i wrote about this game, the circumstances of its creation are pretty interesting!
http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1841&sid=e4d65dfffaa0faea631bb4df4ae0b236
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Left this playing in the background and realized this gameās music (and itās pretty much all music, sound-wise) rules:
Spikey in Transylvania
aka (box art Dope Box art - #1007 by smbhax ) Spike in Transilvania
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Really starting to think Rare was fucking bad ass. Mostly from watching videos of games that Iād probably hate actually playing. But Rare was fucking bad ass.
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according to legend. they got a nes dev kit by reverse engineering a retail console, making a game, and sending it to nintendo.
but yeah, their games definitely suffer from āthe microcomputer problemā
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they have an absurd amount of games for the NES a lot of people donāt even seem to know about. thatās part of where my obsession with them as a kid came from. thereās no doubt thatās why they ended up so heavily partnering with Nintendo in the latter half of the 90ās. a lot of those games were way too hard of courseā¦ a problem they never really let go of.
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I love how rc pro am, cobra triangle and solar jetman are basically all the same game reskinned. a perfect trifecta of isometric clunky to control action
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I have very fond memories of always playing some RC Pro Am at friendās house when we were kids
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How did I miss Community Pom in English? Sweet.
My RC PRO AM was Micromachines.
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Rare was also one of the few devs doing non-action NES games, right? They had all those game show adaptations and weird shit like Taboo: The Sixth Sense and Anticipation. I have a hazy memory of streaming Anticipation sometime in 2020 and people (me?) just getting real pissed off at it. I canāt remember exactly why though, makes me think maybeā¦I should play it againā¦
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Before founding Rare, the Stamper brothers had a different game software company, operating under two successive names: starting in 1982 as Ashby Computers and Graphics, they made four mostly highly derivative arcade games: Saturn, Blue Print, Grasspin, and Dingo:
Then as Ultimate Play the Game, they made games for British microcomputers. First and perhaps most famously, the highly successful Jetpac for the 16k ZX Spectrum
After success with other games on the 16k machine, they moved up to releasing pricier (Ā£9.99, almost double the usual price on the system) games on the 48k ZX Spectrum with titles like Sabre Wulf
and a later installment in that series, 1984ās Knight Lore, which debuted their splashy new āFilmationā isometric graphics engine:
Sources:
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I bought Sensible World of Soccer 96/97 for 6 bucks off GOG because well I had an Amiga as a youngster and always had to read in whatever Amiga magazine they had here about how amazing āSensiā was but I donāt think I ever saw it in a store because this is America.
Now through the miracle of the internet and the game biz and DOSBox and JoyToKey I can play it and it seems really engaging and cute and precise and Iām ārubbishā at it as they say(?). Thereās only one button and aftertouch seems to be the main thing and uh well I donāt get that part yet. Iāve scored one goal on a penalty and one by actually kicking it into the goal somehow but mostly itās a lot of flailing and losing the ball. Playing a buff team like Man U vs some lower division team is just making me feel humiliated so anyway my plan is to like start a career coaching up an Albanian team or something but I think Iām going to be there for a while while I try to get the hang of this thing.
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Penguin Adventure (MSX)
Notorious as Kojimaās first pro gig, as assistant director, but also has really cool into-the-screen scrolling environments and an impressively big lizard boss:
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Penguin Kun Warsā Penguinās origin?
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iirc, it is the penguin from rhe parodius games
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Yeah, the penguin Penta ( Penguin Adventure - Wikipedia ), or Pentarou, as Wikipedia refers to them when describing the prequel, Antarctic Adventure (Antarctic Adventure - Wikipedia ), appears to be one and the same as the penguin in the Parodius seriesāand that Wikipedia article says as much. (Edit: not quite right, see a few posts down.) The Penguin Wars penguin looks different on the GB box cover, at leastātall and black rather than plump and blueāand that was a UPL game, whereas those other games were Konami.
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Oh! Thatās Penta, and Iād got it wrong from reading the Antarctic Adventures article too quicklyāhe is NOT Pentarou; as this article Yume Penguin Monogatari - Wikipedia about the plot of that Famicom game says
ā¦Penta, who is getting dumped by his girlfriend Penko because he has become far too obese for her liking. Penta originally appeared in Antarctic Adventure and Penguin Adventure, and he is the father of āPentarouā who appeared in the Parodius series.
(Just so as not to leave the story hanging:
The game follows Pentaās quest to win back his ex-girlfriend by losing weight via collecting diet drinks and avoiding enemies. Penkoās new boyfriend, Ginji, is trying to block Pentaās attempt by dispatching enemies sent to force-feed him back to obesity.
)
The Antarctic Adventures article says, rather vaguely:
In addition, the penguin character Penta, and his son Pentarou[1] became a mascot for Konami through the 1980s. They have made appearances in over 10 games. Of particular note are his appearances in the Parodius series of shoot 'em up games.
Penta, or his son Pentarou, had appeared in the Medal Games like Tsurikko Penta, Balloon Penta and Imo Hori Penta. Following in 2002 (not released for mobile in 2001), three mobile games Kekkyo ku Nankyoku choi bÅken (ćć£ćććåꄵć”ććåéŗ),[2] released on May 6, 2003, another titled Kekkyoku Nankyoku DaibÅken Taisen-ban (ćć£ćććåę„µå¤§åéŗåƾę¦ē), as part of Konami Taisen Colosseum,[3] and the fishing game as Penta no Tsuri Boken, and released for i-Revo.
Also
In 2014, Antarctic Adventure was released on a special version of the ColecoVision Flashback by AtGames.[6] available only through Dollar General[7] stores.
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fat-shaming aside, Yume Penguin Monogatari is a nice breezy little game with some fun spritework
Penta and Penko also shilled for Suntory beer?
not 100% sure itās them though, didnāt find definitive proof at a quick glance
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Thatās Jill and Mike.
They even had their own movie.
Penguinās Memory
Returning from the Delta War, Mike Davis is left traumatized and adrift in life. Leaving his home town, he eventually winds up in Lake City and takes a quiet job in the local library. There, he meets Jill, a young woman with dreams of being a professional singer. Sheās already involved with a young surgeon practicing at her fatherās hospital, but she finds herself attracted to the withdrawn Mike. As she falls in love with him, she tries to break through the wall of sadness Mike has built around himself, but outside forces are conspiring to keep the two lovers apart.
The timing is interesting. The Mike and Jill ads came out in 1983ācouldnāt find a more specific date than that. Antarctic Adventure came out in December, 1983.
More on Mike and Jill:
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