I also forgot to write about this one. I think the remixed music is weird and that’s cool. I think it is definitely harder than the Hu-card, as even though I was very tired when I played it I could not beat the first stage.
On 1992!
Dragon Knight 2
Yeah that’s right I started with the horny. Much to my surprised I played it for almost two hours tonight. It was a very easy Dungeon Crawler with straight up PC-98 menus. Laughed out loud at the title screen. I never had more than attack/run away in battle. I never fought a boss. I just ran around solved stupid puzzles and fought monster girls. Some adult woman has stolen all the beautiful women and turned them into monsters. When you defeat them their monster costumes pop-off and they look confused. And you might see a nipple. Nice to see one of these Japanese PC games playable. Got pretty bored by the end and doubt I will return. Enjoy this delightful Rat friend:
So many good shooters on the PC Engine, and this is one of them! I’m not sure it is good good, but the creativity on display can’t help but impress. Dying feels bad and i could not understand the options system. They would stay on the screen for a second them fly off. Bullets like to hover right over power-ups. The simple AI was very visible. It made me need to go back and check out Wings of Wor on the Genesis. So I did!
People are scared of making decisions and just want “knowledgable” persons to tell them what to do. So ancient insert credit writer Aderack telling the forum to play Wings of Wor was enough for me to buy a copy. I should have bought more shooters then. I liked shooters. Why didn’t I? Hmm.
Any who. Wings of Wor owns. When you die you make the same death sound as in Landstalker! That’s great. There’s an earthquake and in this game too an inexplicable powerup system. I’m collecting orbs and my weapon seems to change for no reason?
Like I’ll watch a playthrough of Choaniki to see all the wild sprites but will play Wings of Wor. The MiSTeR makes that possible.
It depends on how much of a hater you’re being at the moment. Me at my maximum hater says everything but Parasol Stars, Spriggan, and Magical Chase needs an asterisk. Hate turned low, I can find things to like about Burai, Monster Pro Wrestling, and even Obocchamakun.
I made this list thinking that I could separate them into fourths. Itt makes sense to me, but I can’t promise the same for you.
This shooter was made by the same people who made Rock-On, Manjyudo, so I wasn’t expecting much. To my surprise, the game is thoroughly decent and worth it to see all the ways that eyeballs can force their way onto the world. I really love how busy the night skyline is in the first stage. There are so many lights, buildings, and neon signs. One screenshot doesn’t do it justice. It feels pretty unfair with enemies shooting from all sides of the screen without any warning, but levels are short enough that I don’t have to memorize much.
chou aniki is gorgeous but plain and kind of hard, except also maybe not really? like, sometimes when i got my muscle-bros shooting lasers i can devastate a boss in seconds while without them, it can take a minute, so ability to keep them alive affects a lot. it seems to have a couple of mechanics that lack (at least in emulation) any proper tells that anything is happening.
like, holding shot button for a bit and then releasing fires your wide shot and the mentioned muscle-bro lasers, but only if you hold it long enough and there’s no tell that it’s charged or even that it’s charging. also, hitting the bomb button while holding shot will change your muscle-man behavior, even if you have none at the moment. there is no sound or visual effect when doing this without them, but the change still happens. made it very confusing when they kept changing behaviors between deaths.
it’s very well drawn, often really cute. a teacher challenges you to a karaoke duel but you don’t actually get to play this part. every once in a while you have to do really slow, really bad turn-based fights against weekly villains. it’s OK. i’d prefer to play something else.
Oh! Another quiz game! I wonder how many questions I’ll know the answer to this time. It turns out 0 because they are exclusively about Chibi Maruko-chan. It was worth trying though because it has a very unique system for answering the questions. Instead of selecting one with a button press, I have to destroy an enemy that’s the same color as the answer and pick up their item. Fail to dodge enemies or get too many questions wrong, and I lose. Love how it looks, too.
This is called Liquid Kids in the West. It rules. Plays like a mix of New Zealand Story and Parasol Stars. There a couple of neat contraptions that I have to use the game’s water physics to control. There’s a paddle boat that moves when I splash water on it and watermills that I have to control the spin of to get across gaps. This probably ranks among the top 10 platformers on the console, almost just for lack of competition. These little platypodes are my everything.
Might & Magic
I played this for ten minutes just to see what it’s like. One interesting thing is that a lot of commands are written in kana transliterations of English instead of as Japanese words. For example, アタック instead of 戦い. I mean, that’s the first time I’ve noticed it, so maybe it’s more common than I think. The third Might & Magic gets an English language release in 1993 so I’ll play more of that one, thank you.
Ninja Gaiden on the PC Engine! This was made by a joint venture between Hudson and a Hong Kong team called Hudson-Era H.K. They would also port Cotton later on. Neat! It seems like Hudson shared a lot of their know-how because the backgrounds scroll in the exact same way that they do in Ys III. Be prepared for motion sickness.
It is a slightly more beautiful Ninja Gaiden and one of the few Famicom games I can think of that were ported to this system. The enemies are in the same frustrating places. They still spawn infinitely depending on where the edge of the screen is. It’s still good.
This game would be cool if it had tighter level design or more options for attacks. I’m controlling a huge, honking mech. It won’t turn around unless I double tap in the opposite direction, but that means I can walk backwards while shooting forwards. I can run if I double tap in the direction I’m moving in. It has jets that overheat if I use them too much. Apparently I only have a machine gun and it can only shoot parallel to the floor, not ideal. I can’t get past the third stage because there’s a boss fight against a flying rival and I can never follow him fast enough to beat the level timer. There’s an English VO when he arrives where he calls me Rambo for trying to infiltrate their base all by myself. Maybe he was right to check me like that.
Yeah, I thought it would be the same, too. I think you would be interested to know that the Hong Kong studio would later form something called Warp Power Interactive. Only thing I could find that they made was an RTS called Alchemist:
I don’t know the exact science behind this but there are at least 6-7 homebrew famicom ports including Super Mario Bros. They have weird glitches but it is impressive none-the-less.
Parodius Da!
This is my absolute favorite out of the Konami STGs so far. There are still two more I haven’t played, but I don’t think any are either are going to top this. I think Parodius is really cool, beyond just showing wacky sprites everywhere. By throwing in the Gradius power-up orbs and the Twinbee bells, along with the chaotic level design, Konami has created a maximalist tour de force. There’s a special, caravan-esque mode for getting high scores, too!
Human Sports Festival
I had gotten it in my head that this was going to be some track & field mish-mash, but it is far more substantial than that. Human Sports Festival is a collection of three full sports games, all worthy titles on their own. It has tennis and soccer, which we have seen Human do before, but it also has golf. This Human golf shoots to the top of the pile that was created in 1989 and hadn’t grown until now. I could get par reasonably easy and the smooth jazz just made me want to keep going. Soccer feels better than it did last time, smoother and more legible and tennis feels great, too. It’s amazing that this deal just existed at the time because I would think each of these games could have been released separately. I guess that’s just the magic of CDs. You could put every sports game on the PC Engine on a single disc if you really wanted to. Geez, Human is really good at drawing humans.
Darkwing Duck
Holy crow, this is bad! It is somehow worse than TaleSpin. Darkwing has a gun with limited ammo and most bullets don’t even kill enemies, just spin them in the opposite direction. It turns out I have to jump enemies. Not like that. Doing it the Mario way just hurts me. I think I have to press jump at the same time I land. The game is not communicating well at all. In each stage, I collect puzzle pieces and I can put them together to make some kind of Mona Lisa duck painting. I like that I have to move a magnifying glass over a gang member to pick a stage, but it’s all downhill after that. Did I mention there’s a San Francisco level where the whole stage is a steep hill that you have to walk up? And enemies constantly stream down at you? And the only way to hurt them is to jump on them?
Detana!! TwinBee
TwinBee is a bit of an unsung series, but I love them. The bell powerup system is such a graceful risk/reward mechanic and it’s one of the few ways I’ve seen a game successfully encourage players not to shoot. This port is beautiful and pairs well with Parodius. There’s so much stuff flying around and popping off. I love how the first stage is over this mining region, it’s so industrial and idyllic at the same time, like Pittsburgh. I would love to sit down and beat this game. It really seems to want me to, too. There’s plenty of 1ups and continuing gives me a ton of power-ups.
It really feels like Konami is steadily becoming more familiar with this console, like they’re working up to something. Hmm…I wonder what that could be??
Gyuwanburā Jiko Chūshin Ha: Mahjong Puzzle Collection
Woah, this is not Mahjong but a different variant of Shanghai. Instead of having tiles stacked on top of each other, they are laid out in a grid. I can only remove pairs that have an opening on the same row or column. I wasn’t able to clear a single board, but I played it for a solid thirty minutes. Interesting fact, this and the other Gambler Jiko game seem to be the only two that Game Arts personally developed for the PC Engine (Veigues was ported by Bits Laboratory). Something about the SEGA CD must have seemed more interesting to them!
Hawk F123
When did the developers of this know they were making a bad game. They had already made a worse game, Deep Blue (The worst for the system?) The opening features 3 different songs that have silence between them and yet are also all Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone.
It’s boring and sucks. I had to play a good airplane shooter luckily.
Macross 2036
Okay so I’m not playing is Miria but as her daughter? This doesn’t even have the vocal tracks though it does have voice talent. I guess this takes place after Robotech. Wow more story. Turns out the Zentradi are back at trying to get the Protoculture. It has lots of talking. It is kind of boring but reminded me of another shooter from 1992 with lots of talking.
Spriggan Mark 2
Turns out Compile can make a better shooter than Masaya. I was all prepared to link my posts about this game from a year or so ago but turns out I never wrote about playing Spriggan Mark 2 on the PC Engine Mini. It’s good. It’s got a plot about a coup-de-ta and lots of talking and anime yelling. At the end of stage 2 you get a kickass mech and can customize it for each mission for the rest of the game. It is not a particularly difficult shooter with a replenishing life bar and they want you to see this playable anime. It even has some of the same levels as Macross 2036 but is more fun and vibrant. It is no where near Spriggan though.
Splash Lake
What a strange but fun puzzler. Maybe I have been poisoning myself by only playing the most unknown and weird of the console but found this pretty fun until the boss. I could see myself putting on my own music in which you are a toy duck and have to break blocks to cause monkeys and kappa to fall into water.
Macross Eien no Love Song
Also Masaya this time in their hometurf of strategy games. I had flashbacks to X-Serd. I control only two vertitech fighters and a support ship. This is also after the movie and uses pixel recreations of it but not the vocal tracks again! I’m in the 3rd battle as I type this watching 13 Friendly Units and 15 Enemy Units take actions I can’t control. I guess it looks okay. I could watch Do You Remember Love once in the course of this battle and Do You Remember The Heart like 5 times. Putting DYRL on mute and just watching it is a great time. I bought that bluray with no English Subs for a hundred dollars. Wonder how much it is now?
Look I’m still typing because I am just watching this battle go on and on and on. Wow my allies are just running up to the enemy line and getting killed. This must be how real soldiers feel sometimes.
Genocide
Early I said it didn’t matter if Shadow of the Beast was good or bad, for Amiga’s sake. Genocide is that for Japanese Computers. You are a flipping mech with a katana and you are just slicing and taking damage and you wonder if skill is even real. Where Amiga ran on instant death here your generous health bar still isn’t enough to save you.
It is absolutely easier than the HuCard version. I’ve been listening to PC Engine music on youtube in one ear as I child-rear and there was a song I didn’t think much of but as soon as it started playing in Stage 1 I said aloud, “I hate this song.” Still this is a much more playable version of Raiden.
