represented by square brackets.

The gameplay was based on pentomino puzzles, though using tetrominoes instead for the sake of simplicity, with the pieces falling into the playfield to be arranged by the player.  Originally it seems that at some point the game would’ve been just about trying to arrange the shapes and that’s it, similarly to the pentomino puzzles.  But Pajitnov soon realized that the shapes filled the screen very quickly and elected to have rows disappear, thus forming the central gameplay tenet of Tetris: the objective is to make horizontal lines for as long as possible before the shapes fill up the screen.

It’s an extremely simple, yet deceptively fun and addictive formula.  This goes without saying.  So much so that it lends its name to a well known psychological phenomenon: the Tetris effect, in which performing a task for a long time can lead to seeing its patterns everywhere, even when just closing one’s eyes.  It’s probably something you’ve experienced before, if not from actually playing Tetris, then from doing a new job or activity for the first time.

In addition to being famous for how successful and well-loved a game it is, Tetris is also infamous for its complex legal history.  This is mostly due to shady practices of early companies involved but also somewhat complicated by the major stakeholder in the property for over a decade being the Soviet Union itself.  In fact, for a long time, because intellectual property rights did not really exist in Soviet Russia, Pajitnov received very little money for his tremendously successful invention.

But because the history of the game is such a clusterfuck and there are so many versions of it, I figured a good way to talk about this would be to play several of them.

AcademySoft version (MS-DOS)

The original was ported to MS-DOS based IBM PC compatible computers sometime in 1986 by Pajitnov’s friend and colleague: Vadim Gerasimov, a much younger man (only 16 at the time!) who was well known within the Academy for being a computer genius.  It was “published” by AcademySoft, the licensing arm of the Academy of Sciences at which they worked, in 1986.  This first port was the first version I actually played and is also the version that really started to set things on fire.  It was shared, originally by the programmers themselves within the offices, on disks and BBSes until it had spread all over Moscow and then Russia and eventually all over Europe.

Despite this, it’s a very hard version to go back to after having played any other version.  It has graphics, sure, but the pieces consist of simple solid colors with no division between the individual blocks.  The title screen logo is rendered similarly, flashing between the different colors.  And everything else other than that is still rendered in text.

Of course, since it’s Tetris this wouldn’t be a huge deal if the controls weren’t so unresponsive.  The controls are mapped to the number pad, which is fine (unless you have a tenkeyless keyboard, I guess), but it has what seems to be an input queue.  If you hold down a directional key to try and move a piece around very quickly, it will queue up all of those inputs and continue executing them after you let go of the key.  Sometimes they’ll continue even after the piece lands, so that the next piece comes out flying to the left or right without you pressing anything.

It’s possible this is a quirk of the specific version’s delayed auto shift programming or of the DOSbox emulation (though I didn’t have this problem with the next port I played on DOS).  In any case, this can be mitigated by moving the pieces through individual keypresses, which is a better practice anyway.  Although, it still felt like some of my inputs got lost even while doing that.

Other nuances of this version are that it has a piece rotation system that resembles the later Nintendo one (and is presumably identical to the Electronika 60′s roatation system).  This means no wall kick if you rotate a piece next to a wall and no lock delay.  It has hard drops only, though it is apparently possible to maneuver pieces during the drop.  All of this and the controls combine to make it a pretty difficult version to play.  It also requires you to press the 1 key in order to show the next piece, which is just strange.  Maybe a performance related thing for computers back then?  I have no idea.

The game also has no music and the only sound effects are little beeps when you clear a line or get game over.  Suffice to say I didn’t play this version very long.  I just played enough to fill the high score table (another new feature of this version over the original) with some pretty lousy scores, some of which were me making an early mistake and just giving up anyway.

Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version (MS-DOS)

Here is where things get interesting and legally sketchy.  Sometime after the AcademySoft version set Europe on fire, Robert Stein of Andromeda Software encountered the game at the SZKI Institute of Computer Science in Budapest, Hungary along with some clones for the Apple II and Commodore 64 created by some of the students.  After playing the game, he was immediately interested and was referred by them to the Soviet Academy of Sciences from where they had originally received the game.

When Stein wired a message to them displaying his interest, it was originally Pajitnov that was tasked with negotiating.  However, due to Pajitnov having difficulty responding to the telex and the general Soviet disinterest in actually marketing something, Stein did not receive a reply for weeks.  However, unbeknownst to the Soviets, Stein had already sold the rights to a British software company known as Mirrorsoft headed by Robert Maxwell along with its American affiliate, Spectrum HoloByte.

Despite not yet being successful with negotiating the rights from the Academy, Stein assured Mirrorsoft that the rights to the computer versions of the game were in their hands.  Mirrorsoft developed and (along with Spectrum HoloByte) published a version that was widely ported throughout 1987 and 1988 to a variety of the many computers used in the United Kingdom such as the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and of course the MS-DOS based IBM PC compatible, which is again the version I played.

Despite being British-developed, this version oozes Russian flair, due to Mirrorsoft wanting to play up the foreign, second-world mystique.  The graphics on the title screen are almost entirely red.  After a certain point the title itself changes to being the phrase “Play Tetris!” written in Russian with Cyrillic characters (pictured above).  The title screen graphic itself depicts St. Basil’s Cathedral, prominently displaying its iconic onion domes.  It also depicts a Cessna plane flying across (pulling a “Play Tetris!” banner), referencing an infamous incident in which a West German pilot, Mathias Rust, illegally landed a Cessna in the middle of Red Square, right in front of the Kremlin.

The difficulty selection screen depicts a map of the Soviet Union, again red.  And within the game itself, as the difficulty level rises, the background image cycles through various Russian scenes, such as Yuri Gagarin’s (and humanity’s) first space flight, many of which look very cool.  The background for level 5 in particular, which shows a Russian space station (pictured below), looks great.  Even the packaging was red and depicted Soviet imagery, with the Cyrillic C constituting the title’s last character resembling a hammer and sickle.  It all very much works in the game’s favor and gives it a lot of identity.

The controls of this game are also a lot better.  You can use the arrow keys (with the Enter key to rotate) or the number pad.  The controls are much more responsive without the strange input queue issue the previous one had.  It has a similar rotation system to the previous version (though very slightly different) and once again only has hard drops.  It still requires a press of the 1 key to display the next piece for whatever reason.  It also contains a height option which generates garbage blocks up to a certain height for you to deal with, similar to Game B in the later Nintendo version.  Overall it plays much better and has much better presentation.

The only shame is that it still lacks music and still only has minimal sound effects.  This is true of all of the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte computer ports, with the sole exception being the Commodore 64 version.  The music is the only notable thing about that version, other than that it’s supposed to be a pretty bad version.  But man, what a song it is.  Clocking in at an insane near 26 minute length, it’s a very interesting song.  It just doesn’t sound very Tetris-y.  More like a weird psychedelic journey into the mind.  But maybe I’m just biased toward the more well-known Russian tunes.  Either way, C64 composers are from another dimension, I swear.

After the runaway success of this game in computer stores across both Europe and the United States, the positive press reached the Academy.  The Soviets were very upset that the game had been marketed without their approval.  Elektronorgtechnica (or Elorg for short), a newly created Soviet ministry handling the import and export of computer products, took over the negotiations from Pajitnov.  Eventually, they did settle on granting Stein the rights to computer versions of Tetris.  Despite initially being published on bogus rights, the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte versions were now tenuously legal.

Bullet-Proof Software version (NES)

However, the situation didn’t remain legally sound for long.  Though he had only received rights to the computer versions, Stein, of course, wanted a cut of the arcade, console, and handheld pie.  He sent a memo back to Mirrorsoft (falsely or perhaps mistakenly) stating that he had secured the console rights and later assuring them that rights to the arcade versions would be coming shortly.  In fact, despite this, Elorg was proving to be a very tough negotiator, maintaining that Stein already owed them a lot of money for the computer versions he sold without their permission.

Again, while Stein was struggling with Elorg, Mirrorsoft sold off the console and arcade rights to Atari.  Atari began work on an arcade version for market in the United States, as well as an infamous NES port of this version which will be discussed later.  Meanwhile, they sold the rights to a version for Japanese arcade markets to Sega, a port of which will also be discussed later.  A third player also entered the fray: Henk Rogers, the president of Bullet-Proof Software, who marketed games in Japan.

Having seen one of the computer versions at a trade show, Rogers approached Spectrum HoloByte to attempt to purchase the rights for Japanese computers and arcades.  After some struggling between the multiple companies, Rogers was granted the rights to the Japanese computer versions but was informed that the Japanese arcade rights had already been sub-licensed to Sega and was told if he wanted to purchase other Japanese rights, he would have to sub-license them from Atari.

After meeting with them he was able to secure rights to market the game in Japan for the Famicom, while Atari still intended to sell their version in the United States.  The game was now split among at least five different companies across multiple markets for multiple platforms.  Bullet-Proof Software developed and published its Famicom version (the next version I played) in Japan on December 22, 1988 along with versions for a number of different Japanese PCs including the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, the Sharp X1 and X68000, and the Fujitsu FM-7.  With their computer, console, and (through Sega) arcade markets filled, the Tetris craze could now thoroughly sweep Japan.

This version is the first console version I played and is pretty much where things start to get very good.  Visually, it also retains the Russian feel that the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte computer versions had, but doesn’t present it quite as strongly.  Its title screen image, also of St. Basil’s Cathedral, is somehow less visually interesting despite having more than two colors and integrating the tetrominoes into the image (I guess implying that you’re building the cathedral in the gameplay?).  It also only has one background during the gameplay depicting a couple of onion domes.

One enormous leg up it has presentation-wise though is the fact that it has music and a wider variety of sound effects.  The title screen music marks the first appearance of the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki“ (often known as the Tetris theme) in a Tetris game.  The in-game music includes two other Russian folk songs, “Kalinka” (or Karinka as the in-game Engrish refers to it) and “Troika”, both of which are also featured in Atari’s version.  The third song featured is an original one, “Technotris”, which actually slaps pretty hard.  The only drawback is the games run pretty long in this version, so any of the songs can get old quickly.

The reason the games run longer in this version is that it is structured very differently from the marathon style of the other versions so far.  In addition to just being difficulty levels, the levels in this version are also literally that.  After clearing a set number of lines, the level completes and it is only then that you are awarded your score.  After the end-of-level scoring display disappears, so too do all the pieces remaining on the field, giving you a fresh slate to work with, at least for the first round of levels.  It also features a lives system, allowing you fail multiple times before a game over.  This ends up making the game feel too easy, at least at first.

Another thing about the game that is immediately noticeable is that drop (of which there is again hard drop only) is mapped to the A button, while rotate is mapped to down.  For me at least, this feels completely backward, but you do get used to it.  Some further nuances of the game are that it used its own rotation system, but this system served as a the predecessor for the Standard Rotation System that would eventually be put in place as The Tetris Company much later tried to standardize the look and feel of the numerous Tetris ports.

In fact, this game is a common lineage for many later Tetris versions, owing to the fact that Bullet-Proof Software was, in the end, one of the few companies to hold on to publishing rights.  Henk Rogers eventually helped Pajitnov found The Tetris Company, essentially making Bullet-Proof Software (later Blue Planet Software) comprise 50% of that company.

Sega version (Genesis)

As mentioned above, Sega received the rights to create a version for Japanese arcade markets from Atari.  This was after a Sega of America employee discovered one of the many versions of the game.  Although these were rights that Elorg had not given away originally, they would eventually be granted to Stein, causing the rights chain that went to this version to be retroactively legal.

Whatever the case, Sega’s arcade version did very well in Japan, releasing in December 1988.  As opposed to the Bullet-Proof Software version, it helped to popularize the marathon style of play instead of the level-based style.  Its Sega Rotation System and other rules became the prototype for many other different versions of Tetris, including the popular Tetris: The Grand Master series.

But specifically, I would like to talk about the version I played, the ill-fated Genesis/Mega Drive port, developed by Sanritsu and intended to have been released sometime in 1989.  Though a prototype exists (and at one point a copy of it was put on auction for a million dollars, due to its extreme rarity), it was shelved due to the copyright issues that would eventually come to a head over the legality of the console versions of the game.  Although, strangely, this version did get a release in the form of Sega’s Mega-Tech hardware based on the Genesis/Mega Drive due to it technically being an arcade game.

Though it is a very faithful recreation of the arcade game, presentation-wise it seems kind of boring.  The title screen consists of a logo written into bricks set over a bland blue-green landscape that seems to have had tetris pieces pulled out of it.  Like the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte versions, the background of the playfield changes as you play (though in this version it’s based on getting tetrises rather than the level rising).  This game, rather than Russian scenes, depicts scenes from prehistory and human history: from an ocean landscape, to dinosaurs, to the Ice Age, to Stonehenge, to more modern buildings and cities, and finally to a futuristic city.

Aside from looking kind of boring, with their look resembling digitized photographs (even though they obiously aren’t, considering the futuristic city and tripod-posture tyrannosaurus), the images are mostly blocked by the playfield.  I didn’t even know the fourth background had a dinosaur until I paused the game.  The arcade version does have a monkey that animates throughout play so that’s one advantage it has, I guess.

The song that you hear for most of the play, “Tetremix”, is also somewhat boring.  It’s a very low-tempo, bassy song (though as you advance through the levels it increases in tempo until it reaches kind of a mid-tempo but that’s it really).  There is a second song that plays when you get dangerously close to the top, along with title screen and ranking entry songs, but none of them are really worth writing home about.

But despite all this, the gameplay in this version does hold up.  It’s the first version I played that has both hard and soft drops.  As mentioned before, it has a precursor to the rotation system seen in the Tetris: The Grand Master series although, strangely, the ceiling also blocks rotation, which took some getting used to.  The scoring system complements the marathon gameplay very well, giving bigger score bonuses the higher a piece lands and therefore encouraging the player to take bigger risks beyond just trying to get a clean and at least four high row stack for a tetris.

The biggest addition to this version, however, are the special item blocks that can be toggled on or off before each game.  If turned on, every ten pieces, a flashing tetronimo will come down.  Depending on which shape it is, it can activate different effects upon being used to clear at least one line.  These effects can include a larger score bonus, raising or lowering the level, or clearing three other nearby lines.

Overall, I didn’t care for this version very much.  I certainly don’t think it’s worth the million dollars.  But I do appreciate what it’s gameplay brought to the table as well as its status as the progenitor of the Tetris: The Grand Master series.  On a more positive note, this version actually did eventually receive a home console port in Japan as part of the Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 28: Tetris Collection for the PS2.  This compilation included the original arcade game along with two Tetris-like sequels made by Sega: Flash Point and Bloxeed.  It also included a new version called Tetris: New Century.

Nintendo version (NES)

Here is one of the versions that everybody knows, along with the Game Boy version.  And these versions only materialized after the rights tensions came to a head in the form of a vicious legal battle between Nintendo and Atari over the console rights to the game.  It began after Nintendo was finalizing their design for the Game Boy and decided they wanted to have Tetris as a pack-in game.  They enlisted the help of Henk Rogers, who they had a positive business relationship with, and who recognized the potential of the Game Boy prototype of the game they showed him.

Rogers began to attempt correspondence with Stein to let him know they should try to secure handheld rights as soon as possible but essentially got the cold shoulder from him.  Stein was in fact still struggling to make deals with the Soviets on his end.  Eventually, Rogers lost his patience and flew to Moscow to secure the rights himself.  Coincidentally and unbeknownst to one another, both Stein and Robert Maxwell’s son, Kevin Maxwell, also ended up flying to Moscow, frustrated with the way the negotiations were going.

Rogers was the first to meet with Elorg at the Academy.  He managed to quickly make a good impression on them, especially Pajitnov himself who he ended up befriending.  With this, he was able to easily secure the handheld rights to the game and signed a contract after only two meetings.  In a cheerful mood after his successful deal, he decided to show them a copy of his Famicom Tetris that he had brought along.  The mood of the room immediately fell off a cliff as the Soviets asked what the game was.  After Rogers explained what it was, they angrily declared they had never sold the console rights.

As Rogers tried to frantically explain how he secured that deal and from whom, he realized that the rights he bought were a sham.  Meanwhile, the Soviets also found out from him that Atari was marketing and sub-licensing arcade rights.  Rights which they also never gave away.  Rogers, wanting to make things right and stay within his benefactors good graces to maintain the deal he just made, agreed to pay them back-royalties for all of the Famicom carts that had sold, including a large advance.  Appeasing them, Rogers realized this was also his chance to secure the console rights for Nintendo.  While Mirrorsoft and Atari were both big contenders, Nintendo was the proverbial 800-pound-gorilla in the room at the time for video games and had very deep pockets.

Sometime later, Stein met with Elorg.  Rather than discussing the arcade and handheld rights, they immediately make him sign an addendum to his computer rights contract.  Focusing on the parts of the addendum concerned with the late fees he owed, he did not pay much mind to the seemingly innocuous line that very clearly defined what a computer is.  This was part of the plan to prevent him from arguing that he did own the console rights as part of the computer rights.  After he eventually decided to sign it, Elorg gave him the arcade rights (which he still had to pay a very large amount of money for), but not the handheld rights.

When Maxwell ended up meeting the Elorg representatives, they simply presented him with the Famicom cart, asking what it was.  Maxwell, not knowing that his own company had sold the console rights to Tetris, maintained that it must be a pirated copy.  This gave Elorg further ground upon which to claim that Mirrorsoft, and by extension Atari, had no right to the console versions of Tetris.  Impressively, within these three meetings, the Soviets had regained complete control of the situation.

As Elorg worked with Rogers as well as officials from Nintendo of America, including Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa, on the case, Lincoln sent a cease-and-desist to Atari, ordering them to stop production of their NES game.  The tensions escalated to the point that the senior Maxwell of Mirrorsoft’s parent company started throwing his weight around, even using his significant ties to convince the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to put pressure on Elorg.

Eventually, once the Nintendo v. Atari trial actually started, it all came down to whether or not the NES and Famicom could be considered computers.  Atari argued that it was, pointing to its extension ports, networking capabilities, and even the fact that Famicom is short for “Family Computer.”  Nintendo’s argument was more straightforward.  The Academy only ever intended to sell the rights to computer versions as explicitly defined in the contract.  The court eventually ruled in favor of Nintendo, who were then able to legally make Game Boy and NES versions of the game.

With that extremely long preamble out of the way, Nintendo was able to make a Game Boy version of Tetris in June of 1989, which became a pack-in.  They followed up with the NES version (which is the version I played) which was developed and published by Nintendo in November of 1989.  With this, the Tetris craze was able to sweep the United States more thoroughly than ever before.  Because the Game Boy version led to sales of Game Boys and more Game Boy games, it was an incredible success for Nintendo.

While I still think the title screen for the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version has the cooler looking rendition of St. Basil’s Cathedral, this one looks pretty slick overall.  The logo and the border around the title screen look very good.  There aren’t any changing backgrounds in this version, which is a shame, but instead the pieces change colors as you advance through the levels which keeps things visually interesting.

Like the Bullet-Proof Software and Atari versions, this one has music with Russian folk flavor.  Music 1 is “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker.  Music 2 is an original composition, but still retains the Russian sound.  Music 3 is another original, but is also recognizable as the song that played when Nintendo put you on hold at the time.  Of these, I typically go with Music 1 most often.  Also, the victory music for Game B is the “Toreador Song” from Georges Bizet‘s opera, Carmen.  Unfortunately, it does not contain “Korobeiniki“ like the Game Boy version does.

Gameplay-wise this version uses the Nintendo Rotation System and lacks a hard drop, but does use soft drop.  It also has a Game B which plays similarly to games using the height option from the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version.  It spawns garbage blocks up to a specified height and challenges you to clear a certain number of lines.  Depending on the height and difficulty you select, you get different victory screens, with the hardest ones showing several Nintendo characters.  Game A also has a victory screen if you get a high enough score, showing a rocket being launched.

With its solid gameplay and presentation, this ended up being the version that I played the longest.  I even ended up getting some halfway not terrible scores.  It also helped that the Retro Achievements site that I used actually had some cheevos for this game that did a good job of encouraging me to shoot for better scores.  The only real drawback to this version is it lacks the multiplayer modes seen in the Game Boy version, but these modes were added to the port of this version included in Tetris & Dr. Mario, so it’s not a total wash.  Overall, this is probably among the best of the early Tetris versions.

Tengen version (NES)

So, this is the version that got the short end of the stick.  Even more than the Sega Genesis version.  Even though this version did actually release (despite the cease-and-desist from Nintendo), after the lawsuit Atari was forced to take it off shelves pending the verdict which was ultimately a loss for them.  This led to hundreds of thousands of copies of the game that they produced but could not sell and were forced to leave to languish in a warehouse.  This was a huge financial loss for them.  It also led to the game being somewhat of a collector’s item, but the copies don’t sell for the extreme amounts the Genesis version does, since there were a lot of copies sold prior to the lawsuit.

Atari’s arcade port was released sometime in 1988 and this port was developed by Atari and published by Tengen in May of 1989.  Tengen was Atari’s console games division and even beyond Tetris was infamous for the legal trouble they were often in.  Prior to the Tetris lawsuit, they landed in hot water for bypassing Nintendo’s lock-out chip on the NES in order to publish unlicensed games, since Nintendo only gave publishers license to create three games a year.

And y’know, it’s really a shame that this game got recalled because it’s actually pretty damn good.  The title screen features the usual cathedral, in a large and colorful rendering with fireworks being set off.  It also features a nice looking border.  While it doesn’t go quite as ham as the computer versions, there is one piece of faux-Cyrillic in the logo with the backwards R.  The graphics on the playfield look pretty basic though and I don’t really care for the way the pieces look.

This version includes one more song than either the Bullet-Proof Software or Nintendo versions.  Two of them are original compositions, “Loginska” and “Bradinsky”, named after one of the programmers and the composer respectively.  Both songs still manage to retain some Russian flavor.  The other two songs are “Kalinka” (still in Engrish in-game despite being done by a western company) and “Troika” which both appeared in the Bullet-Proof Software version.  Of these, my favorite is probably “Kalinka.”  Also included is the traditional Russian song “Katyusha,“ which plays during the scoring screen in between levels.

The gameplay uses its own Atari Rotation System with soft drop only.  Like the Bullet-Proof Software version, the gameplay is level-based, though you still accumulate points during the actual levels, unlike that version.  After clearing a set number of lines, a score screen comes up which calculates bonuses depending on how many singles, doubles, and so on you scored.  Also, unlike the Bullet-Proof Software version, the pieces are not cleared from the screen after completing a level.  There is also a handicap option which is really just the height option seen in the other versions.  The difference here is that the blocks spawned with the handicap are more tightly packed, making it easier to clear them right away.  Unfortunately, it seems as though some of the later level challenges such as randomly spawning garbage blocks present in the Atari arcade version were cut.

The really nice thing in this version however is the multiplayer modes.  Had these modes not been cut, these would’ve been a deciding factor in whether or not to purchase this over the Nintendo version.  It features competitive multiplayer against another player or against the computer.  Also, strangely, it features cooperative play with another player or the computer.  The co-op mode features a very large playfield with two pieces falling at once, one controlled by each player.  It’s a strange mode, but it’s so interesting that I’m glad they included it.  It seems like something that can create a lot of friction between people trying to play it as they accidentally fuck each other over.

Overall, this is actually a great version.  A lot of people at the time of its rocky release and recall argued that it was the better version.  While I do love the Nintendo version, it’s really a tough call.  If it had the little challenges present in the later levels of the arcade version and the multiplayer modes, I would definitely agree.

In the end, Nintendo’s versions of the game definitely came out on top legally.  The Tengen versions were recalled, being a big hit against Atari.  Mirrorsoft collapsed during the legal struggle, although Spectrum HoloByte managed to survive and make a couple of Tetris sequels for computers along with Pajitnov.  Robert Stein made relatively little off the game, but probably could’ve made more had the companies he sub-licensed to (legally or not) paid him royalties.

The big winner other than Nintendo was Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software.  His company managed to continue making Tetris sequels and variants.  Eventually, after the rights to the original game reverted from the Soviet Union to Pajitnov, he and Rogers worked together to form The Tetris Company.  Together they continued the Tetris legal battles, working to remove many of the other versions of the game that had cropped up illegally and also worked to standardize the formula for legally licensed versions.

So, that’s a very brief history of Tetris’s tumultuous early releases, along with my thoughts on some of those versions.  A lot of the material in this, my longest entry yet, is sourced from David Sheff’s Game Over, a book on the business history of Nintendo, which includes a couple of chapters about Tetris.  It’s an extremely interesting story and I obviously couldn’t include the level of detail present in this book, so it’s definitely a recommended read.  Next time, I’ll be continuing my puzzle game gauntlet with some of the early Tetris sequels, starting with Welltris.  Until then, take it easy~

Image Sources:

Electronika 60 screenshot - Tetris Wiki

The rest are screenshots taken by me

[megamoses]

Backblog #7 - Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS)

This time around, I played Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, the fifteenth game in the Fire Emblem series.  It is a strategy RPG developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo on April 20, 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.  Known in Japan as Fire Emblem Echoes: Mō Hitori no Eiyū-ō (translated as Fire Emblem Echoes: Another Hero King), the game is a remake of the second game in the series, Fire Emblem Gaiden, which released exclusively in Japan on March 14, 1992 for the Famicom.  It is the third remake in the series, after Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem.  It’s also the newest game I’ve played thus far for this little backlog blogging thing of mine, being released only about a year ago, and the first game I’ve played from the current console generation!

The original Fire Emblem Gaiden is a pretty stark departure from the first game in the series, containing a ton of changes such as a freely navigable world map that you move the two main characters across in order to fight battles and advance the story, dungeons which feature multiple smaller scale battles, a branching class system (for the villager characters anyway), and unbreakable weapons, that simplify the formula and make it feel more similar to a typical JRPG than a more strategic game like the previous entry.  While most of these changes did not stick around for the next game, they can often be found individually in some of the games later in the series every once in a while (the world map in The Sacred Stones, for example).

The remake throws even more gameplay changes on top of this, ending up making it feel very unique within the series overall.  The Echoes exclusive changes include a casual mode which removes permanent character death (of course, I went with classic mode for my playthrough since it’s a Fire Emblem staple), network rankings and StreetPass support (my profile card name is just MegaMoses by the way, so if you manage to StreetPass with me, uh... that’d be weird), a limited use item called Mila’s Turnwheel which allows the player to rewind to a previous turn and correct mistakes, dungeons now being fully 3D and including a fatigue system, towns and bases now being explored similarly to a visual novel and including base conversations and item forging, a fully realized support system with support conversations, and a new sixth act which is unlocked once the game is beaten featuring a very difficult post-game dungeon.

The remake also features five sets of DLC.  There are two sets of battle maps and dungeons (one for early game and one for late game) that can be used for experience and items, a set of powerful new class promotions for each of the class branches, a set of prequel battle maps, and a set of two battle maps that allow you to recruit four characters from the Fire Emblem 0 (Cipher) card game.  In addition to these, the game has amiibo support.  The two amiibos produced for the game of the two main characters each unlock a small dungeon (more of a gauntlet of battles really).  The Fire Emblem character amiibos from the Smash Bros. line allow you to summon illusory copies of those characters in battle, and any other amiibo just summons an additional monster into the battle.

Despite the formula feeling somewhat simplified by these changes, they are very much welcome and actually address some of my personal misgivings with the last game feeling too aggressively on rails for its RPG elements, since you can progress through the story at your own pace and grind characters to insane levels if you want to by revisting dungeons or allowing enemy groups to continuously spawn from spaces you have not cleared yet.  And although, possibly due in part to these changes, the majority of the game felt a bit too easy (on normal difficulty anyway), at the end of the fourth act the difficulty skyrocketed and I felt my characters were in danger for pretty much the first time.  In fact, it was on the penultimate boss that I finally allowed myself to use the previously untouched Mila’s Turnwheel item for the first time.

The story of the game is a side story to that of Shadow Dragon (hence the Gaiden in the title).  It takes place on the continent of Valentia, far to the west of Archanea, during the two year interim between Shadow Dragon and Mystery of the Emblem.  It even features some characters from Shadow Dragon: the Whitewing sisters and General Camus, making them the characters in the Archanea series with the most appearances, even above Marth himself.

In the game’s backstory, the continent of Valentia was, in ages past, ruled by two patron deities: Duma and Mila.  Duma believed that humans should be defined by their own strength, while Mila believed that humans should be free to pursue a life of peace and luxury.  These conflicting ideals led to a violent war between the two, until they settled it in a divine pact, dividing the continent in two, with Duma ruling the northern country of Rigel and Mila ruling the southern country of Zofia.  The two then pledged never to violate one another’s dominion.

Centuries later, a coup in Zofia causes a civil war to break out, with Rigel quickly becoming involved, thus breaking the divine accord for the first time.  On top of this, the seemingly unending bounty that the Zofians had long been spoiled by seems to have dried up, leading many to believe that something has happened to Mila.  The game features two main characters: Alm and Celica, childhood friends who each embark on their own separate journeys.  Alm ends up leading the Deliverance, a rebel army fighting against the chancellor who instigated the coup and eventually against Rigel.  Celica, meanwhile, sets off to the Temple of Mila to investigate what could have happened to the goddess.

It’s already a more interesting story than Shadow Dragon’s but Echoes improves it even more by adding a lot of elements that flesh out the events and themes of the story as well as the characters.  Of the multitude of newly added characters, Fernand and Berkut do the most to flesh out the “commoners vs. nobility” themes that permeate Alm’s side of the story and make for very good antagonists.  There is also an Echoes exclusive prologue that shows the event in Ram Village that caused Alm and Celica to become separated during their childhood, items known as Memory Prisms that show flashbacks to previously unseen events between characters, and base and support conversations that do a lot to flesh out the individual characters.  The characters even get some characterization during the final battle, with each character having a quote they say at the beginning of it, which is a great detail and really pumps you up for the fight.  The gameplay changes support the increased character focus too.  Since you don’t have to worry about focusing on using a smaller number of characters like in the previous game, there are more opportunities to see them interact.  There were definitely a lot of conversations I did not see in Shadow Dragon due to just not using a lot of the characters, but that could just be on me.

Visually, the game looks great.  All of the sprites during the battle scenes are very colorful and detailed.  Whenever you actually attack another unit the screen zooms down into the map and very smoothly transitions into a full 3D rendering of the attack.  The animations for the attacks all look great (Alm’s animations in his Conqueror overclass just exude big dick energy).  Some of the animations do cause some degree of slowdown though, such as the death spell that many Arcanists have.  The models of the characters all look good, but there are a few cutscenes which make use of them as well and in that context, it really draws attention to their flaws.  The majority of the cutscenes, however, are done in a visual novel style, with great looking character portraits and CGs by the character designer, Hidari (known for his work on the Atelier series).  His new designs for all the characters are all great, with some of my favorites being Clair, Gray, Boey, and Emma (from the Cipher DLC).

The music is all also very good, with the standout track for me being one of the songs that plays during Celica’s battles, “With Mila’s Divine Protection.”  One detail that I like a lot is the way the world map and battle themes change as you progress through the game, with the world map theme changing with each act (finally adopting a melancholy tone upon crossing the border into Rigel) and the battle themes gaining more instrumentation upon the start of the third act.  It’s a little touch that makes progress feel that much more satisfying.  The voice acting is also quality, with Berkut probably having the standout performance, pivoting from sounding like a pompous dickhead to a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum with ease.

Overall, I very highly enjoyed this game and cannot recommend it enough.  It’s definitely one of the ones I was most looking forward to getting to.  So much so that I went ham and got the limited edition of the game (which comes with a very nice artbook, the soundtrack, and a set of pins of the battle sprites) and the Alm and Celica amiibo set.  I also ended up getting a New Nintendo 3DS (the one with the SNES design), since all I had from before was the original model.  And after playing on the new model, the screen just seems comically small.

But anyway, the only things I really have left to do in the game is the post-game dungeon, maxing out all of my characters, and unlocking all of the awards (basically in-game achievements).  The post-game dungeon seems like it’s difficult enough that all of these things will end up going hand-in-hand, so I figure I may as well save all of this for an eventual hard mode playthrough and move on to the next game.  Since the next game on my list would be Dr. Mario, I’ll be taking another short genre detour into falling block puzzle games.  After all, it’d be strange to play something like Dr. Mario without first playing the grandaddy of all falling block puzzle games: Tetris.  And that’s what I’ll be playing next time.  Until then, take it easy~

Image Sources:

Box Art - Fire Emblem Wiki

Ending CG - Serenes Forest

[megamoses]

Backblog #6 - Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (DS)

As I said at the end of my last post, this time I played the original Fire Emblem!  Well, sort of.  What I actually played was the eleventh game in the series, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, which is a remake of the original game (the second remake of it and the second remake in the series overall if you count Book One of Mystery of the Emblem, which this includes elements from), titled Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryu to Hikari no Ken in Japan, and translated as Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.  It is a strategy RPG originally developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo in Japan only on April 20, 1990 for the Famicom.  The remake was likewise developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo worldwide on August 7, 2008 for the Nintendo DS.

Fire Emblem was Intelligent Systems’ next big strategy game coming off of Famicom Wars, so naturally there are some similarities, with a few major differences.  The setting of the Fire Emblem games of course have a medieval fantasy theme compared to the Wars series’ vaguely modern setting.  They also were more story-driven from the very beginning as opposed to the (first few at least) Wars games having no story at all other than “these nations don’t like each other.”

The big gameplay difference is the larger focus on individual units, as the overall concept of the game was to combine the strategic elements of Famicom Wars with that of a JRPG, creating an early establishing example of a strategy RPG.  As opposed to Famicom Wars where you are expected to play very aggressively, pumping out gigantic offensive lines of faceless units to fight and die by the dozens, Fire Emblem has you playing more defensively.  You can’t produce units at bases or anything like that, you just recruit characters you meet along your journey.  Both since these are actual characters that permanently die when defeated (with a death quote and dramatic music to boot) as opposed to faceless mooks and because you actually put work into them via a leveling system and equipping them, you typically want to avoid sending them to their deaths (or just reset if you fuck up and let someone die, since you feel like a shitheel for letting them get killed).

Of course, the remake throws a wrench into that by locking the new gaiden chapters behind dead units.  In order to unlock the majority of these chapters you need to have fewer than a set number of units alive at certain points in the story.  The game even makes it clear that having to sacrifice units is on the table from the beginning by unavoidably forcing you to sacrifice a unit in the final remake-exclusive prologue chapter.  Granted, this is clearly supposed to be a second playthrough kind of thing that gives you an alternate take on the story in which the war isn’t comically one-sided in Marth’s favor with him just steamrolling across the continent with zero losses.  But on the flipside, it is pretty dumb from a gameplay perspective to have to lose on purpose to access content.  Because I can’t really see anyone stumbling into these gaiden chapters naturally.  The game isn’t really all that difficult.  And according to my Fire Emblem correspondent, @the-loli-closet, this really is the only Fire Emblem game to do anything like this, so I guess it wasn’t very well received.

As for the story, being the first game in the series and a Famicom-era JRPGs, it’s pretty minimal.  The Shadow Dragon, Medeus, has resurrected after having been defeated during a cataclysmic war 100 years prior and allies with the dark sorcerer, Gharnef, to begin conquering the continent of Archanea once again.  The young Prince Marth of Altea, descendant of the hero that slew the dragon previously, is forced to flee his country after Altea’s neighbor, Gra, betrays them, killing his father and stealing the sword that slew Medeus, Falchion (the titular Blade of Light).  This is all fleshed out in more detail in the remake’s exclusive prologue.  The main game picks up some years later after Marth embarks to take back his homeland from the forces that have allied with Medeus.  It’s not too much to write home about compared to some of the other Fire Emblem games, especially the characters, but I’m willing to give it a pass of course, being the very first one, since it hadn’t really found its identity as a very character focused series yet.  One thing I will give it, especially for the time, is that the scale of the world feels grander than most of its contemporaries, with multiple established countries that each have their own histories and politics, making it almost feel more akin to a high fantasy novel than most other JRPGs of the time.  Though this sense of grandeur could come from the fact that you can’t freely walk around the locales and expose to yourself how small the world truly is.

Gameplay-wise, one thing that really stressed me out about the game (and this type of game in general) is that you don’t really ever have time to stop and breathe.  By which I mean, you are forced by the structure of the game to always move forward along with the story progression, which is fine, but knowing that experience for characters and even opportunities to buy equipment is in limited supply felt stressful to someone like me that likes to try to do things at least close to perfectly.  But really this is where the difficulty of the games comes from.  You really need to pick a company of characters (typically unpromoted, since they’ll end up with better stats than pre-promoted characters in the long run) that you really dedicate yourself to building up and defeat enemy units in such a way to spread experience efficiently between only these units in order to be very successful.

One way to sort of get around this is by grinding in the arenas, though it’s somewhat of a point of contention among Fire Emblem fans whether or not this is a bullshit tactic to use.  And it’s pretty risky to do anyway since saves are in limited quantities on the maps.  You have to do it for a long time to get much out of it and it’s pretty easy to accidentally let a unit die in the arena.  Also it feels pretty embarrassing to see the chapters in which you abused arenas in this way scroll by on the campaign summary after beating the game and seeing the huge disparity in the number of turns you took so you could fuck around in the arenas.  I don’t know if I’ll even bother too much with them next time, all things considered.

Surprisingly few earth shatteringly major gameplay changes were added onto the remake.  The most major things outside of the new prologue and gaiden chapters is the addition of a reclassing system that debuted in this entry in which you can make lateral class changes outside of promotions (for example, reclassing Caeda from a pegasus knight to a mage) and convenience changes like one-time use savepoints on the maps and the convoy being accessed through Marth instead of a stationary building.  Other than this it’s just a litany of smaller engine changes that are taken from the later games that mostly influence how values are calculated (like the weapon triangle, for example).  The graphics and music mostly look fine, though I’m really not a fan of the pre-rendered sprites used by the remake and its followup, New Mystery of the Emblem.  They look very muddy compared to the very nice-looking spritework of the previous games.  Thankfully though, later games went with much better looking fully realized 3D graphics.

Other than the way the gaiden chapters work and the pre-rendered spritework, I can’t say I really had any problems with this game.  It was enjoyable and felt like a good stepping stone into a series I’m not very familiar with, since it combined the overall experience of the original with the niceties of the later games.  I’m actually very much looking forward to the next game I’ll be playing: the remake of the second game, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, which looks and sounds great by all accounts.  I’ll be firing that one up just as soon as I get it in the mail.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #5 - Mendel Palace (NES)

The game I played this time, which like last time was a game I previously had moved on from, was Mendel Palace (Quinty in the original Japanese release) by Game Freak.  It is an action-puzzle game published in Japan by Namco on June 27, 1989 for the Famicom and in North America by Hudson Soft on October 12, 1990 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  It was later ported to the Wii U Virtual Console in Japan only.

The game is the debut release of future Pokémon creator, Game Freak.  Prior to this entry into the video development industry, Game Freak was simply the name of Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori's self-published video game fanzine, which began running in March of 1983.  The game was designed by Tajiri and features art by Sugimori.  The American version, of course, takes the "angry eyebrows Kirby” approach and ditches the cute Sugimori art in favor of designs with more attitude (seen in the title screen above and on the American box art), which look just terrible.

The plot, especially in the American version, is pretty bare bones, as could be expected from an NES action game.  The plot, which can be read in the manual, is your standard rescue-the-princess kind of story.  The hero, Bon-Bon, must rescue Princess Candy after her dolls come to life, cast her into an eternal sleep, and cart her off to the titular Mendel Palace.  The Japanese version provides a bit more detail and whimsy.

In this version, the characters all live in a country of dolls.  The protagonist is named Carton (with the second player character being named Parton!) and the damsel is Jenny.  The plot to capture Jenny is orchestrated by Carton’s sorceress younger sister, the titular Quinty.  After Carton and Jenny fall in love, Quinty becomes jealous of the attention she is receiving and manages to convince her and Carton’s three older brothers to kidnap her, who comply with the hopes that Quinty will pick one of them as a favorite.  I don't think Quinty or the brothers are ever named in any of the American material.  Maybe Quinty's American name is Mendel?  I guess?  Whatever, I'll be using the Japanese names because I like them better anyway.

In any case, when the game starts you off on a map screen, allowing you to play through the eight dollhouses surrounding the central palace in any order.  Upon entering any of the dollhouses, the objective is to defeat all of the dolls inside by flipping tiles in order to slide them into the walls.  In addition to regular tiles, there are also others, such as star tiles, which act as coins and give you an extra life when you collect 100; shockwave tiles, which flip all other tiles in all four cardinal directions; and the bane of my fucking existence, the portal tiles, which spawn in another enemy whenever they appear.

Each of the initial eight dollhouses feature a unique type of doll, posing various levels of challenge.  The easiest ones are the walkmen, which just pursue the player and, in later stages, split into two smaller versions if they are slid without them hitting a wall.  They aren't even really good at pursuing the player, since they cannot walk into you if you stop moving.  The others are much more challenging, such as the jumpers which cannot be slid while they are mid-jump, the mimics which move when you move and flip tiles at the same time you do, or the swimmers which quickly swim across the room and flip tiles behind them as they go. Each dollhouse contains ten rooms, the tenth of which usually contains a boss encounter (save for the walkmen dollhouse).

The bosses of the initial eight dollhouses are either extremely powered up versions of the dolls in the dollhouse or a fight with one of the brothers (though in the American release, some of the boss fights against the brothers are replaced with fights against Quinty).  The brothers simply hop over you and can typically be baited into hopping next to a wall where you can easily defeat them.  Quinty will use her magic to turn you into a doll, which allows her to slide you into walls to defeat you.  But if she turns you into a powerful type of doll such as a sumo wrestler, who can flip rows of tiles, you can turn this against her.

The central palace (Mendel Palace in the North American version) contains all eight types of dolls and ends with a fight with one of the brothers followed by a cutscene of Quinty whisking you away to her true palace in the clouds.  The palace in sky contains a ninth type of doll and ends with one last brother fight followed by a final battle against Quinty.  As mentioned before, in the Japanese version you only fight the brothers in the dollhouses, so in this version, this is the only time you fight her.

So, as you can see the game has a lot of different elements that it plays with.  Some of them seem pretty simple at first, but it quickly ratchets up the difficulty in each area with different tile configurations for each room.  A lot of the most difficult rooms feature large amounts of portal tiles, which spawn in new enemies as you defeat them, forcing you to think of ways to quickly get rid of them.  Other rooms will simply box you in with large amounts of block tiles which block your path or limit your options with large amounts of bolted tiles which you cannot flip.

However, a lot of this difficulty is sidestepped by the fact that you have infinite continues.  This allowed me to hammer through the game pretty quickly.  But now that I've beaten it and figured out strategies for a lot of the tougher points by just bashing my head into them I can see myself minimizing the continues with practice.  The game also has a secret Extra Palace mode which can be accessed by holding Start + Select and then resetting your system and consists of a linear set of 100 new, more difficult levels.  If I ever come back to this game it will be to play the extra mode.

Graphically, all of the sprites and animations in the game are very cute, which of course goes with Sugimori's art very well and clashes pretty badly with the North American art.  Quinty in particular has a really cute design, so I felt kind of bad during the ending because she is just crying in the corner of the room while Carton and Jenny have their little moment.  The music by Junichi Masuda is very catchy and reminescent of his later work with the Pokémon series.  A friend of mine pointed out while I was streaming the game that the opening of the boss battle theme sounds like it could be the fanfare that plays during the transition into a wild Pokémon encounter.

So, even though I pretty much charged through this game continues blazing, I ended up enjoying it.  I liked the cute style and all of the twists it threw in to the relatively simple formula.  The game also has co-op multiplayer which might be another reason to revisit it, on top of the extra mode.  I should point out that another new thing I did while playing this game was used the Retro Achievements website via the RetroArch multi-system emulator, which I plan to do for other games in the future where possible.  Next time I'll be playing the original Fire Emblem by Intelligent Systems.  Until then, take it easy~

[megamoses]

Backblog #4 - Famicom Wars (NES)

The past was alterable. The past had never been altered. Red Star was at war with Blue Moon. Red Star had always been at war with Blue Moon.

For this entry's game, I went back to a game I had previously moved on from.  You might recall from my Mother entry that I temporarily gave up on both Famicom Wars and Mendel Palace.  But after completing Vegas Dream last time, I decided to give Famicom Wars another shot and actually ended up making progress.  So, the game I played this time was Famicom Wars by Intelligent Systems.  It is a turn-based tactics game released in Japan only on August 12, 1988 for the Famicom and was later re-released on the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U Virtual Consoles all also in Japan only.  It is the first game in the Wars (or Nintendo Wars) series that eventually finally made its way to North American and European markets with Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance in 2001.

I played the game using a fan translation by aka translations, which simply translates all of the menus and even adds some cute little icons for the menu at the bottom of the screen, to prevent wasted space due to the vertical aspect of each item in the menu.  Specifically, I should say I used a patch by Spinner 8 and friends that was built on the aka translations patch as an addendum, allowing it to be applied to the verified dump of the ROM, since the original was made for an overdump.  There is also a patch by pacnsacdave which translates the logo into English as well, but I wasn't interested in that and found the original logo to look much nicer than his anyway.

There really isn't any plot to speak of.  You can play as either Red Star (known as Orange Star in the North American and European versions of the later games) or Blue Moon, though some maps suggest that they were designed with Red Star in mind by giving Blue Moon a significant advantage to add to the difficulty, such as the seventh map, Mist, which starts Blue Moon out with twenty cities and Red Star out with zero.  There are fifteen maps that you can play in any order (though I just went down the list in order) and two unlockable maps.  The objective of each map is to either wipe out every last enemy unit (which is what I did for all of them) or capture their headquarters.

The types of units you can build at your headquarters or at your factories, airports, or seaports are pretty standard fare for this type of game, with infantry, tanks, helicopters, bombers, battleships, and the like.  I probably got the most mileage out of the mechanized infantry and helicopters, electing to use them whenever possible to build a front line far away from my headquarters as quickly as possible and keep up the pressure by sending out a new mechanized infantry transported by helicopter each turn.  Plus, the helicopters made good shields for the other units since the only things that could effectively get rid of them were other aerial units (except for bombers) and anti-air units and if I built this offensive quickly enough I wouldn't have to worry about that until there was plenty of support to keep it going.

But make no mistake, this is a pretty difficult game, even after coming back to it and having the basics "click" for me, something I'm sure people who have played the later games can attest to.  Like any strategy game, early mistakes in any given map can really set back you back later on.  The map I was stuck on from before was the third map, Triangle, which was the first to feature aerial units and had each player's base on a separate island.  This is the map that forces you to learn the above (admittedly very effective) strategy.  But because it takes a turn to load a unit into the helicopter, two to fly it to the opposite island, and another turn to unload it (and only with both the copter and the intended drop off point on a plain or a city) it is very easy for your offensive to fall apart completely if you let up on that pressure for even a single turn.

That said, when you see your big wall of units start to coalesce and the tide starts to shift in your favor, it feels very satisfying, due in no small part to the difficulty.  There’s nothing quite like struggling for several turns to eventually see the AI opponent start to command all of their units to fall back and to start taking fewer and fewer actions each turn because you're gobbling up all of their options by capturing city after city.  Although, I should say I played on the standard difficulty.  The more difficult AI would probably wipe the floor with me.  Also, I haven't played either of the unlockable maps yet, though I do plan to come back to them one day, possibly before playing the next game in this series.  They look pretty rough though.  In addition to being a very large map, the first one starts out with several heavy Blue Moon units already halfway to your base, forcing you on the defensive early, depending on what the AI decides to do with these units.  So, these maps are quite daunting.

As far as the graphics and sound go, there's not really all that much to say.  The graphics get the job done for this type of game and the little animations that play when doing things like capturing a city or loading a unit into a transport are charming.  They also feature little voice samples that I can't understand at all (it kind of sounds like the infantry say "Shut up!" when they hop into transports) but are also cute.  Although, I eventually turned these animations off to save time, since the maps tend to take a while to beat.  There are two sets of music that you can toggle between.  Music A seemed to make Red Star sound more heroic and Music B the opposite, so I ended up sticking with Music A so I didn't feel like as much of a bastard when I did things like callously bomb a single infantry unit that was stranded by itself and finally about to capture a city after several turns in order to win instead of just capturing the enemy headquarters.

All in all, I really ended up enjoying this game, so I'm glad I went back to it and stuck with it.  The difficulty made it a very satisfying experience, although the maps could be very long and daunting to beat at times, especially the larger ones.  I might even see if I can trick one of my friends into playing multiplayer with me to see how well my strats hold up against a non-AI opponent.  Probably not well!  Anyway, next time, I might give Mendel Palace another shot as well.  If not, the next item on the list would actually be the original Fire Emblem, also by Intelligent Systems.  Until then, take it easy~

Links:

Spinner 8 and friends Fan Translation (based on the aka translations' patch)