Gomola Speed. That should read Gomola Speed.
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I remember reading somewhere that the reason why Australia never got the TG16 or PC Engine was because of this one teen who worked at one of our main Department Store chains. He was buddies with one of the reps for a certain electronics company, and one day this rep said he’s got something cool he wants to show him. He invited the rep over to his house and turns out the company was in talks to distribute the PC Engine over here, and so the rep had brought one over and he got to try it out.
His response after playing a couple games was “this is pretty cool and all, but no one’s gonna want this once the Genesis comes out”. Supposedly based entirely on his feedback, they decided to can the release.
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Seems believable; Vic Ireland claimed many Western releases were chosen by an American executive’s child. It’s in that Christian Nutt penned piece Minty linked earlier.
I recently learned about how Marvel’s post-bankruptcy editor in chief claims to be the American equivalent of that Australian kid (but for the NES) and if that’s true it’s fucking wild shit
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Needed to finally get around to posting about Genpei Toumaden, as I’m pretty sure I am literally the only person on the board to actually finish the game.
Genpei Toumaden is a painstakingly realistic historical drama where famed samurai Taira no Kagekiyo is brought from the dead as a demon from hell who has to kill off Minamoto no Yoritomo, who has become a different but more evil demon, along with Minamoto no Yoshitsune (star of the Genji series on PS2/PS3 (famous for its giant enemy crab meme)) and Benkei. Kagekiyo runs around killing yokai, skeletons, and Raiden himself along the way. You know, famous battles which actually took place in ancient Japan.
The big claim to fame the game has is its constant change in perspective. You have these platformer segments with these small sprites, then “Big Mode” which has large individually animated sprites duking it out similar to The Kung Fu.
Then there’s also these top-down segments.
It’s a neat way to add some variety, I think. Anyways, the object of the game is to go across Japan, killing everything, and making sure you pick up the Magatama Jewel, the Kagami Mirror, and the Tsurugi Sword, or else you can’t access the final stage. Simple enough, right? Just a cool looking arcade port that can be really tough?
WRONG
Genpei Toumaden gets fucking weird, and it’s awesome. There are hidden bonus stages where Amaterasu haphazardly drops a ton of power ups for you to scramble and pick up. These are the only time you can get Chairo, the brown orbs, which increase your maximum health.
There are also a few occasions where you can find “Gag stages,” where the game developers appear and make bad jokes or commentary. One of them even has the Kagami mirror, in case you missed it in the regular stages.
If you hang around in these stages for too long, a giant version of Minamoto appears in the background and smacks at you with a stick, so don’t fuckin dawdle.
Falling off a ledge at any point will immediately send you back to hell. If you have enough money, you can simply jump into a pool of blood, and be warped back to Kyoto. Otherwise, you have to meet up with Emma Dai-o, who will present you with eight chests to open. One of them will take you back to the previous level, while all the otherwise will straight up kill you, and you only have one life!
This game owns. Namco Museum Volume 4 is the only way to play it in English, if that’s something that might interest you. Namco also put together some live action promotional videos that are really cool.
A couple of differences between the arcade and console games: Benkei’s weak point changed from his head to his stomach, so PC-Engine owners can simply crouch down and hammer the attack button.
The other difference is this dragon you have to get past. In the arcade game, you were meant to jump on its back while attacking the head. However, in the console game, the body does damage, so it’s a much harder fight. My Protip is to wait until the dragon flies to the bottom of the screen, do a neutral jump, land on the back which will push you right into the hadouken scroll, take a couple hits and fire off a wave shot to kill it.
Here’s a translated version of the ending text from the PSX version. I can’t speak for the veracity of the translation, but it goes hard as fuck.
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Sinibad Chitei no DaiMeikyuu
Everyone crowded into Bachelor’s Discord to watch me be bored by this. I spent 20 minutes legit leveling up, then had a retroarch menu mistake and had to restart. So I restarted with fast forward which I never stopped using.
The encounter rate in this is hilarious. I got in a battle just for using the stairs and not moving. I got in a battle the first step I took out of town. I got in less battles if I fast forwarded. Thank god for online strategy guides because I was a helpless baby. There were two caves I was not allowed into. A cave I was not allowed to cross. And if I went one tile too far in the world I would get hit by a succubus Hillbilly (???) for 69 damage of my 30 health.
It was full adventure game logic folks as I had to pick up a coffee from an overworld skeleton corpse and then “use” it in front of a drunk guy at a bar who would give me the password to enter the thieves cave once he sobered up.
Even after an hour of grinding there were enemies in the cave that would murder me instantly. I just ran from every battle, navigated to the captured princess (who became a party member!) and hobbled back to the King’s palace who my buddy then insulted and we got thrown out.
My headcanon is that I died 2 days later from Sand Sickness. It is a perfectly mediocre Dragon Quest clone and as much as I need to play Portopia I also need to play the other Yuji Horii game defining classic Dragon Quest for the Famicom. I bet better music and better sprites really improve the experience all around. And like better math.
The game was exactly Dragon Quest with a Arabian Theming. I rescued a princess and brought her home. Sinibad by Naxat Soft is going to slide right off my brain along with the other 2-3 RPGs I’ve played for this thread.
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I FORGOT ONE IMPORTANT THING
One of the leads on Genpei Toumaden is the brother-in-law to one of the creators of Heiankyo Alien, and the Kyoto level pays tribute to Heiankyo Alien by having said aliens as an enemy type.
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I love how deep your knowledge is with this game.
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That bee can knock me out any day, holy cow.
Oh yeah, this morning I played
Timeball
AKA Blodia, AKA Diablo
Do you think the Cyberbots team were big fans of Timeball? Did you know that the original version of this game was released for the Texas Instruments computer in 1983?
At first I tried to play it by linking up a clear path before the ball got to the end. This is not how most puzzles are meant to be solved. I realized that I could actually slide the tile that the ball is on, trivializing some of the puzzles but also opening up a confusing multitude of possibilities. Later, I realized I could slide any amount of tiles toward the blank space as I wanted. It’s not easy for me to decipher the visual logic here. I got to around Level 10.
This game has a leaderboard for some reason.
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I feel this, too. Because I’m dabbling, any early frustration I have with a game pushes me away from it. If I was trying to really sit down and play it, I would push through that frustration and get a better feel for each game’s rhythm.
On top of dabbling with new games, I’ve been spending a little time making progress with ones I like. It’s nice to return to Valkyrie after screwing up so much in Ranma 1/2.
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nope!!! i got obsessed with genpei toumaden a few years back, there’s really nothing else like it.
must check out the sequel someday, though can’t help but feel like it’d be a disappointment
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Streaming Sinibad really helped this impulse and made me sit in (a boring game with almost no redemption) but I had a very good time laughing with everyone.
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The Wheel told me to play
Rambo your way through the jungle to save “concentration camp” prisoners from hordes of bad guys. you know they’re sick and twisted because they’ve hidden ammo clips in coconuts and birds and pigs but that’s lucky for you since you can run out of ammo (it refills one bullet at a time very slowly when you hit zero) I kept wanting to see my rockets launched with a slight impact delay to play with, collision is instantaneous, oh well, most glaring difference from the arcade version is obviously no light gun, seen here
hell yeah
if gun assy, what is d-pad? serviceable, fine, that goes for the whole game, not much in the way of personality or gameplay surprises from what I saw. it does have two-player co-op. I beat a few stages
died a few times and had enough
also save stated my way through to the end of Marchen Maze, that game loses a lot of its charm going from isometric to top down! and whatever charm is left will probably be spent by the time you suffer the difficulty of the final few stages. still, I’m a sucker for how the arcade version looks (the backgrounds for one look way prettier) and the weirdness of Alice blowing bubbles out of a straw to kill cigarette smoking mushrooms so I gave it a go on Wii MAME for a bit (less than ideal performance so I also installed the JP virtual console wad but the characters are all garbled and controls don’t allow me to start the game, this seems to only be an issue with JP arcade VC games (Valkyrie as well) if anyone has experience with this let me know (outside of switching the console’s region, don’t wanna chance the risks that come with that (anyway!)))
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Operation Wolf was such a fucking huge game in American arcades but it did absolutely nothing for me, pretty much anything military themed was a yucky for me, no thanks. Playing the PCE version the other night helped me understand the appeal though, big sprites, guns, could use music but yknow it was alright glad I didn’t get into it as a kid as such things are not good for the soul but I can see why other li’l war criminals got off on it.
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talk about gun porn!
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He did an interview about this on Ed Piskor’s YouTube show a couple months back. I’ll try to find the clip later tonight.
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I was playing Operation Wolf in a party store while it was being robbed when I was like 8 or 9. Weird time to have a fake Mac 10 in your hands.
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Today you get Two Tonkin House delights, as Bachelor always says “If This House Be Tonkin…” he drifts off and looks to the east. The gaze’s meaning known only to him.
That said I do not like either of these games even though they both look and sound very nice and seem compelling to a person that is Not Me.
Cyber Night is a Sci-Fi RPG. You crash land on a planet and have to look around for repairs. There is a lot of text and the intro moves at its own pace so I had to read very fast. You’ve got a hanger full of robots on your big spaceship and the enemies are all robots that you can capture and switch and swap and upgrade. This planet was colonized by a seperate ship that fell to the planet 250 years ago. As is noted customizing mechs and stuff for RPG battles is not my jam and the battles were slow but cool.
I talked to the President of the planet and his wife then went outside and did a few random battles. I got into a dungeon which destroyed my party to game over. Sinibad at least had me wake up with half my gold. I knew it was going to be difficult when my mech blew up.
Sekigahara meanwhile is a game where you play one of the armies in that famous Japanese battle I definitely know something about. It has fantastic graphics. It looks like one of the giant murals for Japanese battles. I guess it is based off the board game Sekigahara. You can only take one action a turn, whether it is moving one unit, deploying one unit, or attacking once. Each action is accompanied by a full screen graphic of each unit’s general giving order.
Once the action carried out you might get a message from a Ninja or find out a unit has betrayed you. Then the cursor hovers over the last used unit and you might drag it all the way back to the otherside of the map to select either your home base or one of your units already deployed.
If you eventually get into a battle it switches to a smaller screen where you have to deploy each unit and place them. These battles go until all the units have used their actions. Or you press II and immediately end your turn with no prompt.
I was playing very poorly and casually since I did not bother to know any of the Real World General Names or read the 50 stats for all their soldiers. It is a very slow game. I played for 20-30 minutes and definitely would take more than an hour to make any progress. It is an impressive product with a lot of history and grognard in it. The very basic menu problems took it over the top in trying my patience.
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