The Ninja Warriors (Again) (ザ・ニンジャウォーリアーズアゲイン) - Super Famicom/SNES

I remember walking into an Arcade and seeing this massive 3-screen spectacle full of jumping ninjas and army guys. It was probably the single most impressive game in the place at first glance. The Ninja Warriors was an immediate draw and drained two-quarters right out of my pocket. The animation was fluid and smooth, battle damage was brilliantly indicated as pieces of your character's clothes ripped off, the music was a pumping synth-rock and the entire experience was top-notch at first glance. The problem was that there really wasn't much of a game there once you dug in beyond the initial surface. You walked to the right and used your two or three moves against an endless army of nameless mooks. After about 15 minutes I was bored to tears.

Taito used a similar 3-screen setup for its Darius games. In fact, instead of just putting three screens side-by-side and dealing with the bezels, the first and third screens sat down in the cabinet and pointed up at mirrors that surrounded the middle, forward facing, monitor. The gave a nearly seamless extra widescreen that was impossible with any other technology of the time and like movie magic that's all smoke and mirrors was an unmistakable attention grabbing special effect in the arcade that's still not matched in the home experience today.

Still this game proved popular enough to receive quite a few home ports (minus two of the screens) to most of the major systems of the time. The TurboGrafx-16/PCEngine and the SegaCD/MegaCD ports were probably the best. However, the basic gameplay remained sadly unchanged and the game more or less fell out of memory.

So when Taito decide to release Ninja Warriors for the SNES/Super Famicom I think it was assumed it would be yet another direct port. Instead Taito decided to give the job to Natsume and gave them more or less free reign to properly adapt the game to the home market.

Natsume kept the signature female robot ninja, the army of nameless mooks, the great graphics and animation and the title and then pretty much tossed the rest. What came out of the complete redesign processes is probably one of the most polished games of the 16-bit generation.

The arcade also had a second player male ninja, which in this version was amped up into a huge mechanized nunchuck whipping monstrosity and then added a third robot with bladed forearms to literally tear through the enemy. Taking this group of robot killers, the game then blessed them each with an surprisingly large move list. So large that I'm still finding new moves and ways to use the characters years later. The character play kind of like a cross between a full-on fighting game like Street Fighter II and Final Fight but is unique enough to feel completely like its own game.

Gameplay here is king.

There's other differences as well. This is one of those rare beat-em-ups that's not set in a simulated 3d space (often called a belt-scroll). You'd think that the lack of the extra dimension would limit the gameplay options, but somehow it still works and I think keeps the game moving at a faster pace. Instead of walking around groups of enemies for better position, or exploiting bugs in the hit boxes, you have to jump around or throw individual enemies to group them.

There's also loads of tossable items, motorbikes, computer consoles, crates full of lifebar energy and more. The environments are also full of destructible background bits, energy conduits, vats and other sundry -- toss an enemy through the air and his lifeless corpse takes out some valuable equipment and six of his closest friends. It's unbelievably fun.

There's also loads of enemies that all use different attack strategies. Even the palette swap enemies act differently. Some hang back, then come in for a low attack, others run in direct, others are tall armored robots. There's even entire groups of martial arts experts and long range snipers. Bosses are similarly varied and creative. From a light bending predator like to a cane wielding bond villain who can call on an orbiting ion cannon. On top of this, the levels toss all manner of cinematic special effects at you. In a few places you have to dodge mortars, helicopters firing a side-mounted vulcan and more. This game keeps tossing more and more at you and never gets boring.

Sound effects are pretty standard Super Famicom stuff: they're fine, don't get in the way, and get the job done - but nothing really to write home about. Music is the same, nothing fancy, but fades into the background and keeps things moving. You won't find lots of covers on youtube for the otherwise forgettable tunes.

I really want to pound in the point how polished this game is. The tiniest details were clearly sweated over, from menu graphics on. There's nothing that really stands out and makes you think that this a B grade effort. Natsume went all out. And it's this detail that let's you kick back, relax and bring robotic murder to hundreds of enemies for about an hour. How it doesn't make more top-10 or top-20 lists is beyond me.

Life Force (ライフフォース) - Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom

Life Force is confusing. Not the game itself, but the origin of this weird mini-spin-off from the Gradius series. Actually, it's a refinement of Salamander which is a spin-off from Gradius and generated quite a few ports. Each port is seemingly designed and built different from all the others; each port subtly different from each other in everything from strategy to powerups. I might do a comprehensive Life Force/Salamander/Gradius article one of these days, but for now I want to focus on a specific version of Life Force, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version.

Why single this port out? Well to be honest, because it was the one I grew up playing. I'm only going to touch on the Famicom version because it's a bit different than it's American sibling in certain subtle ways. Still, I think it's important to understand where Life Force for the NES came from using some very broad strokes.

As mentioned before, Life Force is a spin-off from the Gradius series -- which first found life as a 1985 Arcade release. Some credit Gradius as a refinement to a 1981 release called Scramble which I don't personally buy except that both games came from the same company so yeah, I'm sure there's some influence.

The original Gradius is an interesting game, a bit rough around the edges, but sets the groundwork for the rest of the series (and all of the spin-offs over the years) with a pretty specific set of immediately recognizable power ups (speed, ripple lasers, ghost "options", etc.) and a unique system for earning those powerups. You play through a short stage where you have both a chance to earn powerups as well as get softened up a bit before facing a recurring boss. An entire play through takes under 15 minutes if you can handle the brutal difficulty.

Key to the Gradius experience is a clever powerup system. Along the bottom of the screen is a "Power meter" that functions a bit like a real-time in-game store. As you play, certain enemies or collections of enemies drop a powerup token. Each token you collect advances the bar one step. When it lands on a power up you want, you hit the power up button to "buy" it.

It's a unique and elegant system that gives the series a surprising amount of strategy. Do I hold onto my tokens to buy a better powerup or get something I can use now? It also makes dying absolutely devastating until you can buy your way back to power. But before long you're filling the screen with death and it's so satisfying.

A year later, when Salamander hit the Arcades in Japan, Konami tossed the power meter for direct item pickup and added alternating horizontal and vertical levels and more variety to the game (echoed later in Axelay). In addition, they polished the formula, tightenedd up the gameplay and level design and gave it a more consistent theme musically and added more bosses. It seemed a great sequel to Gradius in every way. After some tweaks, Life Force hit the arcades in the West, then tweaked a bit more hit the Arcades in Japan (again?) then finally started getting ported everywhere. The pollination between the games was very tight at this point and was ripe to give birth to the NES classic. Yet, something just didn't seem quite right.

At the time, replicating the arcade experience at home was the mantra, and several other ports of Life Force tried their darnedest to keep the experience intact. However, for the NES port, Konami made an interesting decision. Make a home console port themed around Salamander/Life Force, with options, alternating horizontal and vertical levels awesome music and all that, but deviate from the strict Life Force experience and give it the strategy of the power meter. This combination clicked.

These changes turned the 15 minute arcade game into a 30 minute home game with lots of strategy, replayability and challenge. Toss in two-player support and you've just made a hit.

In fact, the two player aspect of the home game are some of the best parts. Levels are cleverly crafted to work well as both a single player game, with choices as to where to fight, and a two player game, with loads of separate play areas to fight and power up in. In addition, levels are also full of incredible variety. Where most shmups might use a single background per level, Life Force casts your ship through open space, narrow corridors, blasting through regenerating barriers dodging giant fangs and more. Finally, levels are longer than Gradius' too short design, but never exhaust the player or bore them. Life Force hits the perfect ratios of level length/power ups/boss fights. It's almost impossible that this is an 8-bit game, and then it's almost impossible that this is a fairly early NES game. It's no doubt due to the visionary direction of Shigeharu Umezaki -- who was also responsible for the NES/Famicom version of Contra, the Castlevania series and Blades of Steel.

Graphics are among the very best on the NES. Holding their own even against late releases with lots of fancy add-on chips. Certain set pieces, like doding solar flares while flying through a star still impress. Enemies are varied and move in interesting patterns. Articulated arms reach for you while swarms of ground enemies fire at  you and flying enemies swoop in attack formation.

The music in Life Force is simply awesome. Memorable themes draw the game consistently together. It's the remarkable work of the indomitable Mika Higashino, responsible for the music in many Konami games.

To give you an idea how great the music in Life Force is, I think it's useful to look at what it turns into when freed from the constraints of the NES's restrictive sound system.

As sublime piano music

As rock anthem guitars

Or explosive metal

Or my favorite, a fully realized dramatic movie theme

There's hundreds of remixes of the music, testament to the quality of the ideas Ms. Higashino put into her work. It's not her magnum opus, but it's video game music of the highest possible quality.

Even after all these years, Life Force still plays like an incredibly modern game. A modern player would feel at home, with it's mature power-up system, great music and reasonable challenge. It's not one of those bullet hell shooters all the kids play these days, but there's nothing here a modern player wouldn't "get". No awkward design choices that flag it as a primitive experiment in game design. Life Force, it's a game that wants to be played, do it.

Alisia Dragoon (アリシア ドラグーン) - Genesis/Mega Drive

Originally known for the impossibly cool but virtually unplayable mess known as Thexder, Game Arts was already a pretty mature, but small, Japanese computer game developer when they released Alisia Dragoon (AD). A poor seller during its release period, AD practically oozes with solid competency. Add some innovative light RPG features sprinkled in to spice up the highly responsive action platformer formula and you end up with a really good game that's earned a well deserved cult following over the years. Like fine wine, it's only gotten better with time.

The basic gameplay in Alisia Dragoon is fairly typical for the genre, run around a level jumping from platform to platform, shoot at bad guys, survive until the end. Mechanically, there's not much new here. Yet, AD advances the formula in a few key ways that have earned it much love:

• Your attack is an auto-targeting lightning attack.
• Levels are fairly large and reward exploration with powerups and loads of secret areas.
• You have an AI buddy (well actually four) that follow you around and assist.
• Light RPG elements

Reminding me of Thexder's auto-targeting laser attack in robot mode, I was not surprised to find out the same developer worked on both games. This lightning attack made me think this game would be a breeze at first: face an enemy and push fire, no targeting or strategy. But AD balances out the seemingly overwhelming power of your attack in a few really well designed ways. First, you are practically overwhelmed with enemies, which forces you to pace your progression. Second, as the game advances they simply absorb more punishment, even powering up all the way doesn't completely remedy this. Third, the more intensely you use your attack the weaker it gets (reminiscent of The Legendary Axe on the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine from a couple years before). You have to find a space to rest for a moment to recharge your attack. The late game really requires a surprising amount of nuanced strategy to make it through and can't really be appreciated till you're there (and have found yourself at a bitter end many times to learn your lessons).

The levels in AD are varied, interesting and just large enough to get a little lost in, but not so big that you can get lost in them. You never really wonder where to go as you wander around, yet they at least pretend to offer several choices as you work your way through them. Since there's no time-limit, it's worth taking the time to explore as you'll almost always find something valuable: a power-up, food, fairy helpers, etc. They're really well designed and you never feel like the game is being cheap or cheating.

AD introduces what may be one of the earlier AI controlled allies in a game. Often called "familiars" or "companions", AD let's the player select from one of four (or even none at all) friendly helpers creatures. Each helper has their own life bar and attack level (up to 3). The helper AIs each have different kinds of attacks and use-cases, from tossing boomerangs to unleashing a devastating screen clearing lighting attack. Cultivating your AIs is an important strategy element in the game.

The companions are interesting, and building them up and keeping them alive is definitely an interesting part of the game -- and they can be helpful. But I also kept wishing for them to be a little more...aggressive. There were plenty of times that I was being mercilessly beat upon only to have my dragon or ball of fire or whatever simply sit there and not do much of anything as I yelled at the screen "some friend you are!" Even with everybody all powered up, you never really reach the kind of havoc you wish you could unleash on the enemy. So they're really more of an enhancement than a core game-play mechanic. They're optional enough that I'm sure there's a group of AD players that simply turns the familiar off for a more hard-core game-play experience.

Graphics in Alisia Dragoon are generally very good. You'll see interesting characters in fascinating settings. The range from fantasy to techno alien. However, they have a flavor to them that's like nothing else on the system. I think that's because Game Arts really cut their teeth in the computer games market as well as most of the design work and graphics done by anime studio, Gainax, better known for computer dating sims when they do work on games.

It's almost like AD looks like a very good guess of what a computer games company thinks arcade style graphics on a console look like. It's like having a world class classically trained portrait painter draw a picture of Mario. It'll be beautiful, accurate, have sophisticated brush technique and treatment of lighting, but it won't really be the cartoon Mario everybody's used to seeing. In the same sense, the character designs in AD seem almost overworked and scream for a higher resolution screen to capture it all - they would definitely be more at home on a Japanese computer.

Music and sound effects are in many ways the same bag. Like nothing you've ever really heard on the console, but really well done. Perhaps then it won't come as a surprise that the music and sound engineering also was sub-contracted out to a company they worked with on other occasions Mecano Associates (also known for the music in Silpheed).

I'd rate the music in Alisia Dragoon a tad higher than the graphics. There's some really great music in the game. Stretching from Baroque harpsichord music to upbeat new age rock the music services and enhances each level well. The Genesis sound chip is bent in some pretty great ways to provide subtle reverb and echo effects, drum machine, orchestrations and organ leads that really sound fantastic. Sound effects are likewise well designed and get out of the way. You main attack sound never gets annoying, and various clumps, bumps and explosions are sound about as good as you'd expect. A few of the sound effects, namely an enemy teleportation effect, are simply awesome and really caught my attention the first couple times I'd heard it.

Gameplay in Alisia Dragoon is interesting. I kept finding I wanted to compare it to something else. And I think this is one of the reasons the game never really broke out on its own. For me the main game that kept coming up in my thoughts was Castlevania.

For many years Sega sought to produce a Castlevania clone for their systems. Master of Darkness for the Sega Master System is one early attempt. But none of them really quite caught the Konami magic. Despite different gameplay mechanics, the great music and fantasy setting really kept bringing me back to that conclusion however. A real Castlevania game wasn't to hit the system until two years later.

There's really not much else to say about Alisia Dragoon. It's an unbelievably solid and polished game, well worth playing. But it probably won't drive you histrionic with unbelievable levels of fandom. You'll be rewarded with about an hour long playthrough, some great music, some cool locations and interesting gameplay. If you beat it, you'll be rewarded with a pretty cool ending and one of the better songs in the soundtrack. It's kind of sad that AD doesn't have a bigger legacy. It's not even a virtual console game. Game Arts these days is too busy printing money with its Lunar games to really try and revive a pretty great game.

Further Reading

• http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/alisia/alisia.htm
• http://www.retrocollect.com/Reviews/retro-review-alisia-dragoon-mega-drive.html
• http://www.honestgamers.com/7549/genesis/alisia-dragoon/review.html

Revenge of the 'Gator/Pinball: Revenge of the Gator/Pinball: 66 Hiki no Wani Daikoushin (ピンボール 66匹のワニ大行進) - Game Boy

Pinball has a surprisingly long, complex, and sometimes seedy history. The progenitors of pinball started from a 17th century variant on various cue sports like billiards (which was itself a variant on the ancient game of bowling) played by the aristocratic class during the reign of the builder of the Palace of Versailles, the Sun King himself, Louis XIV. That's right, early versions of pinball probably filled the recreational areas of the absolute monarch of France.

Pinball's name derives from the historic source of these kinds of table bowling games. It turns out that knocking over tiny pins (a la Bowling) takes forever to set back up for another round. So some early game maker simply nailed the pins into the board, found that the little ball ricocheted nicely and put targets and holes and such around the playfield.

Eventually, the game was refined in different directions and spun out in a number of directions, two of which bagatelle and billard Japonais (Japanese billiards) are important today. Bagatelle remained a popular game and was even brought over by French soldiers to the U.S. during the American War for Independence and remained popular enough for Civil War era cartoons to feature it.

Examples of these games continued to find their way East and West until becoming Pachinko in Japan and Pinball in the U.S.

Okay, maybe not that simple, early games required people to roll the ball up, or hit it with a cue stick, and bounce off of the now embedded pins into scoring holes or targets. It was eventually found, circa 1770 that using a spring launcher to launch the ball to the top of the table and let gravity pull the ball down into a labyrinth of pins was more fun and voila! Pinball!

In the early 1930s coin-operated "pin games", often called "bagatelles", were introduced. The first major hit was Baffle Ball by David Gottlieb (lovingly recreated in Microsoft's Arcade Pinball). Other than the plunger, these were almost entirely games of chance. A shortage of "Baffle Balls" inspired a Gottlieb distributor who started making their own games, starting with "Ballyhoo" and eventually spun out to become Bally.

I remember as a kid watching what I thought was a bizarre game of pinball on the Honeymooners (The Jackie Gleason Show). In the episode, Two Men on a Horse, the main character Ralph attempts to win some quick money from a Pinball machine by drawing back the plunger, shooting the ball and then...nothing. No flippers or bumping the table or anything. The scene puzzled me for years.


It turns out flippers weren't introduced (Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty) and made common until around the time of that episode. The familiar double flipper system, common to all modern pinball games, finally stuck with Gottlieb's Spot Bowler in 1950. And with that the basic format of modern pinball was set.

Additions since then, score keeping, bumpers, sounds, lights are all derivative of this basic system. Pinball machines eventually shed their gambling past with a virtuoso display of flipper skills in court and it opened the game up to play by people young and old for years.

The ban ended when Roger Sharpe (a star witness for the AMOA – Amusement and Music Operators Association) testified in April 1976 before a committee in a Manhattan courtroom that pinball games had become games of skill and were not games of chance, that is, gambling. He began to play one of two games set up in the courtroom, and – in a move he compares to Babe Ruth's home run in the 1932 World Series – called out precisely what he was going to shoot for, and then proceeded to do so. Astonished committee members reportedly voted to remove the ban, which was followed in other cities. (Sharpe reportedly acknowledges his courtroom shot was by sheer luck.)

At about the same time, it was realized that pinball could be simulated reasonably well with current game technology and video pinball was born. Versions of more or less faithful video pinball games started coming out for computers, arcades and home consoles and have continued on to smart phones and probably far into the future.

A early 1989/1990 release by HAL Laboratory for the Game Boy (and later 3DS and Virtual Console), Revenge of the 'Gator (RotG) is a classic on the platform. At first glance it seems like a basic enough, 'Gator themed pinball game for the portable. There's a couple of easily accessible levels on the playfield with some interesting targets and bumpers and such. A fun, light and upbeat tune plays on in the background. There's nothing amazing about RotG, but it's supremely competent at first glance. Good enough for casual play for a few minutes, but like any pinball game, deep enough for long play.

As you play, you soon realize that the targets are more than just point multipliers, hitting sets of them open up doors to new areas and turn on blockers to keep your ball from draining to a lower part of the field or down the final drain where it's eaten by a waiting, exaggerated cartoonish alligator.

Two more entire single screen playfields are reachable through these unlocked doors. Other paths lead to single screen bonus stages. And it's here that the designers went wild and had some fun. These other areas play really nothing like the traditional pinball we've come to know and love over the past several decades. Sure there's flippers, but the playfields combine bits of breakout and whack-a-mole with flying baby alligators and other madness. They're fun and a nice reward for climbing the screens that far.

Play-wise, there's some interesting design decisions. Lots of modern pinball games have an elevated track, that's not here. Nor is multiball, bumping the table, or other various themes common to modern pinball. In many ways it feels like a pinball game from the early pre-digital years. The game never really elevates to the kind of panicked frenzy that lots of modern games bring you to. This is really a game you can pick up quickly, play a few relaxing rounds, then put down.

The screen also doesn't scroll, which, while initially alarming, surprisingly helps the game be more playable on the Game Boy's blurry screen. Ball physics are pretty good, with some time you can get a feel for the ball and usually get it to go where you want after a couple hits. One frustration, certain targets reset if you go off that playfield, meaning that a long effort to unlock a door can end with a momentary dip to a lower part of the game.

There's a few songs, a title song, a main playfield song and one for bonus rounds. They all sit comfortably in the background without becoming annoying -- though there's no way to turn it off. Sound effects are well designed and distinct, with different kinds of targets giving appropriate sounds.

Graphics are pretty good for the such an early release and hold up well even to games later in the system's life, and quite frankly even against more modern, colorful games. The art direction has kept the game fresh feeling, and the decision to go with 'gators means the green screen of the Game Boy has meaning.

I think Game Boy Crammer has a good take on the game.

Revenge of the 'Gator is a fun game, it's not the best game, but it's a fun diversion for a bit. The extra play areas and bonus stages means that long play, and investing some time into the game are rewarded. You'll probably see everything there is to see in the game after no more than 5-10 hours of game play, but that's okay -- It's pinball.

The Revenge of Shinobi/The Super Shinobi (ザ・スーパー・忍) - Genesis/Mega Drive

Like any important, revelatory experience, I remember the first time I played The Revenge of Shinobi. A local friend had purchased a Sega Genesis right around the release and brought the whole kit over to my house. I vaguely remembered Shinobi as a very hard, quarter munching arcade side scroller and so passed on it at first. We played through the pack-in Altered Beast a few times, had some fun repeating the terrible voice acting,  "RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE", and then found ourselves promptly bored. Arcade games just don't play the same when you don't have to worry about feeding quarters into the machine -- a fundamental issue with many Arcade-to-Console ports. I think it's also because I was so used to Altered Beast as an arcade title that seeing it reproduced on a home machine, as good as the port was, wasn't terribly impressive to me. It was just a game.

Then we decided to have a go at The Revenge of Shinobi (RoS). At that time the arcade Shinobi was already considered a little long in the tooth, so it seemed natural to us that it would be essentially the same game, running left to right tossing shuriken at a couple types of bad guys, rescuing hostages, that sort of thing. Perhaps it would have some cleaned up graphics and maybe some more digital voices. If I remember correctly, the sequel to Shinobi, Shadow Dancer had already hit arcades and, while adding a new dog helper mechanic, more or less doubled down on the first game's concept. There was no reason to not assume that RoS wouldn't be more of the same -- the arcade experience at home was Sega's modus operandi after all.

What we got was something oh so much better.

In an odd move, Sega, a company who's mainstay at the time was pretty direct arcade to home ports, completely reimagined what Shinobi could be. This was something more commonly seen on the NES with games like Contra or Ninja Gaiden -- a complete rework of the game from quarter munching quick arcade play style to a deeper and more balanced home console gameplay. RoS was an overhaul of the entire franchise, gone were single hit deaths, and simple left-to-right level designs. In was limited ammo, multiple attack options, elaborate ninja magics, power-ups and more complex level designs.

The other impression that hit us immediately was the sense that this was a game that really couldn't be done on previous systems. If you squinted you could imagine a semi-faithful Shinobi on the NES (which did actually happen) or the Sega Master System (which was even better than the NES version), but Revenge of Shinobi was impossible on previous systems -- with parallax scrolling and beautiful lush backgrounds, huge detailed characters and incredible sounding music and digitized voices -- this was something that the old 8-bit machines simply couldn't do. Nothing announced the arrival of 16-bit to me better than RoS.

It's not to say that developers on the older consoles didn't try to respond. I think the closest response any developer could manage came two years later in the form of Sunsoft's Batman - Return of the Joker for the NES. Characters in that game look and move remarkably similar. Heck, even the basic play mechanics are identical -- walk around jump and shoot relatively static bad guys, destroy boxes for power ups. The influence of RoS on the Sunsoft title is noticeable.

I think the influence was more important in attracting developers who wanted to work on this more powerful system. A slew of games followed RoS that also had a similar character size and playstyle -- almost like a game engine that had been licensed out and reused (ESWAT, Dick Tracy, Decap Attack, Alisia Dragoon, Chakan - The Forever Man come to mind immediately). This visual and gameplay style became almost a Genesis hallmark until Sonic and the mascot games of the 90's replaced it.

The music is astonishing. Written by Yuzo Koshiro, it's an imminently intense synth-jazz-pop with occasional rock elements and is highly listenable outside of the game. I personally believe it's the best soundtrack ever produced on the system. It has a certain sound and sense of style (with a very particular sounding drum-kit) that was never replicated. For a soundtrack on one of the first releases on the system this is astonishing.

Graphics in RoS are, like I mentioned before, something that couldn't be done on an 8-bit system. However, they aren't amazing beyond being a conscious improvement on any 8-bit system's graphics. Sprites move a little stiffer than then contemporary 8-bit characters and the increased size of the characters meant that there was simply less you could see on screen. To compensate RoS and similar games took a decidedly slower pace to the action i.e. Ninja Gaiden's Ryu Hayabusa's run would have introduced new enemies onto RoS' Joe Musashi's playfield too quickly to be reacted to. This is simply one of those cases where graphics do impact gameplay.

There are a few places where the graphics are out and out amazing. The waterfall in stage 2 put the expanded color palette of the Genesis to incredible use - completely outshining other similar levels (the NES Contra's waterfall springs to mind). Most of the bosses are ho-hum, the levels are far more interesting than the boss fights. The most memorable thing about the bosses is that in early versions of the game, bosses were copyright unfriendly rip-offs of well known comic book and movie characters. But then again, the Godzilla boss was huge, reasonably well articulated and filled the screen in a way you wouldn't see in 8-bit gaming.

Curiously, when the individual components of the graphics are synthesized into a play screen, the graphical issues largely go away. The sum is greater than its parts and the graphics hold up strongly against any other game in the Genesis/Mega Drive library.

Gameplay-wise RoS plays great. Your character goes pretty much exactly where you want him to go and enemies and levels have a surprising variety. RoS is the first game I remember having a double-jump mechanic as well - though the timing was sometimes difficult (the Internet says that Dragon Buster from 1984/85 was the first game though). If performed it also unlocked a more powerful shuriken attack. The double-jump is also a required technique for certain levels, not just because of high jumps, but it also transitions the character between foreground and background elements in certain levels. The game normally plays with limited shuriken, so up close you use a melee attack. Depending on your power-up level (there are 2), you might even pull out your sword once in a while.

I'd say the only part of the game I don't enjoy is the final level and boss. Everything form the music to the level layout (an infinite maze) to the difficulty of the final boss simply don't fit the game. It's like a modern glass and steel office building in the middle of a historic downtown area. The music feels like Yuzo phoned it in and the maze just feels like a way to extend the game artificially.

The final boss is likewise out of place. Overly difficult, previous boss fights do nothing to prepare you for the methods you need to use to defeat him. Stacked on top of that is a high pressure timer and it just doesn't work.

Overall, The Revenge of Shinobi is an awesome game. It created a parallel Shinobi universe to the arcade that carried on for quite a while (influencing a fantastic sequel, two Game Gear games and a Saturn game), giving Sega two entirely different takes on the same basic franchise. I have a few small quibbles with it, but when I feel like playing a Genesis game, it's always at the very top of my list -- probably my favorite game on the system. It has a pick-up and play sensibility that's fantastic.

The Creation of Missile Command and the Haunting of its Creator, Dave Theurer (Polygon)

Just thought I'd do a mini-post about a great article on Missile Command and the context it was created in and the ramifications it's had.

Axelay/Akusurei (アクスレイ) - Super Famicom/SNES

When you're the legendary Konami, cranking out hit after hit after hit, you're bound to leave a little bit of greatness behind. With a vast stable full of long running, awesome franchises (Gradius/Nemesis, Salamander/Life Force, Parodius, just to name the shmups), ones which consistently turn out good reviews and great sales, the one-off games, the real risks, struggle to find a voice.

But it can be boring to turn out yet another Gradius game (or Gradius-like), with slight tweaks to mechanics long established as tradition. So the impetuous Konami game designer, eager to try out wholly different ideas, has to rally support to turn out a risky and unproven product.

With Konami, this has happened at least twice. In 1989, the extraordinary Space Manbow was released on the MSX and never seen in another platform or sequel again.

(Okay, I lied a little, it was ported to Japanese Mobile Phones (2006) and released against on the Japanese Virtual Console (2009). But the point still stands.)

Released a mere 4 years later, Axelay, perhaps the pinnacle shmup on the Super Famicom/SNES, is yet another game that's almost completely forgotten. Languishing in relative obscurity, unported, without sequel or prequel. It's largely a game forgotten.

(Okay, a little more lying to make my point, it landed on Virtual Console in 2007.)

Evidence that this game has been lost in the hearts and minds of gamers? Read any retrogaming message board, and you'll find people new to retrogaming asking for great SNES games -- Axelay, despite being one of the finest shooters ever released, almost never makes that list. When it does though, it's almost always talked about with gushing praise.

Why is Axelay forgotten? The world may never know the true answer, but I suspect it was sunk by reviews in the professional gaming media, never seeming to have risen up to more than a 7 out of 10 (± .5). Yet player reviews routinely score it 2 points higher. IGN's Virtual Console's score is a great case in point.

I'm not upset with the press over this, on the contrary, it helps keep Axelay a hidden gem, a shibboleth true retrogamers can use to parse away the posers. Okay it smarts a little. In the specifics of the reviews, they seemed confused about the game. It's a Konami shmup, so they expect a Gradius or Salamander style power up system, but it doesn't have that. Okay, so it must be a Parodius style cute-'em-up, but it isn't -- your family is killed by an unstoppable faceless enemy after all. Rather than review it on its own merits, and it's chock full of them, for each thing it isn't, a point gets deducted from the final score.

So what is Axelay? Probably one of the purest shmups ever made -- a kind of F-Zero for shooters. There are no collectibles and no powerups. Before each mission, you choose three weapons to loadout and you begin. New, rather unique, weapons are added to your arsenal as you complete missions. But there really isn't any one weapon better than another. They are situational tools, seasoning for different flavors of delicious combat.

Missions alternate between unique vertical and gorgeous horizontal levels each capped off with amazing, usually articulate, screen filling bosses. Axelay never becomes a grind, it's difficult, but always fair. It's first and foremost a game to experience all the way through -- and this is exactly how the difficulty is calibrated (and it can even be adjusted up or down to suit the player). A full run through on hard takes slightly over a half-hour to 45 minutes.

Along the way, each level will be filled with a never ending cornucopia of enemies, all unique to that level (as far as I could tell). Some might be used only in one instance in the entire game. Your weapons loadout double as a kind of life bar, take a shot and you lose the weapon. Take too many shots and you're fighting for you life with a peashooter and a warning alarm to get your blood pumping -- four shots and you're dead. Regardless of your remaining loadout, suffer a catastrophic collision and you lose a life.

Graphics are fantastic and often mindblowing, even today. Levels range from high tech orbital habitats to organic caves dripping with moisture. Enemies fit the theme of each level perfectly, and your ship has impressively subtle animations as you weave it to and fro. Lots of ink has been bled over the use of the SNES's "mode 7" in the vertical stages to simulate a slightly canted landscape. But I'm not convinced this is a mode 7 effect. It appears to be more likely programming wizardry. Where mode 7 is used, it's a gorgeous and surprisingly subtle tool. The body of the articulate boss in Stage 2 for example.

Perhaps most impressive to me in this game is the music and sound design. The music is astonishingly listenable today with barely a hint of the resource restrictions the SNES soundchip put on it. It's typically an uptempo 90s era jazz-rock, but lots of care was put into making it match and work off of the visuals. Each boss even gets its own variation on the level's music. In places, instruments are bent and twisted to build suspense, provide incidental tension, fill out the atmosphere of the stage and even sound like alien speech. An epic 30+ minute version of the Stage 2 music was even produced -- and it's a hell of a ride.

The sound effects are likewise perfect, explosions rip across the soundscape and weapon effects never get annoying or intrusive. It's the remarkable work of a collaboration between Taro Kudo known for work on Super Castlevania IV and sound programmer/designer Atsushi Fujio. As a layer over the game, it binds and tightens up every other facet and makes it a complete whole. There's really not enough that can be said for the audio work in this game.

An interesting side note about Axelay is the small legacy it created. One of the founders of Treasure, Kazuhiko Ishida worked on Axelay, the soundtrack has often been covered and remixed, and the recent Dreamcast game Sturmwind based much of its gameplay mechanics on Axelay -- almost enough to be a spiritual sequel. Another game clearly inspired by the Axelay powerup system is Satazius.

So what does the future hold for Axelay? The end of the game promised an Axelay 2, is it naive to hope Konami reaches back into their bag of awesome but forgotten games and gives Axelay the franchise it always deserved?

Ponpoko/너구리 (Neoguri)/Ponpoko (ポンポコ) - Arcade

1982 in South Korea was a strange time. The country was on the slow climb out of a long dictatorship into modern Democracy, massive industrialization and conglomerates dominated the economy and intense trade and cultural protectionism dictated the import/export of goods. Starting around the end of World War II, South Korea banned "cultural" imports from Japan -- this included video games. It wasn't until 1998 that the import restrictions were relaxed some. On top of this, a strict morality code dictated the kinds of cultural items that could legally find their way into the economy -- censors frowned on excessive violence and adult themes. To put this into perspective, one of the most highly promoted and popular shows on Korean TV during the 1980s was mullet wearing, gun eschewing, smart guy MacGyver.

This doesn't mean that video games were unknown in South Korea. On the contrary, building up the electronics industry in South Korea was a major strategic focus of the government and videogames are a major electronics business. A loophole in the law, conglomerates could license foreign technologies and build/market them in South Korea, allowed versions of many consoles to find their way into the Korean market. Still, these restrictions frustrated gamers and a huge illegal underground market flourished.

Why all this about South Korea? Without the free flow of games from the booming Japanese games market, Korean gamers had to make do with what they could get. This skewed the history of that market in strange directions. Almost entirely unknown in the west, Ponpoko, known as 너구리 (Neoguri) in Korea, is widely regarded there as a classic game and had a welcome spot in most arcades, legal or not. As far as I can tell, it may have been more popular in South Korea than in its native Japan.

It's in South Korea that the game still lives on, a youtube search for "Ponpoko" yields a few results. A search for "너구리" finds speed runs, remakes, reviews. In fact Ponpoko, as 너구리 (Neoguri) has been remade in South Korea again and again and again.

In the interest of even more context, 1982 was an interesting time in Arcade games. Just two years prior, in 1980, the first credited platform game ever was released -- Space Panic (though there's some dispute if Sega/Gremlin's 1978 Frogs owns this title). A year later, in 1981, Donkey Kong hit the market. In 1982, the market was flooded with platformers. Most of them were primitive, but a few stand out as all time classics: Donkey Kong Jr., Joust, Q*bert plus less regarded, but still popular: Popeye, and Jungle Hunt. It's no wonder that with massive heavy weights like that in the same arcade, poor Ponpoko just never really caught on in most countries. It's also interesting that a near clone of Ponpoko, heavyweight Atari's Kangaroo was also a 1982 arcade release and saw much wider release in the West.

As an early platformer, the influence of the 1981 platform games on Ponpoko is clear. In Ponpoko, you guide a little Tanuki around a single playfield made of platforms. Similar to both Space Panic and Donkey Kong, you move between platform levels via ladders. To advance you collect a number of food items. The food changes each level, likely inspired by Pac-Man from two years before. Bonuses come in the form of a Donkey Kong-like time bonus for fast completion and extra points from bonus jars spread throughout the level.

Hazards come in the form of enemies who crisscross their platform, tacks spread throughout the level, enemies hidden in the odd bonus jar and an important innovation, fall damage from falling off a platform.

The tacks, platform placement and an interesting two-level jump mechanic (the jump button does a small jump, forward + jump provides a flying leap) introduces one of the first appearance of a complex jump puzzle in gaming -- or at least is a big improvement over what was seen in Donkey Kong.

Because the enemies simply mill about and don't follow you, and the level layout stays the same from game to game, it plays like a reflex memorization puzzle. With the added incentive that the biggest scores come from beating the bonus timer, you want to play over and over to find more optimal paths through the level and learn the patterns. Interestingly, "pattern" is what this game calls it's progressively more difficult levels. Very unusual for 1982, there's tons of levels -- 20 at my count.

Your tanuki has no offensive weapons at all. The game is purely an agility exercise and reminded me in many ways of 1984's Impossible Mission. The combination of the bonus timer, easy memorization, jump puzzles and level count in addition to fun graphics and little reward tunes make Ponpoko downright addictive.

So what are the problems with Ponpoko? For one, it's working off of, by 1982 standards, outdated Pac-Man hardware. Enemies may have 2 frames of animation, and your character has maybe 5. The character designs and music are also not very memorable. To most players, the enemies and the main character are virtually unrecognizable.

Control and hit detection are also a little fussy. The tanuki jumps with a difficult to gauge animation making even simple obstacles like tacks into life threatening weapons of death. Worse yet, guessing which jumps between platforms you can make and which are just a hair too far is impossible without pure trial and error.

I think that if Ponpoko had been released in 1981, we'd remember it today as an all-time global classic, have disco songs about it, cartoons, and people would recall fondly going on a date at the local roller rink and stopping to play a few rounds. But in the fast moving and ultra-competitive arcade market of the early 1980's the only place it seems to have really caught on is in illegal arcades in a South Korea winding it's way out of occupation, war and dictatorships.

Further reading:
Mamedb's game page
Hardcore Gaming 101's incredible History of Korean Gaming
Hardcore Gaming 101's discussion board
A modern flash remake
An emulab discussion about permissible games in Korean Arcades
MAME Puckman driver source code
Arcade Archives review of Ponpoko

The Magnavox Odyssey

This is a mirror of a retrospective review I wrote on another service

In the history of videogames, the Magnavox Odyssey stands out for one reason, it was the very first video game console and jump started a $15 billion dollar a year industry. Despite being built with late 60’s technology, in many ways, the Odyssey has everything a modern gamer would recognize:

two analog controllers

various peripherals like a gun controller

interchangeable game cartridges

even the potential to enhance the system functionality via advanced circuits in the cartridges.

Considering this is 1960s technology with very few prior concepts to work off of, the inventor of the Odyssey, Ralph Baer (along with help from Bob Tremblay, Bob Solomon, Bill Harrison, John Mason and Bill Rush) must have built a time machine first because these ideas virtually defined home video gaming for the next three decades. 

(An incredibly detailed history of the development of the Odyssey can be found here.)

Going to market, the Odyssey tapped cleanly into the sci-fi zeitgeist of the time. It looked just like a piece of tech out of the 2001 movie released just a couple years before.

At first glance, the story of the Odyssey seems to define an entertainment device that any modern gamer, young or old, would recognize. But digging deeper there are some major differences in both the technology and the business model behind this device.

The Technology

Magnavox Odyssey TV Commercial – February 1973

The first thing that a modern gamer might notice is that all of the games require a second player. Even games we might otherwise consider "single player". This is because the Odyssey doesn’t have a CPU! That’s right, there’s no central logic in the system. In fact, most of the system uses discrete circuits with fewer than 40 digital transistors in the entire device! The second player then acts as the CPU and performs various odds and ends from moving characters around to acting as an AI depending on the rules of the game.

The second noticeable difference is that the games essentially have no "graphics". What I mean is that screen characters are basically limited to two large blocks, a small block and a vertical bar depending on the cartridge. There’s not really such a thing as game resolution or color palette. There’s a simple collision detection circuit in the Odyssey useful for ball games like Ping Pong. However, the system has no ability to display numbers or text, so keeping score was entirely up to the players. Early prototypes were capable of providing some limited color, but the circuits were removed before production to save cost.

It’s clear that this limitation was well understood at the time as the system, and
later games, all shipped with clear plastic "overlays" that players were to place on top of the screen to simulate a better variety of game environments. Obviously inspired by board games, many of them provide simple set playfields for the user to move their character around often even included physical props to go along with the game.

Another obvious difference is that given no central logic unit to handle game rules, and no graphics, the game objects were more often just electronic props that the users could do with as they please, even invent new games. This could be considered a plus for a simple reason. The Odyssey actually was built with all of the games already in the device, the cartridges simply closed various discrete circuits and “activated” the appropriate game. An active imagination and a ready play friend could provide a great deal of playtime. The library was also expanded by using various cartridge and overlays to build up different games.

Oh yeah, and the system had no audio -- of any type. No beeps, boops, whistles, noise channel, nothing.

AND it ran off of batteries. Yes, batteries.

However, the main problem is that just like today, most of the games simply weren’t much fun. A game like States involved picking a card from a deck and moving the character block to where that state was on the map. Cat & Mouse simply let two players chase each other around the screen, but because there was no internal game logic, running outside of the play area, or over obstacles turns the games in a boring free for all.

This fact wasn’t lost on everybody. After seeing the Odyssey at a premier, and realizing that the Tennis and Hockey games were the most fun, Nolan Bushnell (father of Atari) went off and built Pong which went and kicked off the Arcade industry.

Finally, the controllers are kind of...wonky. Today we take the concept of a combined control for the x & y axis for granted. The NES came with the now ubiquitous d-pad, the Atari VCS (2600) and other early systems had a joystick, and on and on. But the Odyssey has separate controls for the two axes. This makes learning to control the on-screen character very tricky, something like using an Etch A Sketch.

Despite all this, the Odyssey was the first, and without other’s mistakes to learn from, it was an amazing first attempt. Here’s a great video by the Smithsonian on the Brown Box and includes a cameo by Ralph Baer, the only person authorized to operate the device today.

The Business

The Odyssey was originally called "The Brown Box" after the fake wood paneling on the prototype unit used to demonstrate the concept. Original funded by a company called Sanders Associates, they realized, being a defense contractor that they had literally no business experience in consumer products. So they decided to license the technology to another company that did have this experience.

At first they approached the early cable television industry. The idea was to have the cable provider broadcast a fixed background that could be mixed in with the game objects to provide a more interesting playfield. Obviously this didn’t pan out -- hence the overlays. Eventually, the television manufacturer Magnavox took to the idea and licensed the technology. In the mix Sanders Associates and Magnavox ended up with a suite of key patents that earned them a great deal of licensing fees over the next few decades.

Interestingly, the cable idea is one that’s been tried in one form or another for quite some time (usually without much success)

• Satellaview
• Sega Channel
• Phantom

This is where the business side gets a bit strange. Magnavox at the time sold their equipment through a direct sales channel – their own stores. This had some interesting side effects.

1. Magnavox only showed the Odyssey playing on Magnavox Televisions in their advertisements -- leading the brand new video game buyer to think that the Odyssey only worked on Magnavox Televisions. Later home video game systems actually had to advertise that their systems would work on any home TV to overcome the public perception this built up.
2. Training the sales staff was problematic. The sales models for Televisions and Radios is quite different from a video game system. You don’t just move devices, but you also push peripherals and games. Considering that the games were already in the device and all the cartridges did was "unlock"” that content. Moving cartridges was basically free money and the sales staff at Magnavox stores simply didn't push the games. More often than not, they simply left them boxed up behind the counter.
3. The initial price point for the Odyssey, back when it was still a prototype, was $20 in the late 1960s or about $130 in 2010 dollars. The final price point when released in 1972 was $100 or a bit over $500 in 2010 dollars. Considering it was merely a curiosity, with few honestly interesting games, the Magnavox Odyssey sold well under half a million units (or put positively, successfully sold over 300,000 units in an entirely new market they created from scratch).

Conclusion

On the one hand, the Magnavox Odyssey set the stage for literally all of the rest of gaming since. On the other, it just wasn’t a whole ton of fun.

• Magnavox Odyssey System Review
• History of Video Games Pt 2 - Ralph Baer & Magnavox Odyssey (warning explicit language)
• Odyssey - AVGN - Cinemassacre.com (warning explicit language)

Or was it?

Playing Odyssey (Behind the scenes) (warning explicit language)

Behind the scenes, these perfectly modern gamers seem to be having a blast. It might be a booze fueled blast, but they're having tons of fun.