Power League 4
While Rudie was streaming Doraemon, we were thinking, “who composed this? Have they done anything else?” It turns out, the only other thing they have listed on MobyGames is Power League 4. The soundtrack really is so good that I’m shocked they don’t have more credits.
In this release, it feels like the team has consolidated a lot of the lessons from previous releases. There are 12 stadiums to choose from, 6 in the daytime and 6 at night. I was really eating dirt when I tried an exhibition match, but it feels like they tuned Pennant to start easy and gradually ramp up. It is a beautiful baseball game. I especially like when a batter hits a home run and high fives all his teammates. Who knew that 1991 was going to be the year of great sports games? I sure didn’t!
I am very disturbed that a French game made it onto this console. That isn’t supposed to happen. This shouldn’t be here. It’s a Q-Bertian, psychedelic tile-turner. The friction is almost entirely caused by struggling with boredom as the orange pom-pom glides across the screen. I fall into pits sometimes because I’m just not looking that closely. They introduce mechanics like bombs, ice, and conveyor tiles but none of them feel particularly well utilized yet. I’m reminded of RT-55J’s question: is the PCE the Amiga of consoles? The answer really is closer than you might think.
This is a truly hateful game. Baloo has to bend his knees whenever he lands from a jump, so he can’t jump immediately again. There is an ice stage where I have to jump from slippery platform to slippery platformer. I think you can imagine how scary that is. Baloo can throw a handball or something at enemies. It has an odd weight to it and will sometimes fall ineffectually on the ground. There’s a bonus stage where I fly the plane and Kit swings on a pendulum behind me. That’s actually kind of fun because of the weird centripetal pull on Kit. The rest of the game is not fun.
That’s right I did. And very glad I did. Doraemon gets devious at a certain point. As my friends watching grew quiet watching me try a jump for the 13th time. Extremely Castlevania music playing in the background. Everyone wondering “When are the Arabian Stages?” there are stages where you fight ancient japanese pottery, dinosaurs, haunted mansions with many kinds of skeletons. The boss stages are always particularly beautiful.
The ending screen exclaims, Thank You for playing please enjoy more Hudson games!
Oh NO. TG16 TaleSpin was by US studio Interactive Designs (not to be confused as GameFAQS did : P–I’ve submitted corrections–with small European Amiga and Atari ST developer Interactive Design), who were acquired in the next year by Sega and renamed to SEGA Interactive Development Division.
This is hilarious. I’m learning all sorts of things. They made a Sonic Spinball for the Master System? That’s messed up. I played a lot of Bonkers as a kid.
I was never able to get into the Genesis one, but the Master System Spinball looks and sounds horrific:
I was looking at Bonkers! On a quick skim it looked kind of mediocre overall, but with a variety of quick action, at least, and pretty decent graphics. Did you enjoy it as a kid?
I did! To be fair, I liked all games I played when I was a child. I’m trying to remember all the games I had back then, which is the kind of library you could haveonly as a kid:
6-Pak
Bonkers
Mickey Mania
The Great Circus Mystery
Toy Story
Ecco the Dolphin
Ecco Jr.
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Machine
Shanghai
Jurassic Park
Lion King
Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures
(Oh wow, the Mickey Mania (GEN) art and animation is so nice. Revolving platforms though, HM. But I may have to try this anyway. … NOPE cannot handle this much platforming ^_ ^. Super sweet how it starts you off on a B&W Steamboat Willie stage though.)
I was gonna say that no one who worked on Cabal could be bad, but it is only the port and no other site seems to believe they worked on this port so perhaps they are.
The last RPG for 1991. I don’t think I’ve written about it yet but this is my third play session with it. I wanted to give it a chance because it has a cute dragon and you start with a dragon egg. I wanted to hatch that dragon.
I might/probably am repeating myself but i didn’t find anything when I searched “Monbit”, so, the first time I started this game I forgot to buy equipment walked out of town and got murdered hard. So I had to rewatch the 12 minutes of talking to get back to it. I’ve now visited like 7 towns and one dungeon. So many towns in this thing. None of them matter.
I just finally got to the second dungeon which…said you need to grind for about 4 more levels asshole. Any time magic is cast it causes two full screen flashes which is a great way to wake up my baby giving more ammo to why did this very basic Dragon Quest clone get 3 sessions from me? I don’t know. I do know I could hold A and battles would auto complete. That was nice. Tenshi no Uta is the best RPG I’ve played so far on the system barring Necros which I’ll get around to at some point. And Tenshi no Uta is just pleasant and fast.
Look it doesn’t matter that Shadow of The Beast sucks. It does suck. It’s an Amiga Platform by The British. They won’t know how to make a good game for another 6 years. Shadow of the Beast is a powerful multimedia experience. That fucking music kicks in and you’re like “video games can be about anything.” Like a little runner man turned into a beast and destined to die at the hands of infinitely grotesque unknownable death-beasts. An impossibly long well right at the start with a surprise at the bottom. Horrible boss encounters that can kill you instantly.
It took me back to 1991 because it is dangerous and unknowable. What can possibly be the rules of such a cruel but beautiful landscape? I need my dad to play this, just like how he played through Myst and Riven with me.
Imagining this game above all others as your New Game and you gotta sit in it. The incredible opening track always drawing you in. The songs in the two starting dungeons being much worse.
Yes! We have Full Motion Video, folks! This is a port from an ICOM PC game, which itself is a port of a board game. The action involves selecting names from a notebook for Baker Street Irregulars to spy on, and meeting up with people face-to-face. Cutscenes play out whenever you meet someone, but because of the open-ended nature, plot threads fan out and it’s difficult to understand exactly who you should talk to next. That means I should talk to everyone I guess. At least all the actors are game and the scenes are mildly entertaining. I just hate moving the cursor around with the pad.
This is a lot like a Three Kingdoms grand strategy game I tried earlier, except it covers Japan’s civil war history from the Sengoku period. Once again, it is inscrutable to me. It looks like it has Civilization-esque options for talking to advisors, sending out spies and diplomats, and maneuvering troops. All of that is too much for me, sorry. I barely understand it in English, I’m not going to try that here. It has nice pictures though.
Is this related to Bubblegum Crisis? I Don’t Know. We’ve got police anime girls in the future (all the girls were born in the 2010s). It’s an adventure game with 9 verbs that I got stuck pretty early on because a bank teller would not get out of my way. I did collect two pieces of garbage and a kid showed me their portable game console. I was supposed to investigate a bank robbery but gave up.
Salamander
This is…way harder than I remember. And I remember playing the arcade version on a PSP on the train. You know a terrible place to play Salamander/Gradius? On a PSP. How did I even try? You didn’t Rudie, you gave up pretty quick. I couldn’t beat stage one tonight either, for a reason that felt like some MiSTer error, the flesh walls I could shoot were respawning within a second of me shooting them. Need to watch videos and get a second opinion on that.
Oh turns out I had put my Seiryu Densetsu Monbit words in a text pad so you get what you read above right here to and less tired Dad wrote them:
Seiryuu Densetsu Monbit
Oh good another one of those 10 minute starting cutscenes. This one starts in space and then I guess a meteor crashes and then a Dragon Quest happens. It’s still going as I type this. The efficiency of a Dragon Quest is amazing. press start, in front of the king, given the quest, on your own. I understand they are trying to show off the possibilty of CD format, it’s like an anime you can play. Or watch. And they usually have actual anime voice actors for these. Wow this evil guy is giving like a 3 minute speech.
Jiminey Crickets. I finally finished the cutscenes and foolishly walked out of the first town and got murdered by a slime. And I mean murdered. It dealt 9 damage and I had 15 HP. This cut my money in half DQ style so I didn’t have the funds to equip myself. I has to restart and watch that anime twice. Thank The Engine the text auto advanced and to do a battle I can just hold I.
After an hour it was just a bog standard DQ clone. I went and defeated an Ant Queen and saved for the night. The one interesting thing is I had to grab The Last Dragon Egg to help me defeat the big bad because I was the secret son of the hero. As I left the cave in the starting town with the egg my guide revealed themselves to be a Spy! So I went into a battle and got down to 4 health when the villagers rushed into the battle and killed the spy. So I healed in the bath house in town because “the hero bathes for free.”
To save in the game you have to go to the temple marked by a Star of David and choose まじない. I hadn’t knowingly encountered an out of use word for “praying to avoid disaster.” Fun word for saving.
That’s right I finally played Necros. I got a bit farther than Minty but also had to resort to a youtube walkthrough because unlike every game on the planet i could not find a written guide.
Minty maybe missed that the Mercenary creeps on every girl he meets and was clearly the loser of the 8 Heroes, though he wouldn’t see it that way. Eventually I was asked by a woman in a hotel room to go fight a tigerman. I did, then she said see me in a hotel room in a different city. I did, and we totally did it. That’s right on the PC Engine you see everything. The boobs and butts. And then the mercenary got laid.
Or it just faded to black like an old movie.
Anyways someone had put a spell on Knight so I had to wonder around two caves until I found a letter from Mage. I went back to one of the bars and hit up a pretty girl who revealed herself to be Mage. We went and cured Knight who was too weak to party with us. The video was real helpful at this point as I had to return to the starting town and show the elder a pendant who took me to a basement where his daughter was sleeping and looked exactly like the woman I had slept with and was apparently behind this.
It ended with me trying to kill dracula and his army of Zomborgs. I got owned. Youtube says I should have recruited Amazon in the forest somewhere. Oh well, the random battles were annoying me.
The animations as Minty said are fantastic and worth scrubbing through. The art style reminds me a lot of Protect Me Knight! . It is episodic which seems neat. All the dialog is kind of structured like a joke, or where I a joke should be but isn’t.
All the comments are I Totally Remember This Game. Even one of “I stayed up late and was down to my last party member.”
I played even more Populous. I was not expecting to, but the “Bullfrog” water and PC Engine settlements really made it hard to walk away. This is the CD release, whereas the other amazingly fits on a HuCard. Because we’re on a CD, we get the base game and the Promised Lands expansion, which is why everything looks so wacky. Instead of trees and rocks, the map has cigarette butts, coffee mugs, and stacks of floppy disks. I remembered a bit more how to guide my buddies to victory this time around and I got very captivated by watching them slowly swarm over the map like some kind of plague. Rudie said offhand that The British didn’t know how to make a good game in 1991. Well, I think he is wrong!
Here is where people gave up on localizing the CD versions of Valis. I guess that has more to do with the failure of the Turbografx because this is only slightly worse? than III. It actually starts with a tutorial explaining that you can slide. If only the tutorial would add that you can slide over gaps… I love that the other character can double jump only if you press the button before the crest of the first jump. It’s great because a lot of platforms require you to jump at full height, so you wind up failing and falling into pits. It’s reminiscent of Revenge of Shinobi and I personally find it endearing.
I got far enough in to see that you can recruit more characters to your team. They all have the same stiff movement. When you lose a life, it’s back to the beginning of the screen for you. Sometimes the screen is huge, so maybe don’t lose a life if you can help it.
