when the hell are you people getting to Valis III
I’ve been edging for weeks
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Hisou Kihei X-Serd the second strategy game by Masaya released in the first quarter of 1990. Yeah. The first battle was my 3 bootleg Japanese robots versus 10 enemy robots. My second battle was against 30 enemy robots as the encroached on a base on the opposite side of the map with me on the left and the enemies in the middle. Every time something happens the music changes. This quickly establishes a kind of histeria as you watch THIRTY ENEMY actions and 8 NPC actions before getting to your 3. I eventually gave up when 6 enemies began to ruthlessly beat my melee pilot who hit stuff 1 times out of 4. I also dipped my toe in the other Masaya developed stategy game for the first quarter of 1990 and quit when it flashed me back to high school watching people set up civil war miniature battles. Get me Out of Here!
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Tiger Road - I’d rather not
Saint Dragon - oh boy this is slow
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a streamer i watch sometimes who would fit in pretty well here imo has been going through the pcengine chronologically, some vods at
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Wow! It’s my Spring Break and I played three different strategy games for a little too long.
Gai Flame
This one is effectively a sequel to Crest of Gaia. It has many of the same problems: units miss a lot, stats are opaque, and battles just take too long without being very interesting. What Gai Flame adds is a grand strategy to tie battles together. I can move units around, place new ones at my start, and search the map for crystals. I couldn’t find any guides or information about the game on English internet even though it has a fan translation. Come to think of it, I remember having to translate Japanese webpages to learn about Crest of Gaia, too.
1 out of 5 Nectaris
Vasteel
I didn’t take screenshots of the map, but trust me, it’s a strategy game. This is notable as one of the first localizations that Working Designs released. I bet they inflated health for all of the enemies.
This game is actually very ambitious, something I’ve come to expect from Human. There are long cutscenes with a story that feels inspired by Dune. Before each stage, I can make an important choice that will determine where I fight. The first choice is which side to fight on. The second choice had to do with where I wanted to engage with the enemy next.
The strategy is much different because instead of dice rolls, the game uses action sequences to determine who wins. Sometimes it helps if I just stand in place and shoot the enemy as fast as I can. In other stages, it helps to run away while the stage’s turrets take them out. Every unit has it’s own secondary weapon, health, and maneuverability. It’s kind of cool.
However, each character starts with a factory which means that the game drags. It takes over an hour to slowly earn a money advantage over the enemy and then push towards their base. I can’t even fast forward through the enemy’s turn because they might fight me and then I’d have to actually work to win the battle.
3 out of 5 Nectaris
Hisou Kihei X-Serd
This is another NCS strategy game with a fan translation, so I was worried. Fortunately, the game is much clearer about what each unit can do and it’s upfront about the probability of success. There are a lot of details that makes this more cinematic. One in particular is having to unload each mech from the main ship. They play a short clip of the mech going down an elevator before being deployed. I played one battle and it didn’t take an hour, so I might be jumping into this one again.
3 out of 5 Nectaris
P.S. A little bit of trivia about X-Serd: hidden within the code is a song written by one of the devs that is in egregiously poor taste. I would recommend not seeking that out. It’s really, really bad.
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dot’s cool and is also maybe threatening to translate the first TM game
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I didn’t even mention the two fun facts about this game because I was distracted.
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If you can guess how X-Serd is pronounced I will give you 500 PC Engine Points. Collect 2 million to win Bonk’s actual skeleton.
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Imagine my surprise at starting up the game and during the premission briefing immediately recognizing the song from Digging The Carts CD. DTC was a redbull sponsored youtube series/live show/CD showcasing Video Game Music was Music. Their choices for the CD are all pretty strange. Not strange songs just “this song huh?”
It’s the first track on this.
Personally out of stuff I played last night which included another rounnd of Shibibiruman because I had already forgotten how bad that was, the intro to Dead Moon made the most impression. There is a seperate tier list to make for 1990 that is just the shooters. Which I am going to count if I get time today.
But honestly there are so many shooters this month that it is impossible to give them all enough time in the next 30 days. I try to make myself give all the arcade games 5 credits before I quit.
Gah I don’t have time right now but I haven’t writen about Legion. Which is extremely fascinating and almost Deep Blue bad.
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Thirty One Shooters for 1990.
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I’m going to want to see your list at the end of this year. I’m already really liking Download, Aero Blasters (played it with a friend today!), and Super Star Solider.
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this piqued my interest and while the logo/character sprite/backgrounds/simplified combat seem(ed) like a step down from the first’s charge attack gimmick and vibrant Tarzanisms, it grew on me, the action rolls along at a quicker pace (and although the enemy encounters make for a better flow than the first game’s hyper hop trolling, thematically it’s like…here’s a zombie! now a dark fairy! how’s about a knight! like all in a few screens, no surprise this started out as something other than a Legendary Axe game). I didn’t get an actual axe til like the third level but there’s a sword now and a handy multidirectional morning star (and Castlevania-style specials I think?) also the bosses aren’t such claustrophobic bastard brawls so far, much more manageable. idk that I like any of the tunes as much as stage one in the first game but the soundtrack is some sick sawtooth stuff, more horror than the previous adventure, gonna play more
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Meikyuu no elfeene
Minty isn’t the only one to suffer an idol based PC Engine game as I fell into the shoes of Nishimura Tomomi, a simple shop clerk who gets transported to another world where she must talk to people multiple times and solve bad RPG Maker puzzles. The mook proclaimed instead of random battles there were minigames and I suffered 90 minutes going where the heck are the mini games. Can you believe a RPG has input lag? Incredible. I eventually worked my way to playing an awful version of Rally-X. Thanks game. I also found Tomomi’s voice grating. Now to link the one youtube video that shows the fun full song performance the game starts with:
And here’s a guy making awful jokes talking over the ending:
Guess it eventually becomes Ys but worse?
Download seems cool but my controller died immediately and then I was staring at the same screen Vikram linked.
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Chew Man Fu
This is a Hudson Soft mint, but when I look at the credits, it looks like they farmed it out to a C-team they had. It’s all about pushing balls around onto slots and avoiding enemies. It’s kind of like Bubble Bobble mixed with Pac-Man in how it feels. I love how large and colorful the sprites are. The levels are really simple, but they are more dangerous than Cratermaze and more compelling.
When the music isn’t painfully signposting “China,” it’s pretty nice.
Don Doko Don
Naturally, after playing one arcade puzzler, I wanted to try another. This one is Taito. It’s a lot more like Bubble Bobble, probably too much like it. I love being a bearded fellow with a hammer, but I have no idea how to beat this first boss. That pumpkin just starts belching out fire in all directions. It’s impossible!
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With Don Doko Don you really feel them trying to do something different with Bubble Bobble with a somewhere between Lode Runner and Donkey Kong hammer. The biggest knock against it is the song isn’t Bubble Bobble Theme. Grated me by the end of the first credit.
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i like jigoku meguri a lot
there’s a lot of similar platform games from around 87-90, but this is a really good iteration of that formula
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I played two platformers!
Jigoku Meguri
After loki’s suggestion, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s pretty good! Taito does Yokai Dochuki/Ghosts 'n Goblins. Halfway through the first stage, I came across a cave filled with powerups and trinkets and whatnot. An invisible barrier stopped me from entering and I wondered what I could’ve done to be barred from such treasure. I mean, it was probably all the tombstones I destroyed. I probably shouldn’t have been doing all of that. Regardless, good game!
Momotarou Katsugeki
I wanted to try a game by one of Hudson’s in-house teams. Can you believe they actually released three Momotarou games this year? Granted, one is a remake but still…
Judging by the opening, this is meant to be a very friendly action game, something anyone can beat. What that means is the level design has a bit of fluff. Platforming in general is similar to Monster World, which means it’s kind of bad. That’s all made up for by very charming cartooning. I really thought this game had a fan translation, but I was wrong. There isn’t even a page for it on mobygames, which is odd. I would probably play a lot more of this game if the dialogue wasn’t vertically oriented. That just confuses the OCR so much I can barely get a good translation most of the time.
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Spring Break! I’m playing a lot of video games! There are three separate Darius releases for 1990: a HuCard, a CD, and a special mail-order boss rush. I’m just gonna post pictures of the bosses from the boss rush next to others from the CD because I’m not good enough to get to the bosses naturally.
Darius is really cool and really hard! Of course the music is great. I was surprised to see the CD release has Dolby Surround sound. Each fish has such a unique pattern and they get paired up in really nice ways. Apparently the PC Engine port has more bosses than the arcade version. I don’t think I’ll ever get to see them all though. But! This really feels like one of the nicest shooters for this year and I will happily struggle on stage 1 forever.
Oh! And we hit a benchmark! Over 25% of the 1990 library has been mentioned so far! I’ve updated the wheel for anyone who wants to use it. Personally, I like to spin it five times and choose from that. Wheel of Names
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JB Harold is my new #1 enemy and I hate it with my life
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also tried darius and it’s somehow MUCH harder than the arcade version. maybe it’s cause the screen is so cramped? it’ just so much easier to react to that game when you have all extra space.
gave xevious a spin and the default remixed mode is NICE in that it just feels like xevious but with slightly more variation and a bunch of cool original music.
maerchen maze kind of pisses me off by having all that extra space you gotta walk over, while also beeing so zoomed in you barely even see the boss most of the time. the arcade game feels a lot better since you can see what’s going on.
gomola speed is interesting, but the main mechanic of circling your body around things to kill/eat them is really hard to pull off.
legendary axe 2 and aoi blink are games i’ve beaten previously at some point so i just took a refresher on them, and yeah, they are both good and probably my favouruite pc engine games of 1990.
i think the auto-jump for smaller ledges in aoi blink is interesting, especially since it still has a dedicated jump button for larger leaps. just curious as like, a relatively modern standard showing up at a weird time. sucks that the one girl you can play as is the only pacifist with no attacks.
i gave valis iii like 10 minutes and remembered it sucks. i spent hours on some flowing water hell stage years ago and don’t need a redo.
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who came up with the english title Bonze Adventure I just wanna talk
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