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Creativity overshadowed by reality

• Developer: Hudson Soft
• Publisher: Hudson Soft
• Release Dates: July 22nd, 2010 (Japan), October 15th, 2010 (Europe), January 4th, 2011 (USA), July 21st, 2016 (EU Wii U eShop), October 27th, 2016 (USA Wii U eShop), June 28th, 2017 (Japan Wii U eShop)
• Available On: Wii, Wii U (via eShop)
• Genre(s): Action, Puzzle, 2D Platformer
• Also Known As: A Shadow’s Tale (Europe), Kage no Tou (Japan)

I have a long-term goal to play through every Hudson Soft game. It stems from their games being some of my most formative experiences in the medium, so I see it as a way of paying tribute to something I love without wallowing in nostalgia and playing the same few games over and over again. I still happen to love a lot of their games, so it’s a goal that is a delight to work towards! It has been very educational, too, and in ways I didn’t anticipate. I dunno if you realize this, but trust me when I say that Hudson Soft was really never normal! In fact, I’d maybe call them unhinged! The most obvious example of their chaotic nature is the fact they brought Mario Party into this world, but even beyond that, so many of their games are just plain weird or deceptively capricious. A lot of their older games like Bomberman, Milon’s Secret Castle, and Star Soldier have really obtuse secrets that you’d probably never find without someone telling you about them. Adventure Island made you find a hidden item just to be able to continue! Their forays into adventure gaming gave us Princess Tomato and the Dezeni games, which are as funny as they are weird. J.J. and Jeff is a game based on two Japanese comedians that’s unbelievably fiendish in its difficulty for some reason! Basically, you can never count on Hudson Soft to be chill or normal for long and, honestly, that’s one of many reasons why I love them. Lost in Shadow, their last Wii game before being consumed by Konami, looks like their most “normal” game ever on the surface, but it’s really the perfect swan song for the company in a lot of ways. What looks like a Limbo-style puzzle platformer perfectly befitting of the time it came out ends up being something far stranger for better and worse!

One benefit of writing this post in the present day is that I have an interesting point of comparison that those who came before me did not. At the time, pretty much every review you can find compares this game to Ico, and after seeing the game’s presentation and minimalist story, it’s not hard to see why. They even did the thing where the US version has worse box art than the Japanese version! Lost in Shadow begins with a boy’s shadow being separated from his body and thrown down towards the bottom of a massive tower where a fairy named Spangle finds it. Said shadow still retains sentience and immediately begins a journey to the top where it all began with the help of said fairy. Lacking a body isn’t exactly a good thing, but it does give the boy a unique way of climbing back up the tower through the utilization of shadows and also makes him the only one suited to confront its darkest secret. The plot is intentionally vague for hours and like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, you need to perform your task of climbing the tower without a full understanding of the stakes at hand. It’s a compelling mystery because the complete lack of direction gets your imagination running in all sorts of directions. There are extremely brief teases of the world beyond the tower, but never enough to paint a complete picture. The architecture, lighting and camera angles used to represent the tower feel very much in line with what Team Ico would do, focusing strongly on emphasizing scale while using a mixture of extreme brightness and darkness to depict rising and falling tension. It’s equal parts beautiful and foreboding and that balance of tone fits excellently with the game’s equivalent of audio logs that convey the boy’s innermost thoughts and memories if you can find them. Osamu Tsuchihashi, producer/director of Lost in Shadow, has a real knack for making spaces memorable to both look at and navigate and once you realize that this was the same man who was the chief designer on Kororinpa: Marble Mania, that becomes a whole lot less surprising to hear. If you haven’t played Kororinpa, you should, but either way, take my word for it that it’s a game all about carefully crafted spaces to navigate in increasingly careful ways. It makes great use of the Wii remote, really expects a lot out of you, and makes sure you appreciate just how every little bit of level design connects. I wouldn’t call Lost in Shadow quite as polished as Kororinpa, but those same instincts are on display here and I really appreciate that. It probably also helps that the level editor for Marble Saga: Kororinpa was used as the basis for designing levels in Lost in Shadow, which is really cool!

Despite all this Ico stuff, the game I actually want to compare it to most is Shadow Labyrinth. If you want to read my whole take on that game, it was #9 in last year’s GOTY post, but to give you the shorter version, Bandai Namco’s incredibly weird swing had you controlling a little guy escorted by an even smaller fellow as you went through dark environments and used a very small pool of attacks to get through most of the game. Shadow Labyrinth was evocative and had a lot of great ideas, but it was way, way too long and it quickly ran out of things for you to use the game’s limited combat mechanics on. Its story was conceptually interesting, but too slowly paced and doled out in obtuse ways that made it hard to fully appreciate. It was also a game that expected a lot of backtracking but made doing so a tremendous, deeply tedious pain. Guess what game has all of these qualities? Yup, Lost in Shadow does! It has a lot of the same general atmosphere and energy as Shadow Labyrinth, too, and I’d consider them to be of very similar quality overall! Lost in Shadow is a game you’ll see in a lot of “Wii Hidden Gems” videos, but I personally wouldn’t call it one. I actually had a friend ask me about it the other day precisely because he saw it in one of those videos! Like Shadow Labyrinth, I love that it exists, but I don’t love playing it. Does that make it a Hidden Rock or a Hidden Pebble, then? I guess, I dunno, whatever!

Regardless, I think the idea of seeing this game as a hidden gem is something I wanna dwell on a bit more. Not because I feel the need to try to “disprove” how other people feel- that’s the kind of thing you should go to social media for, not this blog- but because I fully understand the sentiment despite my lukewarm feelings on the game. The more you think about it, the more everything about Lost in Shadow truly screams “everyone’s going to love this in 10 years”. It’s the swan song of a beloved company with significant relevance to gaming history, it’s a fairly late release on a hugely successful console, and it’s a slow burn that a lot of people are going to drop off of before the end, making it ripe for the determined to get emotionally attached to and for Youtubers who thrive in the “playing games that people want to see but don’t want to play” market that I’m noticing is doing very well lately. Even though its creators don’t cite Team Ico as an influence, it really does manage to capture the vibe of one of their games, which is rare enough that I imagine people would want to pursue it for that reason alone. If the credited artist, Hiromasa Ogura, is indeed the same Hiromasa Ogura known for his art in things like Space Adventure Cobra, Ghost in the Shell, and FLCL, then they had a veritable legend backing this game! Heck, Lost in Shadow even came out the same year as Limbo, a fundamentally very similar game that received loads of attention and acclaim right away!

But despite everything in its favor, you just don’t see many people looking back at Lost in Shadow. I did some digging around and aside from a very passionate defense by Hikikomori Media on Youtube, most of the videos on the game were either dated closer to the game’s release, were just gameplay footage with no critical element, or were reviews done by channels without the following size needed to guide the direction of a game’s reception in the present day. It’s not a widely available game, to put it lightly, but it did get a release on the Wii U eShop and Wii emulation is both very robust and easy to set up, so I don’t think the act of discovering it is too terribly difficult. If you want another specific but interesting benchmark, over on RetroAchievements, the site got Wii support in March of this year and out of all the available games (a couple hundred, at least), it’s the 25th least played Wii game on the site with just 62 players out of the 1.7 million registered, one of which is me! Most of the games it’s beating in player counts were very recently released and Lost in Shadow has been available since launch! There’s just something, something about this game that doesn’t get people excited for it despite having all the right elements and while I wish I had a more salient point here to discuss beyond the ones I’ll be making below, I just think that’s really interesting and couldn’t help but ruminate on it a bit. Hey, it’s my blog after all, I can do whatever I want, right?

The entire game takes place in the tower, but each floor (or batch of floors) is divided into individual levels. The goal in each one is to find three Seeker Eyes, destroy them, and then get to the exit that opens up afterwards. Much of Lost in Shadow is a puzzle platformer and cinematic platformer blend that, in the most general sense, works well enough. Your jump has a degree of commitment and stiffness to it, but the height is good and it’s rare that a failed jump has any kind of serious penalty. The puzzles constantly make use of the game’s strengths, forcing you to apply lateral thinking and look at the spaces you occupy in both a 2D and 3D context. Using the Wii Remote in an overall additive way (though I wish the cursor wasn’t constantly onscreen blocking stuff), you’ll have to suss out objects with your cursor and then rotate them or move a light source as needed, which in turn has an effect on the level design. A path that’s blocked off in the shadows will suddenly become clear once you’ve recognized what object in the foreground isn’t cooperating and it’s stuff like this where Lost in Shadow excels. Even if I do have issues elsewhere that I’ll go into, I absolutely love how intricate these levels are. Everything is interconnected and you can really tell that Hudson Soft put in the time to make the tower feel like a place that was built with intention. It’s full of seemingly disparate elements- they’ve got a sewer, a residential district, and a cold storage kind of facility crammed into this thing- but they all coalesce into something that feels like a miracle of human ingenuity. By design, you’re forced to slow down and appreciate every bit of effort that went into the level design and I love what that did to me throughout the game. I’m the type of person who doesn’t necessarily stop to soak in every background detail when it comes to environment design. I’ll look, of course, but if you’ve ever seen the type of Twitch streamer who will take hours slowly walking around and commenting on background characters and other things you can’t interact with, that ain’t me. But here, I found myself noticing every little gear, every single scaffold, because I knew they all had a reason to be there and they could all have an influence on the way things played out. Of course, the story makes it pretty clear by the end that these towers aren’t exactly monuments to the best aspects of humanity and shouldn’t be celebrated, but hey, we can still appreciate the complexities of the architecture on their own merits, at least!

For whatever reason, Lost in Shadow has a lot of combat and I mean a lot of combat. Not only are enemies in your way regularly, they’re straight up locking you into Devil May Cry-style combat rooms in almost every level! On paper, combat is a nice way to break up a game like this (it worked for Flashback), but I found it fumbled in just about every way. Your only weapon is a sword and you only get three attacks, one for the air, one while crouching, and a standing combo for the entire game. All you can really do is go up to an enemy and attack them before they attack you, but even that has issues because the most common enemy in the game is a spider, which is too short to get hit by the full combo! This naturally incentivizes you to try the crouching slash, after which you’ll discover the way to break the combat from there on. The crouching slash is both pretty strong and ridiculously fast, allowing you to chain it multiple times in a row and defeat any grounded enemy before it has a chance to attack! With this in mind, the game’s combat is nothing more than a roadblock even on the hard difficulty (which just jacks damage received way up), a total slog that slows down an already slow game. You’re never getting stronger, you’re never learning new things, enemy encounters never promote synergy between any of the creatures you’ll fight, and the only time they throw in a boss encounter is at the literal end of the game. I never thought I’d be saying this, but I would have gladly taken a parry because at least having one would give me something to practice! It truly feels like a wasted opportunity and a waste of time and it’s such a shame that they don’t do anything with it at all. I can easily see a world where they integrate Spangle into combat, making you use the Wii remote to point out weak spots or activate things that’ll give you an advantage. They almost thought of this with the blue enemies that are invincible to everything except environmental hazards, but these little mini-puzzles are always easily solved by something in the immediate vicinity. Much like Shadow Labyrinth, the action is held back by the minimalism; sometimes less is more, but in this case, more would have been more, I’d say!

The even bigger problem Lost in Shadow ends up running into is that it’s ridiculously long for the kind of game it is. On average, Limbo is around 4 hours long, which is the perfect amount of time for it to express its ideas. Wanna know how long Lost in Shadow took me? 18 hours! I 100% completed the game by collecting all the memories, but doing so doesn’t require much more than the bare minimum anyway, so there’s no avoiding the commitment. The climb initially starts off exciting and the garden and outdoor areas are both decently paced and nice to look at. They’re solid enough tutorials, too, and they cap off with this great moment where you ride a minecart towards the main tower and the game’s title drops with this wonderful little song playing in the background that’s very Ico-coded. No matter how I feel about the rest of the game, it never stops being pretty! Though that prettiness does hit some snags as you go; after the lower tower, you hit a factory and a reservoir area, both of which are much darker and dour compared to how the game started. This is fitting for the environment, but it leads to the gameplay falling into a lull where you’re just going from brown pipe/girder to brown pipe/girder more often than not and there aren’t many new structures or enemy types introduced to compensate. The levels also get significantly longer at this point, so it’s going to be hours before you see light again via the Residential District. That area’s cool, but guess what’s after that? Another factory area! After that, you’re led to believe that you’re golden because the shrine area looks like the final one. It’s pretty, has all the enemy types you’ve encountered throughout the game, and makes significant use of the light form ability that you earned a couple of hours prior. Right when you get to the top, though, the game hits you with something really nasty: to proceed to the “endgame” (this is around hour 9/10 of 18 lol), you need to backtrack throughout the entire game, find a bunch of glass shards (they aren’t marked on your map and there are no hints as to which floors they’re on), and then lug your butt back up to the top to put them in a door so you can proceed. You get access to an elevator, but the elevator only brings you to the beginning or end of each area, so if a shard is on, say, floor 45, you’re backtracking through multiple full levels in either direction. Yup, it’s the Wind Waker Triforce hunt all over again and if you know me, you know that I do not like Wind Waker very much at all!

Let me slow down for a moment. I mentioned it briefly, but around 6 or 7 hours (heh) into the game, you receive the only new ability. The light form is a fantastic idea: at certain spots, you can become light in order to explore areas that were previously unreachable in a 3D perspective instead of a 2D one, kinda like Super Paper Mario. The problem with it is that they make no attempt to do anything interesting with it at all. Every light area contains nothing more than a very simple puzzle to solve, usually one that has you rotating something or pushing blocks around. A timer is meant to make these sections feel scarier than they are, but once you realize that running out of time only incurs minor damage, there’s no turning away from how… nothing these sections are. All of the glass shards are hidden in light area portals, but none of them are guarded by anything meaningful. You just find the right portal (probably want to check a guide for that!), walk in, and grab your shard. There’s no combat in the light world, which would have been such a cool thing to introduce and help offset all that 2D combat fatigue, but alas. Anyway, once you’ve spent a couple of hours backtracking for shards and playing through an all-new sewer area (incredibly bold choice to stonewall players from the climax of the story with a sewer level…), you can finally get to the end of the game… but not until you complete another 10 floors of a dark tower area with an inverted color gimmick and then another lengthy garden area! Lost in Shadow really, truly, does not know when to quit, and while there’s a certain element to this that complements the story and matches up with the feelings of anxiety and hopelessness the boy experiences in his memories, it becomes such a slog to get through that you’ll be overlooking those finer details it excels in and just praying for it to end.

Like Shadow Labyrinth, I wanted to love Lost in Shadow so badly. I have a thing for swan songs, I think they’re often beautiful expressions of finality for a console’s life and the people who made games for them, but Lost in Shadow just isn’t it. I’m a true Hudson Soft diehard, but I think they unfortunately ended on one of their weaker notes. Unless Tetris Axis on the 3DS is cool, I suppose! I enjoy the novelty of a Japanese game feeling like it was influenced more by “Western” designs and real world activities like Shadow Tag than other Japanese games and they deserve loads of credit for their level design and presentation, but this game just wore me the heck out. It’s simply too much! Both this and Shadow Labyrinth are perfect case studies for the importance of things like combat design and enemy variety. No matter how tight the rest of your game is, no matter how interesting it is, if it has you doing the same few things over and over and over again, it’s inevitably going to lose the goodwill that would otherwise encourage people to push through it. Since I’m a generous guy, I have to assume the bloated length was due to an overflow of passion. The team that worked on this game clearly loves designing levels as evidenced by their time with Kororinpa. Marble Saga’s level editor is comprehensive, so much so that the team knew it was capable enough to be the backbone for an entirely different game. I can totally picture them just playing around with ideas, plugging things in, and finding inspiration in unexpected places. Shadow Labyrinth has a bit of a “Oh god, we have no idea what to do with Pac-Man, let’s try something ridiculous” vibe to it, but Lost in Shadow feels born of pure confidence. If only Hudson Soft hadn’t gotten absorbed into Konami just a few weeks after this game’s release, maybe then we would have gotten to see a second go at this game. The people at Hudson Soft were truly masters of the craft and the industry isn’t the same without them running around and having full creative control. Lost in Shadow might not be a great time, but it reminds me of great times and while I’m not the type to wade in aimless nostalgia, it’s always nice to return to the work of people who had an undeniable influence on my life.

• Highretrogamelord. “Dezeni Land (デゼニランド) (Longplay) for the NEC PC-88.” YouTube, 29 Aug. 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay9tCgdHcWo.
• Behrens, Matt. “Casting Shadows: On Lost in Shadow with Director Osamu Tsuchihashi.” Nsidr, 9 July 2010, web.archive.org/web/20200506210924/www.nsidr.com/archive/casting-shadows-on-lost-in-shadow-with-director-osamu-tsuchihashi/1.
• 10min Gameplay. “Kororinpa: Marble Mania … (Wii) Gameplay.” YouTube, 8 Mar. 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3xE90jHX6U.
• Hikikomori Media. “An Overshadowed Classic – HM.” YouTube, 24 Aug. 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNOcvymna7M.

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No hidden gems here, only orbs

• Developer: Arc System Works (as Arc Co.)
• Publisher: Pack-In-Video
• Release Date: December 13th, 1991 (Japan only)
• Available On: PC Engine CD
• Genre: Action, 2D Platformer

Pack-in-Video must have loved the PC Engine CD. Going by Mobygames, their name was on 13 games released for the platform between 1991 and 1995! I’m assuming it was fairly cheap to produce games for because it was the kind of platform you could just put out whatever the heck you wanted while also giving it a lavish presentation and/or soundscape. Fiend Hunter? Renny Blaster? These games aren’t Pack-In-Video joints, but they look and sound fake as heck, so I think they’re perfect examples of what I mean! It’s a system that always delivers when you dig into it because there are loads of good games on it, but if you’re the type of person who also loves noticeably flawed games giving it their all in the audiovisual department, it’s going to hit for you like nothing else. Pack-in-Video, to my knowledge, has a reputation as a publisher for putting out a lot of stuff quickly (licensed games especially) without always giving the quality the pass-over it needs, so the PC Engine CD was kind of a perfect platform for them. It’s the one place you can get people like me to give a bunch of rough games a thorough and fair look just because they have incredibly cool vibes coming off them like the smell of good cologne! Hihou Densetsu: Chris no Bouken, as you probably assumed from this context-establishing segment, is absolutely one of these games down to its very core. It’s messy, really not what I’d call good or fun at all, but it’s trying something, and it’s trying on the PC Engine CD, so I can’t help but want to cover it! Hihou Densetsu was actually developed by Arc System Works (back when they were called “Arc Co.”), which is relevant to my interests because I think they’re a pretty cool developer more often than not. I still need to get way more into Guilty Gear at some point- it’s one of those series I just know I’m going to love once it fully “clicks”- but digging into Arc’s older stuff like Exector often leads to weird and interesting results in the meantime, so I’m more than happy to keep doing that!

If I had to describe Hihou Densetsu as succinctly as possible, I’d go with “Low-rent Valis”. Considering that Valis is pretty low-rent to begin with, this is very concerning! Valis manages to get by on a lot of charm, though, so it ends up punching slightly above its weight. I sure don’t love any of the Valis games I’ve played, but I have respect for them, and I suppose that’s what matters in the end. Hihou Densetsu, though, isn’t so lucky. This is a PC Engine CD game, so it’s guaranteed a bit of mercy from me thanks to the format it was printed on, but my benevolence can only go so far. Don’t want to mislead any of y’all just because it’s a game on a platform I have a huge soft spot for, y’know? Like any PC Engine CD game, Hihou Densetsu makes use of the power of CD technology to provide some pretty solid tunes, the kind of rousing stuff that’ll help you push through the things it throws your way. It has those juicy anime-style cutscenes, too, but they’re nowhere near the caliber of something like Valis. These are super simple in their presentation, often limited to still portraits of the characters as they listen to someone else talk, and the quality at which they’re drawn is also oddly inconsistent. Sometimes, they look decent, but in other moments, it looks like rough drafts with the wrong scale were sneaked in or something! Despite the flawed presentation, effort was put into enlisting actors who went on to do a lot more in the industry. Chris herself is voiced by Yuriko Fuchizaki in one of her earliest video game roles before she went on to do voices in games like Sakura Taisen (Honglan Li), the Berserk games (Puck), Kowloon’s Gate, Super Adventure Rockman, Kingdom Hearts, and a bunch of the newer Puyo Puyo games. Shingo Hiromori is a Super Robot Taisen regular and Shozo Iizuka has even more credits than Yuriko Fuchizaki with a whopping 103 games to their name. In comparison, the game’s director, Nobuyuki Ohara, only has credits on 8 games according to Mobygames!

It’s also entirely voiced in Japanese with no subtitles or fan translations into other languages, so unless you’re fluent, the finer details are going to be lost on you. The premise is simple enough- Chris’s archaeologist father goes missing on an expedition to South America and she literally follows in his footsteps to go find him- so it’s not like understanding the gist of it is this impossible struggle. It escalates in a way that’s pretty fitting for this kind of story, too; Chris meets other people connected to her father, one of her travel companions turns coat to steal a magical stone but ends up getting wasted by a bigger bad named Lagash also looking for the stone, and Chris helps out a mysterious woman who’s linked to the villain and also explains a lot of the lore in the process. Turns out her and Lagash are from the lost city of Atlantis, so that’s kind of interesting, at least! Don’t get me wrong, I wish my Japanese listening skills were good enough to understand the whole thing, but you can just kinda sense that a full understanding beyond the main beats wouldn’t necessarily transform the experience that much, something that I consistently saw backed up by the few Japanese player opinions I could find. The presentation just isn’t that exciting to behold, unfortunately! One interesting thing about it, though, is that Satoshi Urushihara (a beloved manga artist you may know for things like Langrisser and Growlanser) was supposedly responsible for the game’s packaging, though there’s seemingly no concrete written evidence of this anywhere. The end credits don’t mention him and the packaging apparently doesn’t mention him either, so this seems like one of those things that has spread and everyone attributes in a slightly different, often hedged way just in case it’s found to be false later on. It does look exactly like his style for sure, so it’s probably true, but it’s just weird how seemingly under the hood that tidbit is. You’d think they would want to flaunt his work right out in the open, right?

When it comes to the actual tomb raiding- she’s the OG Tomb Raider, you could say- Chris did not come adequately prepared. She’s got a knife, but it’s a pretty stinky one. Seriously, it barely goes past her body and almost every enemy out-ranges it! Being able to take five hits helps with this, but as we’ll get into, this game is crammed with enough traps and nonsense that those five hits never go as far as you want them to. The only saving grace Chris has is access to colored orbs that (sometimes) drop from enemies, which will give you one of three power-ups depending on which combos you grab. A red and blue orb gets you a fast wave shot that’ll cross the entire screen and is the best option for, like, 98% of the game. Blue and orange gets you a boomerang shot that doesn’t go nearly as far, but it does hit on the way back and can seemingly hit some bosses multiple times. There’s a big statue boss that shoots lasers that I was able to mulch pretty fast with the boomerang, so that was cool! Lastly, there’s the red + orange combo, which gives you a much larger melee attack. This sounds cool on paper, but the range increase only applies vertically and most threats come at you horizontally, meaning it’s not nearly as helpful as it sounds. There are a few bits where hitting a bat coming at you from above is nice, but no way is this worth choosing over the projectiles otherwise.

If you’re familiar with Valis as I mentioned before, you’ll know that those games have a bit of a “feast or famine” thing going on. If you’re collecting power-ups and not dying, you can breeze through the game because you’re so powerful, but if you mess up, you’re back to square one with a fresh slate and certain sections will become a major pain. As someone who did it last year, beating the final level of the PC Engine CD version of Valis without any power-ups is a Very Bad Time! Ah, good old “Recovery” in video games, such a contentious topic, ain’t it? In case you’re not familiar with the term, “Recovery” is sometimes used when talking about getting back to a good state after dying and going back to a checkpoint in a shoot ‘em up. Gradius is the most notorious example of this- it scares people so much that it has a whole Syndrome named after it- because of certain spots in those games where getting sent back with a fresh ship is tantamount to being softlocked. Despite the reputation, there is a lot of strategy to recovery in Gradius and routing out how to do so successfully in certain spots is a key aspect of the game’s design, something that’s important for 1CC attempts, and something of a fun metagame in itself with the right mindset. I wouldn’t necessarily say I love recovery in shoot ‘em ups, but I feel I’ve come to understand it better and can certainly see the reasons for including it. I played the Famicom port of Twinbee last year and when going for the 2-loop clear, I had some spicy moments where I died and had to scramble to get back into decent shape. Being Twinbee, this meant that I had to both avoid enemies and juggle bells, which makes for a very chaotic bit of recovery, but it’s one I was able to pull off and it was a part of the experience that really stuck with me. If Twinbee had instant respawns that maintained your power-ups, it might have been less memorable to me, so it was a real food for thought kind of moment!

Anyway, all of this is to say that Hihou Densetsu has a bizarre relationship with power-ups and recovery. Not only are orbs random drops from enemies, the colors you get are also random. You can play a level with nothing to your name, kill everything in your path, and still not get the orbs you need to defeat the bosses or even have fun with the game. Maybe they’ll give you way too many orange orbs or maybe they just don’t give you any at all. Heck, the hidden item containers that only spawn if you stay in the right spot for a moment will frequently spawn with nothing inside of them! It’s entirely possible to be perfect and get nothing for it, especially in the final levels that have fewer enemies, and it feels terrible every time. Like Valis, Hihou Densetsu is so reliant on having power-ups at all times, but Valis is actually a consistent game you can rely on to give you what you need. Levels in Hihou Densetsu are short but have no checkpoints and you get effectively infinite continues as well (even when you run out, there’s a built-in stage select), so there’s really no reason not to throw away lives until the game decides to give you what you need. I found this made the game such an annoying experience because I’d have to replay levels I already conquered if I died on a later segment just to get power-ups that would reasonably allow me to get back to where I was. And here I thought Valis was kind of annoying!

There’s also the problem of Hihou Densetsu not having the most enjoyably designed levels in the first place. They’re very short and are often just straight lines, but they rely heavily on gotcha moments and overwhelming you with numbers. Earlier levels especially love to throw fast-moving bats at you that’ll give you a lot of grief without a power-up. They blend in with the background and always make sure to come at the most annoying angle possible, which is oh so fun! It only gets better when they’re paired with scorpions that shoot lightning fast projectiles and take multiple hits to kill with generous i-frames given to them after each hit, oh boy! Fittingly for a game about exploring mysterious archaeological sites, traps are everywhere and you’ll have to watch for falling stalactites, instant death lava, spikes, and fish jumping out from the water. They even have the gall to throw other explorers at you that’ll steal your orbs if they touch you! The platforming is usually pretty basic but actually does a bit to help with the game’s flow, making things more interesting for a brief moment. The world’s shortest mine cart section and Baby’s First Switch Puzzle are something, I guess, but there’s one specific segment where you have to hit these big bubbles to move them out of your way temporarily that I actually quite liked. If the game did more creative things like that, this would be a different post! Towards the end, they basically just give up on the gimmicks and level design, opting for straight corridors for the final few levels, but before then, you get to run along a winding corridor with spike wheels everywhere, so I suppose you have to earn the reprieve!

In a game with loads of odd choices, one thing I haven’t mentioned yet stands out as particularly strange. Hihou Densetsu makes use of a timer like loads of games of this vintage, but it goes about it in a way that doesn’t really make sense. Every level has a timer that’s set to a number of days ranging from 3 to 9. If you don’t clear the level in the allotted number of days, thunder will come down from the heavens to kill you instantly! I definitely didn’t have this happen to me once when I stood right next to an exit and I definitely wasn’t mad about it! Despite the time metric being in days, they go by extremely quickly, so much so that making a handful of mistakes on a platforming segment could actually result in the level being impossible to clear. It’s a pretty demanding timer and even though the amount of time changes between levels, it’s clearly always designed to be a tight squeeze. Honestly, I think it’s an interesting choice on paper and one I could see really singing in a different game that focuses on speedy platforming or snappy action, but in Hihou Densetsu, I don’t think it works well. The timer forces you to play through levels as quickly as possible, rarely if ever stopping, but a lot of the game’s individual design choices expect you to slow down for a moment if you want to get the most out of each level. Revolving platforms force you to wait, hidden item containers make you pause (even if they don’t contain anything!), and loads of enemies arranged to take you by surprise force you to play patient. It makes for a constantly conflicted game, one that wants you to treat an excursion with the respect it deserves but also one that wants you to waste no time in completing your quest.

Though its lack of polish in every regard and some questionable decisions make it a pain to play, Hihou Densetsu isn’t a total disaster when I look back on it. It’s hard to recommend, sure, but like I said before, it iiisss a PC Engine CD game, so that’s got to count for something! It won’t take too long to get through even with the game overs you’ll likely accrue, so even though it’s not what I’d call ~conventionally good~, it is interesting enough to play through for the experience of seeing how all its choices do or don’t mesh together. I haven’t played a game that makes days go by in a matter of seconds in-game before, that’s for sure! Valis is an action platformer and there’s tons of those, but the Valis format has a particular feel to it and not much else has tried to imitate it since, so there is a degree of novelty to Hihou Densetsu’s adherence to that format. It’s a vestige of CD gaming in the early 90s, something that isn’t really made in the same fashion anymore, and that’s kind of cool to me. The enthusiasm developers had back then for using CD technology to bolster existing concepts is just so charming and I’ll never get sick of basking in that enthusiasm, no matter how much the games may want to beat me down from time to time! It’s all part of the process, I say, and if a little cruft (or a lot, in this case) is what you have to get through to get another taste of that good good PC Engine CD tech, then I’m more than happy to oblige anytime, anywhere.

Now that we’re at the end of this post, I have to ask the hard question: why didn’t Pack-In-Video change their name to Pack-In-CD when they started publishing CD games? Seems like a pretty obvious oversight to me! …I’m still workshopping this one, don’t judge me!

• World of Longplays. “ PC Engine CD Longplay [076] Fiend Hunter (JP) .” Www.youtube.com, 25 Oct. 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b18KIusItxY.
• World of Longplays. “PC Engine CD Longplay [054] Renny Blaster (JP).” Www.youtube.com, 28 Mar. 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKQNpgE3i_4.
• The Video Game Museum. “ PlayStation – Exector (1995) .” Www.youtube.com, 16 May 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz4u7UbeKfM.
• Psymage Arcade. “Is Gradius Syndrome Really That Bad?” YouTube, 27 Dec. 2023, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1zgDcwSAS4.
• ACESpark. “Parodius Da! (Gameboy) – Boss Recovery Run .” Www.youtube.com, 15 Feb. 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2S3EoewvY.
• 週刊PCエンジン. “【秘宝伝説クリスの冒険】うるし原智志先生・渾身の一作？【琴葉茜＆ずんだもん解説.” Www.youtube.com, 15 Sept. 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyfoF7vghc.
• Something called retro games. “【レトロゲーム】知る人ぞ知るパック・イン・ビデオのゲーム達を振り返ってみた【クソゲーメーカー？】.” Www.youtube.com, 15 Sept. 2023, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSgDNAbFcZA.

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Try it, but don’t dye for it

• Developer(s): Starfish-SD, Joyfulstar Inc. (ported the Switch/Steam versions), Opera House Inc. (helped port the Steam version)
• Publisher: Sega (Arcade), UFO Interactive Games (DS, PSP, Switch, Steam), Starfish-SD (PS4)
• Release Dates: March 9th, 2006 (Arcade), August 7th, 2007 (DS), October 22nd, 2008 (PSP), July 6th, 2010 (digital PSN release), November 26-28th, 2019 (Switch), January 7th, 2020 (Steam)
• Available On: Arcade, DS, PSP (physically and digitally), Nintendo Switch, Steam
• Genre: Puzzle
• Also Known As: Kurukuru Chameleon, Kameleon

Chameleons get a bad rap in video games and I’m sick and tired of the disrespect! Chameleons are such cool, lovely reptiles that I’ve had the honor of meeting and feeding before- their tongues feel like getting gently slapped with a wad of chewed gum, in case you were curious- but in video games, they’re almost always shown in the worst light possible. Here are some examples of what I mean: Kirby Super Star? It’s cute, but it’s also a mean ol’ boss character that you can’t make into your friend! Mega Man X’s Sting Chameleon? Another villain for you to destroy! Francis in Super Paper Mario? He’s a vessel for the developers to make fun of the internet nerd stereotype! Leon in the various Star Fox games? Sure, he calls himself great, but he’s part of a ruthless mercenary group that does bad things, so he ain’t exactly a role model for all the chameleons out there! Bloody Roar 2 added Buzuzima, which should have been a slam dunk because he transforms into a chameleon and everybody else in that game is cool as heck, but it only takes booting up his story mode in Bloody Roar 3 (very slight NSFW warning lol) to find out that he’s a gotdang freak! And I don’t mean that in a complimentary way like I usually do! Even the innocent cases like Chameleon Twist don’t fully commit to the chameleon form, literally smoothing off the edges of their appearance to make them rounder and “cuter” to the untrained eye. Chameleons are cute just the way they are and I appreciate the US version of Chameleon Twist 2 for realizing that, at least! So, with this dark history firmly wedged into my mind, I had high hopes for Chameleon the game; would this be the game that finally does a good job of showing the world what makes chameleons so special? Well, uh, let’s just say, uh… no.

Yeah, not exactly what I had in mind for a defense of chameleons! Still, there’s nothing wrong with the designs when you look beyond my little crusade here and the game has cheery vibes all around, so really, this is actually one of the better end results when I lay it all out. At least these chameleons aren’t evil! Anyway, Chameleon is a game that got its start in the arcades as Kurukuru Chameleon before getting ported to the PSP and DS. Depending on your region, the game either keeps the same name, is called Chameleon, or is called Kameleon. Some places claim that the game is called “Chameleon: To Dye For”, but none of the covers seem actually say this (the English DS version makes the pun on the back of the box), so I’m not really sure how that one spread as a canonized name. If you search for the name, you can find images of a DS box that says “To Dye For” on the front, which is probably the source of that, but when I searched for images of the actual physical box on places like eBay, they did not have the “To Dye For” part on them even if they showed it on a search engine before clicking the link. Weird! Maybe it was an older mock up that was changed before release or something? The newest ports say “Fun. Challenge. Colorful” on them and I don’t see anyone using that as a subtitle even though it’d be funnier! Anyway, despite this one being fairly obscure, it managed to end up on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, the latter of which is the version I played. I guess it’s because both were developed by Starfish-SD, but this situation reminds me of Heavenly Guardian, another oft-forgotten and not well-regarded game (I sure don’t care for it!) that somehow managed to stick around. Hey, I guess UFO Interactive and Starfish are good at tapping into their curious back catalog and I gotta respect that! Unlike that game, though, Chameleon asks for a lot less of your time. In fact, they’re total opposites; Heavenly Guardian is ridiculously long for the kind of game it is, whereas Chameleon is so thin that you’ll be begging for more after a single taste!

Chameleon is described as a puzzle game, but the simplicity of the concept and its one-on-one competitive focus make it feel more like a board game adaptation in spirit. Each player is placed at one corner of the board (indicated by a chameleon, of course) and has to accomplish whatever the goal is by smartly flipping tiles. I’m being intentionally vague there because there’s three modes we’ll be talking about, by the way. Each tile is a different color and when you pick one to flip (it has to be one adjacent to a tile you own), all nearby tiles of the same color are flipped too. Any tiles you don’t own that are a different color but get boxed in by a move you make will get flipped as well, so one good move can result in a huge chunk of the board being taken. You each start as a color and whatever color you select is what you become on the following turn. Just like a chameleon, I guess! The catch is that you can’t select a tile color that either player currently matches, so you never have a full range of options on a given turn. If you can nab star tiles located on the board, you get points towards one of two special moves, which range from things like placing a rock on the board to getting two turns in a row depending on the character you’re using. Several of the abilities are shared between the characters, so there’s a disappointing lack of variety in that regard (did 3/5 characters need Double Turn?), but certain ones like Shuffle (which changes every tile on the board) can make a pretty significant impact.The default game mode has players taking turns to try and capture at least 50% of the board before their opponent does, so the key is to make moves that’ll capture as many tiles as quickly as possible. I always feel like describing the rules of a puzzle game is pretty hard, no matter how simple they end up being in practice, so here’s hoping that all makes sense…

The second mode is the “Race Mode”, which has each player racing to reach a specific tile at the center of the map. You don’t just need to get next to the tile with the flag, you’ve gotta flip it and claim it as yours, too! The gameplay flows in the same fashion, but now you’re more concerned with how far your tiles go rather than setting up for combos or anything. I think this is a really clever twist on the formula! I find that a lot of competitive puzzle games tend to fixate on the idea of combos as the one thing to aspire towards at all times, which tends to scare away a lot of prospective players. I’m no puzzle game expert, not even close, but that’s the vibe I’ve gotten from just about every game in the genre I’ve played, so it’s really refreshing to find one that’s willing to change up the objective like this. This mode also brings out the best in a lot of the game’s smaller ideas such as the blocker rocks and the character abilities. The rocks rarely do much of anything in the main mode, but getting blocked off in a direction and being forced to route around it is actually a big deal here! The bomb tiles that jumble up nearby tiles when activated feel a little unnecessary in the main mode, but here, they can actually set one or both players back multiple turns! When you’re just claiming everything in sight, the star tiles come naturally, but in Race mode, you’ve gotta make a conscious detour to get them, adding another welcome layer of decision making to the whole process. Double Turns is nice, but is it nice enough to get you to the flag faster than just beelining for it? That’s a good kind of question to be asking, if you ask me!

Lastly, there’s “King Mode”, which is a kind of spin on Capture the Flag. Not the same flag from the Race mode, you know what I mean! In this mode, there are three big king tiles spread around the board and in order to claim them for your own, you’ve gotta color and own most of the tiles surrounding them. This ultimately ends up shaking out in a similar fashion to the Race mode- whoever gets to the middle king tile first is probably going to win- but there are a couple of wrinkles to it that make it a worthwhile addition even if it is the weakest of the three. Because of the requirement of needing to surround most of the king tiles, this mode is essentially a blend of the main and race modes. You should have some ability to set up combos since they could allow you to capture a king tile in one turn, but you also need to balance that with covering distance quickly enough to get to the center king. There’s a king tile placed near each player in a way that makes them all but guaranteed to be gotten by the player they’re near, so for better or worse, this mode mainly comes down to getting that center king as quickly as possible like I said before. If you look at it like that, I suppose it basically is just race mode again, huh? That’s… not great in a game with only three modes!

Chameleon is a game that’s extremely easy to grasp, but does offer some neat dynamics and strategy that make it easy to appreciate conceptually. Since the goal isn’t to cover the entire board, only half of it, there’s room for strategies that involve either rushing to the center or setting up for a huge combo on your side. Whoever gets to the center first has a pretty big opportunity since they can then encroach on their opponent’s side, limiting what they’re able to do and making that threshold harder to hit. If you can set up a big combo, though, then you might not even need to interact with your opponent’s side at all! Everything is visible at all times to both players, which gives them the ability to plan multiple moves in advance. Since your opponent can’t select the color that you currently are, you can make moves that focus more on disrupting them along the way than helping you. If you don’t have a good move to make, say, one that only gets you one or two tiles, why not ruin your opponent’s day instead, right? If you pick the right color, you disrupt your opponent’s path and force them to take the longer way around, something that’s a huge advantage in the other two modes especially. However, if you’re picking colors in the hopes that they’ll screw up what you think is their current plan, only for them to go with a different option you didn’t expect, then it’s entirely possible that you wasted your time with inefficient moves! There’s always an element of risk, at least a small degree of gambling when it comes to Chameleon, and that reliance on mind games and trying to understand how humans approach situations is what makes Chameleon feel so much like a board game to me. The board and tile arrangements are randomized each time you play, too, so strategies that worked one round might not work as quickly the next time around. Like a chameleon, you’ve gotta adapt to your surroundings!

You’re gonna want to grasp onto that perceived notion of variety I just described as much as possible because once you’ve played Chameleon enough to understand how it works, there really isn’t anything else! There is a single player mode that has you going through four opponents in a best of three with the three game modes rotating out to mix things up, but one playthrough isn’t going to take more than an hour. There also aren’t character-specific endings and like I described before, the character-specific abilities do almost nothing to make them feel different. Heck, you don’t even get an ending, the game just says “Good Job” and moves right along! In the interest of fairness, there actually was a proper story with voice acting and whatnot, but it was cut out of the English releases of the game, so I’m just working with the hand I was dealt here! If you have the Steam version, you can apparently change the language to Japanese to access it, so you might want to do that. In terms of modes beyond the story, all you’ve got is the ability to play against someone else locally and the ability to set up a CPU match with whatever rules you want, which really isn’t much different from just going through the single player mode. The DS version had an “Endless Mode”, but that’s missing from this newer version for some reason! Now, I’m not one to harp on “dollar per value entertainment” or anything like that, that’s not what this blog is about, but Chameleon is a case where the game is so exceptionally slim that the concept itself is being held back by the leanness. Online play was always a pipe dream for a small release like this, but there aren’t even CPU difficulty settings! The CPUs aren’t terrible or anything, but they’re not challenging enough to last once you’ve learned the game, so no matter how into the idea of the game you are, you’re going to run out of things to do and opportunities to try out new strategies. The lack of rule and board options is a huge bummer too because it means you’ll never get to explore the mechanics in a different structure nor will you even be able to consistently take advantage of the star powers since some boards don’t offer enough stars. Even something like adding more characters or board hazards would have done a lot for Chameleon and neither seems like an unreasonable ask for a game that’s been ported to five different platforms since its original release.

Chameleon really is something of a shame because I like basically everything about it, but the game is held back by its lack of, well, game. The core concept is strong and it’s very easy to visualize all the strategies and interactions between players coming together in a cohesive way, but without the means to actually test those things, it ends up feeling more hollow than it should. Playing the right version can help with that to some degree, but that still doesn’t solve the issue of the most easily available version that people are most likely to stumble upon nowadays being undercooked. I think there’s a lot of room for puzzle games to build upon this direction and offer more alternatives to the usual brainteasers or falling block games that seem to be the most common examples. I usually find myself impressed by games like this that can get a lot of strategic mileage out of so few elements, but Chameleon just isn’t on the level of something like Ishido: The Way of Stones. That game arguably has even less to it than Chameleon, but it was designed in such a smart way that makes it so the skill ceiling is sky high even with a single person. You don’t need willing participants to get the most out of Ishido no matter what year it is, so you could say they wisely future-proofed it in that way! If you’re fortunate enough to have someone nearby who is willing to play Chameleon with you, though, you should honestly give it a shot and see how you feel. With two experienced human players, I bet this game would end up feeling a lot more alive and dynamic! I’m not exactly the biggest Starfish-SD fan in the world, not even close, but I’ve noticed that the games of theirs I’ve played tend to be a step or two away from greatness. With both this and Heavenly Guardian, you can see the potential so easily! Maybe someday someone will tap into that potential, but for now, I suppose I should just be happy that Chameleon doesn’t negatively portray its wonderful titular reptile. Speaking of chameleons, I wonder how Spy Chameleon is. Now that’s a game with an actual chameleon in the starring role!

• BossBattleChannel. “Kirby Super Star Ultra Boss 9 – Chameleo Arm.” YouTube, 26 Oct. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lj_S8qV_fo.
• Umbra Gaming. “Mega Man X – Sting Chameleon (No Damage / Buster Only).” YouTube, 5 June 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOw2hSUr2Q.
• TheInnocentSinful. “Bloody Roar 3 (PlayStation 2) Arcade as Busuzima.” YouTube, 30 Oct. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0SeDtV7a0o.
• Top Tier Arcade. “Top Tier Arcade – Kuru Kuru Chameleon – Game Review and Play [4K60FPS].” YouTube, 23 Oct. 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN0QXRgD884.

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The foundation of a pillar

• Developer: WinkySoft
• Publisher: Banpresto
• Release Date: December 8th, 1990
• Available On: Game Boy
• Genre: RPG (turn-based)
• English Translation by: Cabal Translations, aishsha
  

Video game history is tricky because there’s always something you’re gonna miss. If you’re not fluent in every language, aware of every subculture and scene worldwide, well-versed in every genre, something really cool and important is guaranteed to slip through the cracks. It’s something I’ve been well aware of for a long time now, but it’s still daunting to think about. I can try to talk a big game about whatever whenever, but I have to live with the knowledge that someone could hit me with something I missed and remind me of just how little and naive I am in the grand scheme of things. That’s not to say I don’t value feedback, I absolutely do and believe it’s a key aspect of being public in any capacity, it’s just humbling to know how much further I still have to go despite all the years I’ve been doing this stuff. It’s rough out there for ya boy! And Kininkou Maroku Oni is here to take advantage of that weakness with a complete lack of mercy! What I mean by that is simple: take a moment to go to Gamefaqs, look up this game, then go to the data section and click on the Oni franchise. You’re gonna be shocked by what you find; this is a series that spanned 10 games from 1990 to 2007, from the Game Boy to the DS! Five of them were on the Game Boy alone! The arcade game Metamoqester is apparently an Oni game! The DS game was developed by a group called Shannon! I’ve never even heard of Shannon, that just sounds like it was one person named Shannon but it’s not, I assure you! I found a fansite for Shannon, so they must have done some pretty cool stuff, right? The world is a big, big place and I’ve seen so little of it, clearly!

Phew, now that I’ve composed myself, let’s get back on track. Clearly, this Oni series was some kind of deal. Not a secret industry titan or something, but a clearly reliable series with loyal enough fans that lasted through the entirety of what people tend to call “The Golden Age of JRPGs” over here. It’s less “The Final Fantasy You Never Knew About!!!!1” and more like “The Lunar/Grandia/Shadow Hearts You Never Knew About!!!!1”, something like that, I guess. Y’know, one of those RPGs that’s a popularity tier or three below the Square Enix stuff that you wouldn’t expect people on the street to know but would expect internet-goers to know if you’re in the right places. This very charming fansite by novc (nobushi) corroborates my estimation, referring to it as one of the biggest RPG series on the Game Boy alongside SaGa and Aretha while also acknowledging how minor it is in comparison to Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Tales. Nice to know I’m on the right track! Anyway, it’s hard to find an exact bead on what the overall consensus was for each entry- doesn’t seem right to try and speak for an entire country I’m not from- but based on what I could find, the series took full advantage of its length and longevity and definitely had its share of fans until the PS1 entry underperformed (despite being a fan favorite in retrospect for its darker nature and style) and the DS entry killed the series. That is… until a new Oni game was announced last year! Can’t say I saw that coming when I started researching for this post! Moving on, to give an example of a source I found for opinions, this video (narrated by the floating heads of Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame) talks about the history of the series and its title refers to the Oni series as “One of the three big RPGs for the Game Boy”, which once again implies that it had a pretty respectable amount of, well, respect. The comments are also similarly glowing, talking about things like how the PS1 entry was amazing and how they would like to see a collection of the games on modern platforms. Sure sounds a lot like how we talk about some of the long-dead RPG series of the past in North America and elsewhere, right? Wikipedia isn’t exactly representative of an entire fandom, but I noticed that the article for the series was pretty dang stacked with info and someone (or some people) had to care enough to put in all that info in the first place, which is more than I can say for most games that show up on this blog, so this is probably one of those cases where I picked a game that’s not actually “obscure” in its home country!

As each game released, they tried different things and expanded upon the overarching story, with most entries being connected in some way such as through having the old protagonists return in the later games. It was basically Trails before Trails! Within the Game Boy pentalogy alone, you had the second game polishing up everything from this one while also introducing team dynamics and removing the actual Oni-related mechanics, which understandably drew ire and is also pretty funny to think about considering the name. Supposedly, this was because producer Takeo IIjima didn’t like Super Sentai shows and saw their team focus plus transformation abilities as something you’d do to pick on the weak! The third game subsequently brought the Oni stuff back, but scrapped the existing continuity and started fresh, which I’m sure some fans were unhappy with because the fourth and fifth games brought back all of the previous protagonists. The Super Famicom entries sound really interesting to me because they both lean more into actual Japanese history and play with different setting ideas like having the second one take place in America. It sounds very Tengai Makyou to me and you just know I’m all about that! The PS1 entry also sounds like a very interesting journey since it was developed by different staff that had a very different vision in mind and never actually got to complete said vision either. Every source I looked at had nothing but great things to say about it, so this seems like one that would really benefit from translations into other languages so more people can play it! I’m hoping to someday be able to cover this series in full because my time with this game plus the research I’ve done has really gotten me interested in it. Fully experiencing a big series like this can be daunting, but when it hits (like with the Yakuza games), I always find myself getting more and more attached to the journey in a way that many other games simply can’t match. A large scope can be risky, but it can also be extremely powerful in the right hands! It’s not every day I find something like this that I wish I got to experience when it was new, but whenever that does happen, it sure as heck serves as more motivation to try and learn Japanese, so I appreciate the inspiration!

The first Kininkou Maroku Oni begins innocently enough; you’re tasked with delivering an epistle (a letter) to a nearby village. As you might have guessed, though, your hometown ends up in flames and by the time you return home, it’s too late to save anybody. From there, protagonist Tenchimaru vows to discover who destroyed his village and discovers more about himself and the world on the way to that goal. Something really interesting about this game is its choice in general tone. It’s possible this is a result of the English translation to some degree, but everyone’s kind of a huge jerk! Random NPCs will vent and complain, they’ll revel in questionable behavior, someone in your hometown refers to you as “the town’s favorite orphan”, which is just kind of weird, and even your master does nothing but reprimand you for dying should you lose a fight, not a single ounce of sympathy from anyone around here! The plot reflects this downer tone to a degree as well; a lot of the town scenarios involve things like a town that hates tanukis, kappas being forced out of their home, villagers having to decide who to sacrifice to the local monster, and a fake lord taxing innocent people into oblivion. Heck, one of the first things you do after embarking on the quest is get beat up by a mysterious guy named Ibaraki for reasons he won’t explain! The potential of this downtrodden world isn’t fully realized since this game ends with several things intentionally withheld for the sequel and the main villain is ultimately pretty basic in their intentions, but it at least makes for good cover for the game’s serious lack of variety. 

For the entirety of the game, there are literally four kinds of locations, not counting the world map. Every town uses exactly the same tileset, every single one, and the music is always this downbeat track regardless of what’s actually happening in the story. The types of dungeons include caves, mountains, and castles and all three of these only have one tileset each as well. You’re gonna get deja vu really often in this game, that’s for sure! The enemies you’ll encounter, while they’re all based on yokai and have pretty great designs, are also extremely limited and most of them get reused in every dungeon and most boss fights. It’s all a bit dire, honestly, but in a weird way, it actually fits the tone of what Kininkou Maroku Oni is going for. While maybe not as dark as that PS1 one or whatever, this is a pretty dang dark game for Game Boy standards and its choice to beat you down in various ways really sells the intended challenge and debatable nobility of Tenchimaru’s journey. He’s all by himself, purely motivated by revenge, has no one to rely on until very late into the game, and no one you encounter until then is going to be all that helpful because they have problems of their own. You toil away, fighting monsters and exploring dungeons, and it all blends together so quickly that you begin to doubt if you should be embarking upon the journey at all. Revenge is a heck of a motivator, but is it worth it if this is what you have to go through? Are the answers you seek something you actually even want to hear? You could quit now, turn off the game, and do something more wholesome and exciting, but if you do that, you’ll never get those answers. Curiosity is an extremely powerful motivator for me, so no matter how repetitive this game got, I can’t deny that I was engaged and eager to see where it went at all times.

Kininkou Maroku Oni is one of those rare RPGs that doesn’t have a party system at all and only features one-on-one fights. You really do just have Tenchimaru the entire game just like the first Dragon Quest! This isn’t a problem, though, because like any good game in this vein (shout out to Lightning Returns for kicking ass), Tenchimaru has quite the arsenal to work with. Aside from his basic attacks, he gets five different categories worth of skills: Fire, Shuriken, Recovery, Nature, and Special. Recovery is self-explanatory, but the others are all variants on offensive moves that give Tenchimaru strong options throughout the entire game. Fire, Shuriken, and Nature skills are similar in practice since they all just do damage, but they’re at least doled out in a way that gives them individual value. Shuriken skills are typically learned sooner than Fire skills and offer more consistent damage at a low cost, whereas Fire skills have wider damage ranges that can pay off if you don’t mind a light gamble. Nature skills take a lot more leveling to get and MP to use- the last Nature skill is learned at level 29 compared to Fire’s 24 or Shuriken’s 18- but they end up being by far the strongest of these options once you have them.

Lastly, Special skills offer things like debuffing foes, paralyzing them, giving you a guaranteed escape, or simply using your regular attack twice. Don’t underestimate that last one, by the way, because Kininkou Maroku Oni is very weirdly balanced in a way that strongly favors your basic attack! Special skills also have even more going on; like the title of the game hints at, Tenchimaru has the ability to transform into an Oni, which modifies his stats and gives him an entirely different set of Special skills! I could mention here that this was apparently inspired by Kamen Rider, but I’m sure you figured that out already because everything’s inspired by Kamen Rider at some point. Hey, I ain’t judging by any means! Anyway, all of these special skills are once again just different means of dealing damage (you also lose access to human Tenchimaru’s healing options), but the Oni form is a bit trickier to use effectively. Its skills are tremendously powerful, capable of deleting bosses if used correctly, but the points needed to use them are separate from your standard MP and are very slight in comparison. It’s not uncommon to run out of juice in, like, two or three attacks! The Oni’s basic attack is also typically weaker than Tenchimaru’s human form, especially as the late-game levels and swords work together to widen that gap.

To compensate, the Oni form has significantly jacked up defense to the point that many enemies will struggle to even scratch it. This gives the Oni form something of an interesting dynamic with regards to how it’s woven into your arsenal; rather than being used purely as a dungeon closer, it often ends up having as much or more utility during the dungeon crawl itself. The higher defense and lack of cost for simply being transformed lets you safely win easier encounters without having to sacrifice health or healing spells/items, which then lets you either use Oni Specials or Tenchimaru’s human skills in their entirety for the boss. If an enemy is too evasive or tanky for the Oni form, then that’s a reason to use human Tenchimaru’s more plentiful MP, and if human Tenchimaru can safely OHKO enemies, then you may not need the Oni form at all. If the dungeon ends up being tougher than anticipated and your human form gets beat up, the defense of the Oni form may be what allows you to escape and recuperate. As we’ll get into, this web of interactions never manifests into a consistently ideal form because of how bizarre many of the game’s balancing choices are, but the fact that Kininkou Maroku Oni is trying so much more mechanically than most RPGs of this scale and vintage makes me want to give it a lot of credit.

To elaborate on that mention of the game’s balance, the power curve in this game is kind of ridiculous. At first, it’s actually pretty evenly paced. Most enemies aren’t too complicated to deal with, but you’ll need to have supplies and gear to survive for long. You also don’t have the Oni form right away, so you’ll spend a good chunk of the early game healing just as much as you’re attacking. It’s all pretty Dragon Quest-core, y’know, come in at a decent enough level with the newest gear possible and you’ll be fine, but as you approach the end of the game, each level up gives you a ridiculous amount of stats. Your HP more than doubles after just a few level ups and you’ll have attack and defense stats in the thousands! Unfortunately, as mentioned already, this means that all those dynamics I talked about go out the window because you’ll be able to defeat anything in a hit or two. Even bosses will struggle to do anything against your might, so much so that it feels like they intentionally phoned in the final boss by just reusing a regular enemy sprite! Oni is one of those cases where I really appreciate RetroAchievements trying its best to work around a game’s problems by injecting novel little challenges into what would otherwise just be a “mash the attack button fest”. A lot of the achievements ask you to do things like defeat bosses using only a specific attack or defeating the final boss with nothing but a sword equipped and while the game’s honestly still super easy with these restrictions, it at least means you have to think about something as you go. The achievements also let you know that this game has a weirdly large amount of rare drops from random enemies, some of which are actually pretty dang useful, so that’s quite cool!

I wanna say Kininkou Maroku Oni is greater than the sum of its parts because it is, but at the same time, it also isn’t? I don’t know, man, it’s a weird one! I really like a lot of what this game is doing and I can’t deny I had a pretty comfy time playing through it, but it’s also impossible for me to shut the thinky part of my brain off. I just can’t ignore things like the super poor balancing, the technically incomplete story, and the serious lack of asset variety, y’know? I’d hesitate to recommend this game to anyone who isn’t as deep in the RPG sauce as I am, but if you’ve got that curiosity, that desire to see every corner of a genre that doesn’t have anywhere near its full story exposed in English, Kininkou Maroku Oni is a journey you’ll want to take. It’s unlike a lot of its contemporaries and its particular choices from its tone to its solo gameplay make it something that’ll probably tickle your brain in different ways from the RPGs you already play. To someone out there, heck, to several people out there, the Oni series was likely a formative one that they carried with them throughout some of gaming’s fastest-paced and most exciting years. In those years, the RPG genre was known to be ridiculously competitive (always has been, but that’s a story for another day), so to have people who cared enough about Oni to create fansites and ask for modern re-releases is a great indicator of it being a worthwhile use of your time. Passion is infectious, as you probably know, so as I was digging through Japanese sites and comments, I found my enthusiasm for this series increasing beyond where my playthrough had left me. At this point, I’m dying to see if the rest of the series ever gets translated into English because I so badly want to experience what Japan got to all those years ago. It’s games like this, warts and all, that make me love RPGs and that feeling of opening one up and getting more than you bargained for, even if that payoff takes years to fully realize, makes it all worth it. Getting the entire series translated would also make for a lot of blog posts, so, y’know, that’s pretty cool too!

• World of Longplays. “Arcade Longplay [393] Metamoqester.” YouTube, 27 June 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qZ5sNZvpIQ.
• “新作RPG『ONI零X（クロス）』2027年に発売。『流転』ではない完全新作、主人公は『戦国サイバー 藤丸地獄変』の煉釖藤丸。今作では鬼が敵に【TGS2025】 | ゲーム・エンタメ最新情報のファミ通.com.” ファミ通.com, 26 Sept. 2025, http://www.famitsu.com/article/202509/53761.
• 『ゲームの歴史』をゆっくり解説. “かつて「ゲームボーイ3大RPG」とまで呼ばれ華々しい人気を誇った「ONI」シリーズが開発力低下でクソゲー量産→消滅した歴史を解説.” YouTube, 25 Feb. 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS6NzuZPleg.

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Not the most flattering depiction of a Gundam

• Developer: Bandai
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: March 25th, 1983 (this is a date you can find online, but I’m not sure there’s concrete proof this is correct considering how old this game is)
• Available On: Emerson Arcadia 2001
• Genre(s): Action, Sci-fi

I’ve been wanting to cover another Gundam game for a while now, but it took a while for me to decide where to go next. There’s a lot of weird Gundam games out there! You’ve got the crusty looking Saturn game, the other Saturn game that’s a three-parter for some reason, the funny live action one with the goofy Char, the adventure game with a different kind of goofy Char and a surprising amount of English text, a Wii game that revolves around the Gundam Hammer (which was in one episode and effectively became a meme), one that was exclusive to the Xbox 360 for some reason, a whole bunch of strategy games (like SD Gundam: Dimension War, which you can read about here courtesy of yours truly), and many more. If there’s a console, computer, or any other kind of device that exists, there’s at least one Gundam game on it! I’d hypothetically love to cover every Gundam game someday since I do enjoy the series and I feel like compiling such a thing would be a good public service, but I think attempting to do so would literally kill me, so we’ll have to settle for the ones I think fit this blog the best. Even if I had a death wish, finding a complete list is more difficult than usual. This Gamefaqs list is the most thorough one that comes to mind and Backloggd has a lot of ‘em too (albeit broken up into several different series for some reason), but the observant among you will notice something: they’re both missing today’s game, which is precisely why I picked it!

Yup, this game’s so early on, so dang good at being the first Gundam game, that it frequently gets skipped over when it comes to compiling all the Gundam games. Well, actually, it’s maybe not those factors so much as it is the fact that it’s on the Emerson Arcadia 2001 of all things. What the heck is the Arcadia 2001, you ask? Great question! I really didn’t know a thing about this console until I did research for this post, so I’ll at least give you the basics and leave you to dig in more at your leisure. I’ll warn you now before we get into it more later, though: actually getting your hands dirty with this thing is easier said than done! The Arcadia 2001 was a console released in 1982 by Emerson Radio, a company you likely know of in some capacity since they’re a pretty big consumer electronics manufacturer here in the US. They’ve been around since the early 1900s and still exist even today, so I’m sure they had plenty of money to spare to try their hand in the console market at the time. Since this was a 1982 release (and before the North American video game crash of 1983), they had some pretty stiff competition between the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, but they came in with a pretty good strategy of charging a comparatively low price for the console. They applied some interesting touches to it, too; according to Wikipedia, at least, the console was both intentionally made small and built with a standard 12-volt power supply so you could easily use it in a car or on a boat. Can’t imagine many people took advantage of that, but it’s kinda neat, I guess! You wanna know what the problem was, though? Aside from the aforementioned threats (that crash was probably a significant factor, too, just saying!), they put this thing out just months before even more competition entered the scene in the form of the ColecoVision, Vectrex, and Atari 5200! 1982 really was an incredibly crowded year for consoles, huh? While the Vectrex and 5200 weren’t exactly huge firestarters, the ColecoVision was, and it and the other consoles were way more impressive than the Arcadia 2001. Ultimately, the Arcadia 2001 fizzled out after just a year and a half and with only 35 games released for it in that period of time.

If the Arcadia 2001 were a normal console, the story would have ended here, but for some reason, it was a total magnet for clone consoles. At least 30 of them, in fact! According to this article from The Silicon Underground, the deluge of clones was due to the actual designer/manufacturer of the console, United Appliances Limited. UAL was located in Hong Kong and so, because they had everything ready to go already, arranged a bunch of licensing agreements to allow other companies in countries all around the world to distribute it as they please. That article is also just a good write-up on the console in general, so if this post caught your attention and got you interested in this odd little device, check it out for more. According to Wikipedia, in terms of clone consoles, Spain had the Cosmos, Germany/Canada/Australia had the HMG-2650, the UK had the Rowtron, South Africa had the Tedelex, and I could keep going with more, but the point here is that this thing had some serious coverage. With this worldwide adoption, more games came, and in particular, Bandai took a liking to it in Japan and put out four games of their own. All of these games were based on at-the-time popular anime like Dr. Slump, Macross, Doraemon, and of course, Mobile Suit Gundam. These Bandai titles are easily among the most interesting games available on the platform, both for their connection to things that people are passionate about and because they’re some of the few non-arcade ports for the console, which is why I was drawn to them for this post. I have zero experience with Dr. Slump, Macross, and Doraemon (I very much intend to change that someday), so Gundam was the obvious choice. Seems like this would be a straightforward enough post, right? Like, how complicated could a 1983 console game be to set up even if I’ve never emulated said console before? Turns out, it’s apparently a nightmare!

Yeah… so full disclosure: I had to go through a lot of nonsense and scramble under a tight schedule to get this post going at all, so apologies in advance if my coverage is a little brief and scattershot. To my knowledge, there are two main Arcadia 2001 emulators: WinArcadia for PC and DroidArcadia for Android devices. We’ll get into that second one shortly, but I spent most of my time trying to get the first one to work since, y’know, I wanted those gosh darn RetroAchievements. What can I say? I love making numbers go up! Anyway, WinArcadia is straightforward on paper, really no different from any other emulator in the basics, but for some reason, I just could not get Mobile Suit Gundam to work. Other games seemingly did work, including a bunch of games built into the emulator for some reason(?), but Gundam was the lone exception. It’d make it to the title screen, then crash every time! I tried it without being logged into RetroAchievements, tried it while logged in, tried multiple reinstalls, tried restarting my computer, tried running as admin, tried various compatibility modes, tried different copies of the game borrowed from my Totally Legit Local Libraries, tried all sorts of rain dances and prayer circles, but nothing worked! I did find a [b] version of the game (pretty sure the [b] means a bad dump, so I brought this upon myself) and that actually worked past the title screen, but it would get stuck in a strange loop in which the little animation of White Base moving to the left before the game starts would play, but the game would never actually begin. All I could do was watch White Base fly by while a farty little version of what I assume is meant to be a song from the anime played, and let me tell you, it was demoralizing if not also slightly funny! Eventually, I gave up and tried DroidArcadia on my recently obtained Retroid Pocket 5, which actually worked pretty well! The game booted up without an issue and was playable, which was how I got the screenshots you see here. I’m convinced it emulates a bit too fast, but I can’t say for certain and I was able to complete the game’s two levels at least once, so it worked out in the end. DroidArcadia has a problem where it completely stops working after one use and I have to reinstall it every time- it also doesn’t support RetroAchievements in Hardcore mode, which sucks- but hey, I’m just happy it worked!

…Phew, now that we’ve gone through the nightmare I experienced, what’s this game like, you ask? Well, there ain’t exactly much to it! Seriously, getting it to emulate at all took way more time than playing it did! Mobile Suit Gundam has two levels, one that features (relatively) grounded combat on Earth and another that has you fighting up in space. Your Gundam only has a rifle (sorry, beam saber fans), but you at least have the luxury of aiming and moving in eight different directions. To complete each level, you’ve gotta defeat all the enemy mobile suits without dying too many times yourself and it’s one hit kills for everyone involved. Simple enough, exactly what you’d expect for a 1983 console game, but it’s way harder than it sounds due to a variety of factors. For starters, at least if you’re emulating it like I was, this game feels awful to control! Eight way movement is nice, but there’s a noticeable delay whenever you have to change directions, which makes it very hard to move on a dime or react to incoming bullets. You also have to press and hold a direction to shoot in it, which can make for very finicky aiming and firing directly upwards is weirdly difficult. All of this is made worse by your enemies being absurdly fast and surprisingly keen at dodging attacks and countering from advantageous angles; it’s like everyone else is a Newtype and you’re not even though you’re the one piloting the Gundam! This isn’t a game where you can just play enough and memorize all the patterns, oh no, you’re gonna be on edge every time you boot it up!

This is one of those rare games that’s so hard to get a foothold in that I honestly wasn’t sure if I would have enough to say. The emulation is partially responsible, sure, but this game is brutally hard! It feels like they knew that, too, because the enemies in the first level come at you in pairs while the rest wait from above like they’re the audience to a coliseum bloodbath. It’s harsh, almost a little insulting, but like I explained, they’ve earned the cockiness! The first level is also littered with planes and tanks that fly in extremely fast and add more noise for you to dodge. There’s no tell as to when they’ll appear and they appear at random intervals, so if you happen to be in the middle of the screen or the bottom, there’s a chance you could die instantly. There’s a kind of risk/reward element to this that I actually like- the air is safer from the hazards, but closer to the enemy pilots, whereas the ground is easier to aim from but more vulnerable to drive-bys- but in a game with movement this poor and no way to rebuild your stock of five lives, it doesn’t quite work as it should. This is also the kind of game where enemies continue to move and shoot after you die while you have instant respawns from where you died, so it’s entirely possible to lose two lives instantly if a plane travels through you! Once you’ve gotten the enemy forces down to their last pilot, the final mobile suit becomes more aggressive, firing more bullets and moving even more erratically. I dunno if this is proper reactive CPU behavior or if there’s a specifically programmed behavior pattern or whatever, but I was honestly impressed by how tricky the movement of these enemies was!

If you actually manage to defeat all the enemies, you get to move into space for the second level, which is essentially the same idea but framed slightly differently. You’re still defeating enough enemies to move on, but they no longer wait at the top of the screen and instead pop out of the left and right sides of the screen. The enemies you encounter are also much bigger and better resemble the mobile suits like Zakus that you would expect from this depiction of the series. There are red ones mixed in randomly as well, so I have to assume those are supposed to be Char in his special red Zaku? Not sure why there are multiple Chars if so, but I still appreciate the inclusion of something a little more interesting! Despite the enemies being more formidable here on paper, I actually found the space level to be a bit easier than the Earth one. Since you don’t have to worry about those yellow planes and the tanks, you can make more use of the screen and stay in one place for longer. There actually is a white plane enemy in this level (kinda resembles the Core Fighter, which is weird) that spews a lot of bullets, but it comes in from the top of the screen and is pretty big, so it’s not so bad to take out. Although I appreciate the idea of there being both planetary and space combat, this level kinda makes me wish the game stuck to space because the idea of a free-roaming shooter like this really works better in a more spacious environment.

Despite this game not being very fun to play at all, frankly, I can appreciate that there’s actually something of a vision contained within it. Anime tie-in games aren’t always made with the purest artistic integrity in mind, but in the extremely brief, flickering moments where you’re not dying to everything around you, you can actually see how parts of the game echo the source material. Once you actually get the hang of things, you can imitate the army of one behavior that Amuro is often forced to exhibit in the anime as you cut through a horde of enemies that outnumbers you. Even when the game feels kinda unfair and doesn’t control well, overcoming it still feels good! In the brief moments where you get to face another pilot in a one-on-one battle, you’re both zipping around and dodging each others’ bullets in a way that feels like how proper mobile suit combat should be and what most Gundam games after this one also aspire to do. If you’ve watched any of the Gundam anime, you’ve definitely seen moments where two pilots are engaged in a dramatic battle that sends them all over the battlefield, so it’s really cool to see this little 1983 game do its best to recreate those moments. They probably should have tried to make a slightly fancier boss encounter with Char or something, but at least the sensibility is buried in there somewhere! When you’re up in space and the enemies suddenly appear from the sides, I don’t see that as an odd choice or limitation, I see it as a solid recreation of the idea that space is so vast it makes for easy ambushes! Even though the difficulty balance is a bit out of wack, I also appreciate that the (theoretically) tougher enemies populate the space battle since that’s where the vast majority of significant fights in the series takes place. While Mobile Suit Gundam isn’t what I’d call a “good” game if that’s the kind of judgment you’re looking for, it’s one that I think is really interesting to look at in ways like this and I can’t say that I completely regret spending hours of my time trying to get it to work. Normally, this would be the part where I say that I’m interested in covering more Arcadia 2001 games, but after this experience, I think I’m gonna have to think that one over… Well, never say never, right?

• Paul Eales. “Kidou Senshi Gundam (機動戦士ガンダム). [SEGA Saturn – Bandai, CRi]. (1995). Full Play.” YouTube, 2 Dec. 2023, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27CKFA64JaA.
• ReTro2VR. “Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story I – Sega Saturn Playthrough | Real Hardware.” YouTube, 18 Jan. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_sjk-3U8vQ.
• Kalata, Kurt. “Gundam 0079: The War for Earth.” Hardcore Gaming 101, 28 Jan. 2024, http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gundam-0079-the-war-for-earth/.
• Legends of Localization. “Kidō Senshi Gundam Part 1: Gundam Daichi Ni Tatsu!” Legends of Localization, 24 May 2018, legendsoflocalization.com/articles/gundam-daichi-ni-tatsu/.
• TLA GAMEPLAY. “SD Gundam: Scad Hammers – (Wii) Part 1 – GAMEPLAY.” YouTube, 14 June 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvmTUEqyeu4.
• iPlay Retro. “Mobile Suit Gundam – Operation: Troy (Xbox 360) Gameplay.” YouTube, 12 Oct. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsTF8p2ItpE.
• Farquhar, Dave. “Emerson Arcadia 2001: Peak 1982 Video Game Console.” The Silicon Underground, 15 Apr. 2024, dfarq.homeip.net/emerson-arcadia-2001-peak-1982-video-game-console/.
• RETRO-ROCK. “ Dr. Slump/Dr.スランプ (Emerson Arcadia 2001, 1983, Bandai) .” Www.youtube.com, 25 Aug. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYE5y2mD10o.
• MacAyit. “THE SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS(Emerson Arcadia 2001).” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_U1O7ZzgLY.
• RetroGamingLoft. “Doraemon Longplay (Emerson Arcadia 2001 Game) – Level: 1 (Easiest) – Warning: Flashing Lights!” YouTube, 4 Jan. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2GQ9U3By5Q.

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The Hunger Games

• Developer: Erbe Software
• Publisher: Erbe Software
• Release Year: 1987
• Available On: Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, ZX Spectrum
• Genre(s): Action, Advergame

Remember when you could just make a game about anything and sell it for money in stores? Like, literally just slap any brand you want on something and call it a day? The halcyon days of games like Cold Stone Creamery: Scoop it Up and Chuck E. Cheese’s Party Games are my personal favorite examples for being really funny conceptually, but sometimes, these advergames were actually kind of cooking. I don’t intend on ever handing it to them, per se, but McDonald’s had a weirdly decent streak going with games like M.C. Kids and McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure, the latter of which Treasure somehow ended up making. Back when the Burger King name meant something as a viable competitor to McDonald’s, they too had their share of surprisingly decent tie-ins via the Xbox 360 trilogy of Sneak King, Pocketbike Racer, and Big Bumpin’. Ultimately, I’d say McDonald’s won out because their games had the very significant benefit of not being made with the involvement of Steve Bannon (sorry for hoisting that cursed knowledge upon you if you weren’t already aware!), but Burger King had one ace up its sleeve that never gets acknowledged by anyone. That’s right, Whopper Chase, the advergame to end all advergames is here to set the record straight and make up for those future sins by being the secret best fast food-based game to rule them all!

…Is what I would like to say because it’d be really funny if that was true, but, well, Whopper Chase couldn’t be further from that if it tried! The gameplay is a total mess in ways that I find entertaining, but there’s very little to it as we’ll get into later. It’s thankfully an interesting release in other ways, though, such as how it was released. Whopper Chase was a Spain-exclusive game released in 1987 that was given out with Burger King Whopper meal orders, as mentioned in the ad above. If you were lucky enough to be in Spain in 1987, the cassette tape you got was apparently a multi-sided one, giving you access to the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX, and Commodore 64 versions all at once. I played the Amstrad CPC version for this post, but based on the videos you can find out there, the ZX Spectrum and MSX versions look like the winners to me. They move a lot faster, animate more smoothly, offer slightly larger sprites, and even seem to be more reasonable to play for extended periods of time, giving you more time to react to certain enemy attacks. The Amstrad CPC version, on the other hand, is less of a Whopper Chase and more of a Whopper Saunter! It’s so slow and feels pretty awful to play, and the slowness also makes the game more challenging in ways that don’t exactly do it any favors. I suppose that increased challenge does mean you have to engage with it more directly and in more nuanced ways, but this is a game best played in the cheesiest way possible if you’re looking to win, so increased engagement could very well be a bad thing depending on your goal! The Commodore 64 version is closest to the Amstrad one visually, but it moves faster and smoother, so it’s also a step above it. I probably shouldn’t have picked the Amstrad CPC version, but it’s also the only one with RetroAchievements and I can now proudly display the SuperWhopper on my mastery wall to show that I am a master of Whopper Chase, so I’d say that I got the last laugh after all!

As the oh so ~iconic~ Whopper, your goal should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: you’ve gotta collect all six pieces of the Burger King logo and bring ‘em to a guy for some reason! Yeah, y’know, just Whopper Things! …It’s too bad this post didn’t fall on April Fools, huh? Anyway, Whopper Chase is a weird game, but believe it or not, there actually is a plot. According to the intro seen in the Commodore 64 version here, this game actually takes place in the year 2025! You apparently play as a “SuperWhopper”, a burger that has gained sentience and martial arts training after years of technological advancement spearheaded by Burger King. Because these burgers are so advanced that they’ve literally grown legs, customers no longer feel the need to go to Burger King themselves and now expect the burgers to walk to them. That’s why, in order to complete your training, you need to fight against those who want to eat the Whopper as well as those who intend to “adulterate” its ingredients. That’s the game’s words, not mine! So based on all that, the pieces of the logo you collect aren’t just random trinkets but marks of mastery, proof that you’re the strongest SuperWhopper around and worthy of being eaten by the right patron.

This is an incredibly absurd premise for a Burger King video game, one that had way higher expectations for the company than it has been able to meet in recent years, but I personally find it really endearing. I’m so used to corporations being sticks in the mud about everything, enforcing an extremely sterile, samey image for all of their stuff, but here we had Burger King making a game that offered a comedic (and not very appetizing) take on the company’s most well-known item. This, coming from the same company that threw the very king in its name to the curb just last month! That “attitude”, that sense of “cool” and doing things differently compared to the norm was always part of what drew me to them as a kid, I think. Y’know, aside from the food itself, of course. Not to be a corporate cheerleader or anything, I think it’s obvious that’s not my style at this point, but when I was growing up, Burger King had things like the Burger King Kids Club and the aforementioned Xbox 360 games that gave it a recognizable identity that stood out compared to what McDonalds offered. It wasn’t “the burger place that I could go to but never do because why would I” like it is now, it offered things that actually made it a potential choice, and if Whopper Chase existed in the US (and was also released after I was born), it’s exactly the kind of silly but cute thing that could have actually swayed me into picking Burger King over McDonalds even more often.

The name makes it sound like a maze game where you’re always on the back foot, but the dynamics are actually two-sided in nature. Your Whopper isn’t defenseless and can actually take out any foe in a single squirt of projectile ketchup. Apparently, that’s what martial arts training gets you! On the other hand, every enemy in the game can take you out in a single hit and they’re usually either faster than you or capable of shooting projectiles, forcing you to rely on the world’s worst jump to dodge. If I wanted to be a real stinker (spoiler, I always do), I could describe this as a food-based Rolling Thunder or something, which would amuse me greatly, but your options are more limited here. There’s no ducking or doors you can enter nor are there any power-ups or things that help you, but you can escape to higher elevations to dodge as needed. Despite the game only being six screens wide, there’s a decent selection of enemies to deal with, including dogs, tomatoes, pickles, other Whoppers (raising some interesting implications here), boys with slingshots, and chefs armed with knives. The non-humans all rely on charging at you, making them the most predictable to deal with, but the boy and chef will fire projectiles at you on sight. In most versions, simply shooting first usually keeps you safe, but in the Amstrad CPC version, these guys almost always manage to get a shot off before you do, so firing and dodging, not one or the other, is a given. This arguably makes the game a bit more interesting since you’re constantly being forced to stay on the move to survive. To actually get those pieces of the Burger King logo, you need to keep defeating enemies and scoring points until they decide to drop from the sky. Because of that, there’s no shortcut to beating Whopper Chase, you’ve gotta keep fighting until the game decides you’ve done enough.

Forgive the groan-worthy pun/comparison, but there’s kind of a Hunger Games thing going on here where you’re being forced to fight in a particular space for the amusement of the game itself against pretty absurd odds. The enemies never stop flowing, you’re never safe, you’re only equipped with the bare minimum and the end isn’t even in sight until you know how the game works. On paper, I actually think the game’s structure is perfect for this kind of thing. I feel it’s pretty clear that the developers wanted you to keep moving between the six screens, finding vantage points and opportunities for easy kills before trying to get to the final destination intact (which is one screen to the left of the start). And in the other versions, I bet you could probably get away with doing this pretty well! You’re a big target and you’re slow, but you’re typically given enough space to react to threats and the game’s choice in spawn points and enemy spawns becomes predictable enough after a point that you can have a good idea of what’s coming. For example, every screen begins with a chef, but once you’ve taken him out, he won’t spawn again until you’ve left the screen. His absence makes moving around a lot easier, giving you the time needed to breathe and decide if you want to stay on the same screen. Enemies also typically spawn near the edges of the screen, so if you keep shooting or time your shots, you can have enemies defeated as soon as they spawn. Your choice of screen also matters a lot once you’ve completed the logo since that will determine how far you have to go to win the game. You only get a few lives and there are no extends, so if you decide to farm the furthest screen, you’re potentially setting yourself up for heartbreak at the end of the game if you can’t make the journey back. Each screen is different and offers different arrangements of platforms and boxes and stuff, so there are legitimate reasons to choose one screen over another. You might think to just farm on the same screen as the patron you have to get to, but it’s a flat screen with only two layers, the higher of which is barely higher than the floor, making it far too easy for enemies to drop down on you. There’s not much here, but there is something here, and in the brief glimmers of working moments, you can actually see the vision they had in mind for this game, so to speak.

However, like I said before, I was playing the Amstrad CPC version, and boy is that version *rough* when you’re trying to play it well! You can only have one projectile on screen at a time, but the game speed is also much slower than the other versions, so any missed shot is very costly and will have you waiting seconds to be able to shoot again. When you jump, you’re safe from grounded threats, but it takes long enough to come back down that you could just end up landing on a nearby enemy anyway. I’m not sure how bad it is in the other versions, but the frequency of enemy spawns often resulted in situations where I’d walk onto a new screen and immediately die because an enemy spawned directly on top of me. This happened to me multiple times right as I was steps away from winning the game, too! I think this game might also emulate poorly since I did encounter frequent visual glitches that had me vanishing from the screen or briefly covered everything in a garbled mess. The Amstrad CPC version, because of its many issues, has to be played differently from the other versions and in a way that’s likely less faithful to the ideas the developers had in mind. You know how I was just talking about moving from place to place as needed to get the job done? In the Amstrad version, you want to find the place that’s most likely to mess with the intelligence of your opponents and then farm that exclusively because your movement is just not up to the task otherwise. In my case, I stayed on the starting screen and used the top floor of it to farm enemies from safety. None of the food enemies or the dog can get you up there and the chef is easily disposed of and doesn’t come back, so the kid is the only potential threat. He’ll frequently spawn across from you and get a shot off, but you can just jump over it, take him out (if you don’t jump too early, he’ll get hit while you still have enough time to jump), and resume what you were doing. It’s slow, like the rest of the game, but it’s safe and very close to the patron, so I found it effective enough to get a deathless run after a few attempts. Alternatively, RetroAchievements user Whoops found a strategy in which they go one screen to the right and then manipulate the placement of the chef and kid carefully. By getting them both stuck on a box above you, they’ll freeze in place and give you an opportunity to farm the points you need from other enemies without any risk of harm. Of course, you have to make a longer trek than with my strategy, but not having to move around much in this game is a very nice perk!

I can’t say Whopper Chase is a “good” game in the conventional sense, like, at all, but I also can’t deny that I had fun playing it. The Amstrad CPC version feels like it’s barely holding together, but beneath all the jank and crust, you can spot a glimmer of a vision, a game that wanted to capture the fast pace and ebb and flow of the arcade classics that likely inspired it in some way. This is the kind of game that’s so absurd I find myself smiling the whole time no matter how messed up it gets! They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore, you know? The novelty of this release being so fundamentally weird and distant from the kinds of games I typically play and am aware of is doing so much heavy lifting for it, if I’m being honest. This is a game you get fun out of through everything surrounding it, from its place in history to how it looks to how it reminds you of different times. Not only was this a fascinating Spain-only release, it was also the debut title for some members of Erbe Software such as programmer Jesus Medina and graphic designer Julio Martín Erro (going by Mobygames, anyway). Imagine starting your career in the games industry with a game about a Whopper, then going on to work on a game with a cover like this? I love that kind of thing! Erbe Software was apparently a very big name in Spain as well, so this kind of information might come as a big surprise to people who enjoyed their games at the time and didn’t realize how exactly they were all connected. I’m no expert on the Spanish games industry, but if I happened to have taught anyone something new by taking the time to search around for information on the silly burger game, then that’s pretty cool! Anyway, Whopper Chase is the kind of game I probably wouldn’t have played if I wasn’t doing this blog and it’s also the kind of thing that makes me thankful and happy to be doing this. Exploring the wide world of games is fun, but it’s even more fun when you get to share it with other people and potentially even encourage them to explore themselves. Even if only five of you are interested in this game, it’s my pleasure to share it with y’all anyway because there’s an inherent joy to engaging with and/or gawking at a game about a hamburger with legs. They should make more games with sentient hamburgers, if you ask me!

• JovegaX. “Cold Stone Creamery: Scoop It up (Nintendo Wii Gameplay).” YouTube, 25 Oct. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3MV3fPOJh4.
• Mutch Games. “Chuck E. Cheese’s Party Games [16] Wii Longplay.” YouTube, 20 July 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exOeEsuQyXo.
• -MODERN-RETRO-GAMING-. “WHOPPER CHASE -=Classic Gaming=- Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum.” YouTube, 13 June 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbgC0NjpXl4.
• RetroGameManDan79. “C64 Game – Whopper Chase.” YouTube, 29 June 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv12RYdANhM.
• araubi. “Whopper Chase (Topo Soft, 1987) MSX [197] Walkthrough.” YouTube, 29 Aug. 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlwDo8d53mI.
• Stone, Helena. “Burger King Fires Its “Creepy” Mascot after 20 Years.” Yahoo Finance, 17 Mar. 2026, finance.yahoo.com/news/burger-king-fires-creepy-mascot-200048640.html.
• Koolander, Hoju. “Burger King Kids Club Part 1.” Retro-Daze.org, http://www.retro-daze.org/site/article/id/9171.
• DXQX. “Whopper Chase | Amstrad CPC | Deathless Run.” YouTube, 8 Dec. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5zmxMVFKCc.

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It takes stamina to be king

• Developer: Full Fat Productions
• Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
• Release Date: May 30th, 2002
• Available On: Game Boy Advance
• Genre: Sports (Boxing)

Yeah, that’s right, there were more Punch-Out clones on the GBA beyond just Wade Hixton’s Counter Punch! And this one beat it to the punch (heh) by two years! Kinda surprising, right? Seems like one of those subgenres that’s pretty under-tapped in the first place and the GBA wouldn’t be my platform of choice for such games either, so I was surprised to find this game by chance. It’s not like it can’t work by any means, but I guess I prefer the big screen for games that require lots of precision and careful watching of beautiful animation frames. Anyway, if you haven’t played Wade Hixton’s Counter Punch, you should because it’s pretty cool. Punch King isn’t taking that game’s incredibly specific championship belt here (the Hajime no Ippo game definitely has a shot, though), but it’s an interesting take on the Punch Out formula that’s even more overlooked than Wade Hixton. It may not be as funny looking as Boxing Fever, the other other option I could have done for this post, but based on what I’ve seen, Punch King is probably the more compelling bet to bank on!

I already made the obvious Punch-Out comparison, but Punch King makes the interesting choice of following the arcade entries most closely. You get a close behind the back perspective, absolutely massive sprites (the sumo wrestler is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen on the console!), and boxers that are generally more grounded than, say, Super Punch-Out on SNES and the Wii game’s Title Defense mode without completely adhering to what we could charitably call “realism”. The only person here who’s egregiously cheating is Afrika Bambattaya with his weird flash attack you have to block high to cover your face as if you were averting your eyes from Medusa’s gaze, which is, well, pretty dang goofy, can’t deny that! Anyway, that’s all fine by me because I actually have quite a soft spot for the first arcade Punch-Out in particular. Years ago, there was a bar pretty close to where I lived that had a variety of arcade machines but wasn’t a Barcade. Some friends and I played through all of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles once which was delightful, but I usually would go there and try my hand(s) at the Punch-Out machine. I never beat the game, but I’d do a little better each time, making it so I could get to Bald Bull or Kid Quick without breaking a sweat at the bare minimum. I have a ton of fondness for the Punch-Out games and played them a lot when I was younger, so every time I’d go to that bar, it’d make for a nice reminder of how cool these games were and still are even after I had stopped regularly grinding with the console ones. From what I’ve found, I get the impression that some people find the arcade entries to be rough or even outright bad, but I think they’ve got a distinct style all their own and I really appreciate a game that doesn’t deny their legitimacy and sides with me on this particular issue.

Punch King is an incredibly nice looking GBA game. It wasn’t an arcade game (it does label itself as being “Arcade Boxing” on the box, though!), but it has the extravagance and confidence of one in the way it animates and proudly shows off its massive sprites. Slower punches like uppercuts carry enormous heft and when you hit someone, their pained expressions make the damage you’ve done undeniable. Each arena is completely different based on who you’re fighting and each opponent gets different music as well, which does a lot to give the game some character and compensate for its not-so-great character designs. The special moves each opponent carries aren’t as fun or ridiculous as Punch-Out’s best stuff, but each one is unique, bone-crunchingly painful when it hits you (you really need to learn how to avoid them to win), and often brings with it imagery that fits each character’s style. Granted, this game leans hard into the whole “goofy/questionable stereotypes” thing that Punch-Out also did, so you get things like “the Chinese guy’s special move is a dragon punch” and “the Egyptian guy wears a pharaoh’s regalia and does an Egyptian dance to trick you”, so that’s not great and it’d be nice to have a boxing game that moves away from that, in my opinion. Still, even if it’s not all perfect, Punch King absolutely does have character to it and isn’t just a derivative, soulless clone or something like that. It’s not as good as Punch-Out, but it’s an alternative you could actually play and have some fun with, which is more than I can say for something like Power Punch II!

Punch King has you fighting with uppercuts, body blows, and straights and jabs as you’d expect. Your defensive options are the same as well, though dodging is mapped to L and R, which takes some getting used to. For the most part, it really is just Punch-Out (are you as sick of hearing that as I am typing it yet?), so you’re trying to knock them out before they knock you out. I’m sure you’ve played Punch-Out if you’ve made your way here, so I probably don’t need to recap the whole idea, right? Go play some Punch-Out if you haven’t, though! I think it’s best if we move into the differences, which are much more significant than they seem at first glance. For starters, before we get into the problematic differences, let’s talk about something I think is really cool: the KO meter! Like Punch-Out, you’re building towards a precious resource by playing well (it’s even an arrow-shaped bar like in the arcade version), but unlike Punch-Out, this resource is more extreme in both what it takes to acquire and just how much it can change the course of a match. By successfully landing punches, your KO meter slowly builds up, but if you get hit or get knocked out, you’ll lose some in exchange. Right here, you’ve already got a good risk/reward system going; uppercuts are the most powerful punches that get you three notches on your bar, but you’re more likely to land a body blow that’ll just get you one notch in comparison. You regularly have to make calls like this depending on how fast and aggressive your opponents are, which is the kind of cerebral gameplay you want in a Punch-Out clone. There’s also seemingly a system where you can earn more KO juice by countering opponents at the right time, which I wasn’t able to completely hash out the particulars of during my time with the game. Sure felt great when I got a huge chunk of bar, though!

Once you’ve got the bar full, which can take more than one round depending on how well you do, you’re able to continuously punch without any restriction on your stamina (more on that shortly). This allows you to be far, far more aggressive and take the lead against your opponent and if you can KO the opponent while the bar is full, you’re guaranteed to win because they won’t be getting up! It’s not quite a free win because you can lose the meter if you get hit hard enough, but the feeling of going from being on the back foot to feeling like you’ve already been declared the champ is such a great feeling, especially if it’s in a fight you were struggling with. This KO meter system is great because it rewards mastery of the game while giving you another goal to work towards that isn’t just depleting the opponent’s health. If you can get consistently good enough at fighting a particular foe, you can fill the KO meter in one round and win the fight in record time, making it so you don’t have to put up with every gimmick or lengthy fights to get back to where your run ended last time. This is a game that only gives you three credits to beat the whole thing, so a way to fast track getting back is very welcome! This system also makes it (in theory) less daunting than Punch-Out to get into because you don’t have to learn obtuse stunlocks or frame-perfect tricks to get meter and/or easily defeat opponents. You can just learn what the game directly presents to you, practice and master that, and then be on your way in a way that I think most people will find more natural than studying speedruns. When your competition is as good as Punch-Out, you gotta do what you can to stand out!

Unfortunately, now’s the time where I gotta start getting more realistic with this game. I’ve been very nice up to this point, I think! Anyway, stamina is way more of a thing here than in Punch-Out. If you’re playing Punch-Out correctly, you should never encounter a situation where your stamina runs out, but in Punch King, stamina is ever present to an arguably overbearing degree and no amount of skill will ever change that. Every punch you throw and every move you block takes some stamina out of you, with uppercuts taking a lot more than anything else. Once you run out, you’ve gotta wait a bit before you can throw another punch, which doesn’t sound like the worst idea, but I found that the balance all felt a bit out of whack. Despite being a super muscular dude with training, you run out of stamina in, like, five punches! Stamina dictates the pacing of matches to a really unfortunate degree; most rounds began with me throwing a bunch of punches to get some early damage in (almost every opponent struggles to block body blows for some reason), then I would have to constantly wait in between punches from there, slowly biding my time. You could wait for the bar to fill before going on another assault, but chances are that the enemy will be doing enough on their end that you’ll want to counter or block, so time isn’t really on your side. This stamina issue also extends to them too, actually, because I encountered several moments where my enemy and I would just stand there for around 5-10 seconds staring at each other as our stamina meters refilled and it was very goofy! The one thing I have to give this system is that it makes the KO meter even more satisfying because it’s the ultimate reward for having to put up with the stamina system for minutes at a time, but I can’t help but think there was room for a better solution for preventing the player from stunlocking their opponents.

The biggest problem Punch King encounters, though, is that the hitboxes are a total nightmare blunt rotation of misleading animations and seemingly nonsensical solutions that make dodging, let alone playing the game at all, feel completely unreliable. Whenever you find opinions on this game, this aspect is going to be the big bit of criticism that comes up and I have to agree completely with the people saying that. All of the attacks are certainly readable thanks to the great animation work, but if you try this game, you’ll find that a lot of moves have to be dodged in very strange ways. What should be simple cases of dodging left/right end up requiring you to delay or do it way in advance so that the game doesn’t magically hit you. There are times when an attack clearly goes through you, but you won’t take any damage! The body block ends up blocking a lot of attacks that are clearly aimed at your head or chest, whereas the high block is rarely used at all even on moves it should clearly handle. Enemy uppercuts will swap between being dodgeable by ducking or only dodgeable with a side dodge seemingly at random. You can eventually learn what moves are best dodged with what, of course, but every fight has an initial period that just feels bad because it’s hard to know what will or won’t work. To make matters even worse, this game has a moving camera that it apparently has no idea what to do with. As the fight goes on, the boxers naturally move left or right around the ring, but boxers are also allowed to throw punches even if they’re not lined up with the opponent. When this happens, you still have to dodge as if you’re directly in front of them since you can and will get hit even though you’re nowhere near their punch! It looks completely ridiculous, makes the game harder than it needs to be, and I’m not really sure why it’s like this at all. At least now I know why Punch-Out tends to keep things locked to the center of the ring!

I’ve also gotta take some time to talk about the final boss because it’s straight up one of the most unfair things I’ve ever seen in a video game. Seriously, that statement isn’t an exaggeration at all somehow! The game’s story claims that you’ll become the Punch King if you can defeat Bucky Booth, who has a really nasty chain of uppercuts similar to Mr. Sandman’s Dreamland Express, but despite him clearly looking like the final boss, there’s actually one more opponent after that: a robot named Walter-687! A damn shame that 8 is there, otherwise we could have had such a perfect joke to cap off this nightmare of a fight! Anyway, this robot fights like a traditional boxer in most ways and its standard arsenal is perfectly reasonable. Its uppercuts and straights are pretty quick, but if you’ve gotten this far, you can intuit how to deal with them with a bit of time. Where things go wrong, though, is with its signature move, a flurry of five straight punches that are extremely fast and damaging. If you get hit by this, it’s an instant KO, and you can only get KOed by this move twice before you’re guaranteed to lose the match. On paper, this should have multiple solutions- you should be able to duck the punches, block them high, or even try dodging with good timing- but in practice, nothing works. And I mean nothing because even after extensive testing through the use of save states (I spent more time testing this than playing the rest of the game combined), I could not find a single way to successfully avoid this attack! I genuinely think it’s glitched!

Naturally, I consulted some videos to see what I could find and the results were inconsistent in a way that I couldn’t help but laugh at. This longplay by NintendoComplete showcases a strategy of harassing the boss with jabs, hooks, and uppercuts to build meter, but whenever the special move came up, they were unable to avoid it, so they were essentially damage racing the boss to get their KO meter filled before they lost. On the opposite end of the spectrum, this video by Jay’s Tavern shows the punches going harmlessly through the player every time for reasons I cannot explain. I have a theory, one that isn’t charitable in a way I typically like to avoid without substantial proof, but I’ll say that maybe there’s something… suspicious afoot here! Wouldn’t be the first time a longplay or similar video did something like this, such as this video by Bizarro13 that at least has the courtesy of clearly stating their intent to cheat! This is also not the only video of this game in which the player is clearly cheating to beat this boss, so that’s how you know I’m not making any of this up! Ultimately, I settled on the method seen in the first video, so I had to just keep trying the fight until things worked out in a way that allowed me to get the KO meter filled before the boss decided to use that move two times. NintendoComplete was somehow able to survive the attack with a sliver of HP, but I couldn’t get this to work for me, to say nothing of how the boss’s order of operations changes on every attempt, so even knowing what to do in a general sense was by no means a free win! If this was an optional fight, one you could lose and still get the credits, I’d be a lot kinder to it as a funny bit or something, but as the thing that will prevent 99% of people from seeing the ending or capping off the game in a mechanically satisfying way, I can’t help but see it as a complete and unfortunate mess that makes this game harder to recommend to anyone without my particular form of brain worms when it comes to absurd challenges. If anyone knows what’s up with this fight and why it’s seemingly so broken (or if there’s some sort of esoteric way to dodge that attack), please do let me know!

Despite its honestly very serious issues, I actually had fun messing around with Punch King. There’s a fundamental satisfaction I find in games like Punch-Out, essentially an alt-form of fighting games that trades the usual format for something different. Few things hit my lizard brain better than do or die combat between two opponents where you have to use a combination of analytical skills, mechanical ability, and personal expression to win, you know? It’s been so long since I’ve played a Punch-Out that even playing something like Punch King, an ultimately fine game that can’t permanently fill the void by its very definition, brought back some memories of a very different me. I used to play the heck out of Punch-Out like I said before and while I never got to the point of speedrunning, I have a lot of fond memories. The first time I ever finished the NES game was on a cruddy laptop with a presumably outdated emulator and with the use of the keyboard, which is not normally a way I prefer to play games. It took a ton of practice, but I somehow managed to do it all without save states and I honestly still don’t know how! Because of that moment, though, I have an immense appreciation for the kind of challenge games like this bring and I’d go as far as to say the experience made me a better player all around and helped to solidify my love for overcoming challenges in games. I have a personal rule of sorts that I’ll summarize here as “Never blame the controller for your losses”; I’ve seen people here and there blame their problems and shortcomings on things like emulator performance or the controller they’re using and while there are situations where these things can be true, I do everything in my power to avoid doing this because I just don’t think it’s a good look nor does it promote helpful thinking. Good tools are important, but to me, true strength comes from being able to adapt to whatever life throws your way and I get an immense amount of pleasure in surmounting seemingly draconian and/or unfair challenges through any means necessary even if it’s probably not the healthiest thing to do. If you blame everything but yourself, can you really call yourself the Punch King? The final fight in Punch King appears to be terrible nonsense, but y’know what? I did it, somehow, and now I’m never gonna forget that experience and I’m better for it, so I’m gonna call that a growth moment!

• NintendoComplete. “Wade Hixton’s Counter Punch (GBA) Playthrough – NintendoComplete.” YouTube, 18 Nov. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1rROc_ubKw.
• Indie Gaming. “Hajime No Ippo the Fighting T.A.G. Ippo Story Mode.” YouTube, 3 Feb. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMla8BF3VCg&list=PLfPGWbcwI4Fm61a7aERwPbGbbeVldRoj1.
• DeShelly. “Boxing Fever GBA Longplay.” YouTube, 23 Mar. 2025, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpf4251Em9E.
• NintendoComplete. “Power Punch II (NES) Playthrough.” YouTube, 23 Mar. 2024, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3UzcVAfW6U.
• World of Longplays. “Arcade Longplay [222] Punch-Out.” YouTube, 21 May 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T8hoeVpdV0.
• NintendoComplete. “Punch King – Arcade Boxing (GBA) Playthrough – NintendoComplete.” YouTube, 15 Jan. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS7vE0Llwkw.
• Jay’s Tavern. “Punch King (GBA) – All Bosses.” YouTube, 25 Nov. 2023, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO_mvjURr_M.
• Bizzaro 13. “Punch King – Arcade Boxing (GBA).” YouTube, 18 Feb. 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kixvrj-gP0U.
• Canal Game Genie. “Punch King – Arcade Boxing Game Genie (Game Boy Advance).” YouTube, 16 Mar. 2023, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Geyz_BcEZeQ.

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It’s Peak…Vox

• Developer(s): peakvox, O-Two
• Publisher(s): Fun Unit, NIS America, O-Two
• Release Dates: May 24th, 2010 (WiiWare), November 10th, 2016 (as peakvox Escape Virus HD)
• Available On: WiiWare, PC (via Steam)
• Genre: Action, Arcade

One thing I love about WiiWare is scrolling through games, looking up who was involved with their development, and being like “dang, I didn’t know (insert developer here) did this game!”. Pretty much every notable Japanese developer has at least one WiiWare game under their belt that you never hear anyone talk about or praise, which is often a shame as these game are always interesting at a bare minimum. Perhaps because of the service itself, a lot of developers did weird, one-time projects much different than their usual output and these examples only shine brighter when inserted into their proper context. I haven’t covered this one yet (I will someday), but did you know that Intelligent Systems did a light gun shooter called Eco Shooter: Plant 530 on WiiWare? How cool is that, right? Viral Survival, the game we’re actually going to be talking about here, wasn’t developed by a developer anyone talks about, but if you look at that title screen above, you’ll notice that it’s oddly stacked with names considering the small scale of the game itself. First off, Nippon Ichi Software America was the publisher, which is what instantly grabbed my attention and made me want to cover this game. Mechanically, Viral Survival is nothing like what NIS usually puts their name on, but the company has a real knack for publishing and developing small titles that are usually interesting little experiments. These games rarely get any serious acknowledgement from the usual internet stomping grounds, but they’re often pretty good and/or really fun to explore, so seeing their name made me confident that this one would be worthwhile.

Fun Unit is a developer with some… odd history to go along with their search engine-unfriendly name. Most notoriously, they were involved with the development of Sonic Free Riders, a Kinect game that people hated so much it killed the Sonic Riders series and was also eventually modded to become Kinect-optional. It’s not often you see a Kinect game get that level of TLC! Fun Unit was also responsible in part for Rondo of Swords, a DS strategy game with some really weird and interesting ideas I’d like to revisit because younger me didn’t understand it at all. While these games have nothing in common with Viral Survival beyond Fun Unit itself, the team did go on to release some of Viral Survival’s modes with new twists as individual games on DSiWare in the form of Escape the Virus: Shoot ‘Em Up and Escape the Virus: Swarm Survival. I’m not sure what their exact relation is, but pretty much anything Fun Unit ever worked on also has the O-Two name connected to it. O-Two is a development team that appears to focus on a combination of smaller projects, ports, and support on bigger games. They’re wrapped up in quite a few Sega games- you can find Puyo Puyo games, the Switch version of Valkyria Chronicles, and Shining Resonance prominently displayed on the front page of their website– and unlike Fun Unit, they’re still getting a bit of work here and there to this day. According to Mobygames, they had some kind of role in Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.! As you’d probably expect, several names from the games I just mentioned show up in Viral Survival such as planner/programmer Kenichi Koshida, programmer Yoshiharu Kanai, and designer Daisaku Kishiue. Beyond the shared O-Two/Fun Unit games, these names have been on some pretty great stuff ranging from Klonoa: Empire of Dreams to The King of Fighters XIII, so you might want to take a peek at their Mobygames pages!

The last name on Viral Survival is peakvox, a subsidiary of O-Two that was (obviously) also involved with several of their games with a focus on Nintendo’s digital services. Their debut game, Mew Mew Chamber, was a match 3 puzzle game about cats, so it’s probably pretty good. Candle Route is another puzzle game, but it has you helping a little fire guy collect other little guys through various mazes in as few moves as possible. I could go into the rest of their catalog I found on Mobygames (it’s only 7 games), but I just wanted to highlight a couple of examples so I could make two statements. First off, their games all have a strong focus on taking a concept and making it fun to replay. Score attack games with strong fundamentals, essentially, which we always love to see. Second, peakvox really has a way with UI design! Seriously, take a look at their games through the videos I linked or through a search and you’ll notice they all have really distinct aesthetics. A strong focus on tiled design for menus, a lot of colors all over the place, and specific visuals hand-crafted to fit what each game is going for. Mew Mew Chamber, for example, has a lot of light colors and simple fonts to really sell you on the cuteness of the whole package. No need to overcomplicate a match 3 puzzle game since most people know exactly what they’re getting into, right? Candle Route has a very “hand-drawn like a kid would do” kind of thing going on, which makes it a really cute game. Viral Survival inherits these qualities as well and as a result has some really neat menus. You get these steel tiles on this dark background that give the game a bit of mystery before you dig into it. Every single menu has unique tiles and even the game’s credits feature unique tiles for every single person involved in the game’s development, which is so cool. It’s actually a cute game in the end, but this look combined with the name could very well scare someone into thinking they’re getting a serious game about surviving a pandemic or something! Oh also, in case it wasn’t clear from the links, a lot of peakvox’s stuff is available on Steam nowadays if you’re curious, so that’s pretty dang nice!

Viral Survival is the kind of game I always find myself impressed by. It’s clearly a very small production, being a 500 point WiiWare title made by a small team, but it’s one that finds a way to get a lot of mileage out of a simple concept. You play as a little DNA fella and you have to collect more DNA fellas while avoiding what I assume are supposed to be the viruses. It kinda sounds like a maze game like Pac-Man, but in execution, it’s actually a more complex game of Snake. As you collect more DNA, they follow behind you, thus extending your “tail”. You only ever lose when your main DNA gets hit, but if any of your followers get hit, they’ll break off and run around in a panic. If you get them back, everything’s all hunky dory, but if you take too long, they’ll disappear and your point multiplier will go down. Since Viral Survival is a scoring game, keeping that multiplier high by collecting and keeping lots of DNA is of the utmost importance. To try and make that easier, you’re also given the ability to jump high up into the air, which lets you skip around enemies and survive in even the tightest of spots. Your tail will follow your lead when you do this, but it can be slightly tricky to judge where you’re going to land and you’ll actually lose points for using this, so you’re not meant to just spam it all willy-nilly. There are also two kinds of power-ups, a rocket that’ll destroy nearby enemies by chasing them down and a syringe that’ll distort the screen’s colors and give you total invincibility for several seconds, giving you a chance to grab DNA and/or destroy the viruses plaguing the screen.

What makes Viral Survival more than just a Snake clone you could find on an old cellphone is how exactly you go about earning score. By skirting close to viruses without touching them, you’ll get points per DNA that seem small, but ramp up real quickly once you have a good multiplier going. This adjacent take on grazing can be done from any direction, so you can tackle it in multiple ways ranging from tailing a virus that isn’t chasing you to spinning in a circle and moving away before it catches your tail. Finding ways to sneak some grazing in without overextending or having to scramble works extremely well in keeping Viral Survival engaging and that’s all aided by a surprising fast-paced difficulty curve. A round starts slowly with only a few viruses appearing, but once you’ve racked up a minute or two, things ramp up so fast that the screen is packed for most of the game! Once the screen is full of viruses, maintaining a multiplier becomes extremely difficult and will be the main hurdle people encounter while trying to learn the game. It honestly seems impossible at first and your poor DNAs are going to suffer a lot! It took me a bit to figure it out since there’s no tutorial and information on this game is effectively non-existent, but the key is to collect DNAs and get as much score as possible from grazing. I know, that should be obvious since it’s the point of the game, but your instincts may initially tell you to stay away from everything, which isn’t actually the way to play. I don’t have an exact science for it nor do I know how to look under the hood, but from what I could tell on my best runs that cracked 3 million points, the faster you do those things, the faster power-ups will spawn. In ideal circumstances, you’re practically chaining power-up to power-up, giving yourself a lot of invincibility and clearing out the screen to your liking. You want some enemies to exist so you can exploit them for points, but not so many that you can’t move around safely at all. It’s a really fun ebb and flow that reminds me of good ol’ Radirgy where you’re either feasting or you’re starving depending on how correctly you’re playing the game, and while that kind of design doesn’t always work, I think it’s most at home in “arcade-style” games like this.

What I described is effectively all Viral Survival is- a more interesting and complex version of Snake- but peakvox went further to really make your 500 points a fair price to pay. This blog certainly isn’t meant to be a buyer’s guide, but Wii Points were serious business when you were a young teen without a job, y’know? Most games of this ilk could have just stopped there, but Viral Survival has five modes to play that are all pretty dang different! Progressive mode is the closest thing to the normal mode, but the catch is that your forward movement is automated and constant, meaning you only get to control your DNA’s turns. In a game that loves to stuff the screen to make your life difficult, losing some degree of control definitely complicates things! Horde mode intentionally pits you against absurd odds right away, but it shifts away from collecting DNA to causing chaos with constantly respawning rockets. “Zoom128” challenges you to collect 128 DNAs while the camera is zoomed in dramatically and your main DNA grows bigger, though you at least don’t have to worry about a tail or losing any you’ve collected. Lastly, Shooter mode turns the game into Geometry Wars by giving you the ability to shoot at a fixed rate and a power-up that lets you go buck wild for a bit. You know what the best part is about all this? They’re all fun modes, too! There are even in-game challenges and unlockables associated with doing well in each one, so I put a good amount of time in all five modes because I was just having a good ol’ time.

Progressive doesn’t shake out that differently, but it does make you consider your moves more carefully. Since you can’t move with the fine precision seen in normal mode, you’re naturally inclined to take fewer risks. Grazing also becomes significantly harder, especially when enemies are approaching you, so it makes sense that the score challenge is only 1 million instead of 3 million. You do get a cool new tool in the form of braking to replace jumping, though, and it’s pretty dang useful. By braking, you can not only stop your movement, but also bring your tail close to you, making dodging more feasible. Like jumping, this makes you lose points, so you’ve gotta decide whether or not to use it every time a situation comes up. Horde mode is probably my least favorite of the bunch, but it’s still a cool idea. Because survival is so reliant on the rockets, they’re smartly wrapped up scoring in it too. Even though there are multiple rockets on the field, using the same one over and over again as it respawns in different places actually increases your multiplier, so if you can keep track of it, your score eventually goes wild. Therefore, you’ve gotta take risks; do you charge into a horde to keep your combo going, or do you fall back on a fresh rocket if it’s in a more convenient spot? Any good game forces players to answer questions on a constant basis and such a thing is a key of arcade game design if you ask me, I’d say, so Horde mode is a success on that alone even if it isn’t my favorite.

Zoom128 is pretty dang tricky and probably took me more tries than any of the other modes to do the challenges for, but it might actually be my favorite mode. It just has such a fun and frantic pace to it! You’re zooming around (literally!), hoovering up all the DNAs, constantly on edge of what could pop out at any moment. The enemy density is extremely light in comparison to any other mode, but the perspective makes each one feel so much more threatening. As you play, you also develop a sixth sense when it comes to intuiting where the DNAs have wandered off to and it feels so good every time you’re right. Sometimes, things really do work out even better when restrictions are placed upon you and Zoom128 is a good example of how restrictions can foster creativity and new approaches to gameplay situations. Lastly, Shooter mode is pretty dang fun and actually feels like good practice for twin stick shooters. You’re quick, but your firing speed is much slower in comparison, so you can’t just barrel through hordes. Power-ups are absolutely essential to survival, but it’s rare you’ll be able to reach them without a lot of resistance, so a big part of the mode is developing strategies for getting to said power-ups. You can’t just do the thing where you go in circles to win because the power-ups will despawn if you take too long! I ended up finding a good strategy where I’d slowly inch forward, making sure the path was clear before advancing, which allowed me to get anywhere on the map without the enemies behind me catching up. The intensity of this mode really made me want to go back to Geometry Wars at some point because I feel like I could actually play it decently now!

You know me, I love pleasant surprises, I talk about ‘em all the time, and Viral Survival is most certainly one of those. I literally had no idea what to expect going into this one and once I got the hang of things, I ended up playing it for hours without stopping! The game does an excellent job of introducing you to the core gameplay without making the ideal solutions to its many challenges obvious, so once you’re hooked by the good game feel, you’re compelled to dig deeper and solve those mysteries. Each mode included is significant and meaningful, making it all but certain that you’ll want to try out each one for a substantial amount of time. It’s also just a charming game and one that has gotten me to pay attention to the wider peakvox catalog. Even though it’s a generous package for 500 points, you can’t help but want more after it’s over! Maybe I’m easily entertained or something because I seem to be one of the few people on the planet to talk positively about the game (or at all, really), but I’m confident that others could find something fun in this as well if they actually knew it existed. You may need to give it some time to click and you can’t go in expecting it to match what “modern” video games typically are, but if you like figuring games out the way I like doing with arcade games and stuff, I think you could easily dig this one too. It’s on sale for 62 cents on Steam as I write this, so if this post made it sound cool, you might wanna hop on that!

• arronmunroe. “Eco Shooter: Plant 530 Wii 60fps.” YouTube, 16 Dec. 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxwt6yU9tXw.
• IGN. “Rondo of Swords Nintendo DS Trailer – Trailer.” YouTube, 20 May 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARQhBaKQMpw.
• GameSpot Trailers. “Escape the Virus: Shoot ‘Em Up! Launch Trailer.” YouTube, 29 Aug. 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMVqBkgbyVw.
• GameSpot Mobile. “Escape the Virus: Swarm Survival Official Trailer.” YouTube, 26 June 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Q1j-rO1oo.

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