My Stinkor Story

He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is less a toy line or a cartoon than it is a case study in ruthless, well-timed marketing. The rush of commercialized animation in the 1980s is fascinating in its mercenary layers, but the short of it is that Mattel began it by mercilessly promoting He-Man action figures with cartoons thanks to the Reagan administration’s loosened restrictions. Of all the creations in this ominous entwining of advertising and entertainment, He-Man wasn’t the most enduring; Transformers, Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony, and G.I Joe arguably got better mileage. 

Yet He-Man was first, and He-Man was massive in its day. It wasn’t just toy sales or after-school cartoons, either. The Macy’s parade had enormous He-Man floats. Dave Barry mocked He-Man toy names (“Lob-Stor”) in his books. Concerned Christian parents saw demonic imagery in the villainous Skeletor and fretted that their children might attach quasi-religious proportions to He-Man’s tagline of “The Most Powerful Man in the Universe.” 

I enjoyed this almost by accident. I was a little too young to catch the full weight of Mattel and Filmation’s toy-cartoon assault, but I had plenty of Masters of the Universe paraphernalia. Much of this was due to my grandmother, who of course spoiled me and my sister with new toys whenever we visited. I soon had He-Man and Skeletor and a good share of their dueling entourages, and a trip to the grandparents usually meant a new addition. One day in 1985, my grandmother brought out Stinkor.

Even those distantly familiar with He-Man toys may recall that every figure had some gimmick, such as spring-loaded punches or interchangeable arms or a water-spraying mouth. Stinkor’s contribution to this feverish creativity was that he smelled bad. 

Yes, that was all. Stinkor was a skunk-colored action figure who emitted an actual odor.  Of course I found this amusing, and when my grandmother presented me with Stinkor I joked that I would leave him on her bed one night to spread his presumably fetid aroma. 

Grandma was not amused. Though not upset, she declared that if such was my intent, I would get no Stinkor. 

I’m certain she would have relented if I had apologized, but that’s the strange thing: I didn’t. Part of this doubtless stemmed from me being a little brat, but the fact was that I no longer cared that much about Masters of the Universe. Transformers and GI Joe and Starriors (hey, they’re underrated) all interested me much more by that point, and I’d had my fill of He-Man. The cartoon seemed repetitive and preachy, and a lot of the action figures were suspiciously similar. I was hardly a discerning consumer as a kid, but even I could see that Stinkor was just the line’s earlier Mer-Man figure painted like Pepe Le Pew. His orange armor was reused from Mekaneck. And he didn’t even come with any accessories beyond a boring little shield. If you’ll pardon the phrase, Stinkor was running on fumes. 

So my grandmother put Stinkor away. I don’t recall if I got in trouble over this, but it made no difference to me at the time. Only many years later did I realize how dumb I’d been to turn down a toy. More importantly, I worried that I’d hurt my grandmother’s feelings by callously rejecting her gift. 

If I was outgrowing Masters of the Universe, I wasn’t alone. The series declined in popularity by the mid-1980s. It may have been a stagnation of ideas, as the line tried to introduce dinosaurs and a new lead called He-Ro to little effect. It may have been the general life cycle of a toy that isn’t a pop-culture keystone. Some even blamed She-Ra, He-Man’s sister, and her series for making Masters of the Universe seem like a property for girls. I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s sadly true that a lot of boys back then stigmatized any remotely feminine pastimes. That’s another tale for another time. 

Whatever the cause, He-Man was in a slump by the time the live-action movie arrived in 1987 with Frank Langella and a lot of Jack Kirby references. Masters of the Universe was the first big toy-and-cartoon onslaught of the 1980s, and so it was the first to die off. It became a symbol of Reagan-era excess, a hyper-macho hero shamelessly sold to kids in every way the government and media would allow. 

In that case, Stinkor was the decade’s toy industry at its most absurd. He didn’t have laser eyes or a grappling hook or some battery-powered talent. He just stank. 

Stinkor never had an easy time in the He-Man ranks. The staff for the cartoon reportedly laughed him out of the writers’ room, and he never appeared in the show (he would have presented a confused moral anyway, showing kids that you should in fact judge people by how they smell). The 2002 Masters of the Universe revamp tried to develop some background for him, but there’s only so much you can do with a character called Stinkor. The recent Masters of the Universe Revelation, set after the 1980s cartoon, tries to make up for Stinkor’s original absence by giving him a few moments before he’s thrashed by more popular characters. He does not appear in the trailer for that new Masters of the Universe movie, which looks almost bland and safe enough to ignore something as goofy as Stinkor.    

Even so, there are Stinkor toys aplenty. We’re in the grip of rampant 1980s nostalgia grabs to momentarily soothe our slow capitalist decline into ruin and chaos, so you’ll see not only multiple He-Man lines but multiple He-Man crossovers with Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, Transformers, and so forth. New Stinkors take every shape from little decorations to his elaborate redesign from Revelation. I have resisted all of this. I didn’t need a Stinkor in 1985, so I didn’t need one today. 

Last month, however, my aunt and uncle were housecleaning and sent me some old toys that my cousins no longer wanted. This was among them.

Could it be the same Stinkor I stupidly refused so many years ago? It’s possible. My grandmother indulged my cousins as much as she did my sister and me, so it’d make sense if she had just offloaded Stinkor on them instead of taking him back to the store. I’d say that my prodigal Stinkor has returned, though to be accurate I must note that I, not Stinkor, was foolish and wasteful in my youth.

And he still smells! Mattel actually baked a patchouli mix into the plastic that composed Stinkor, giving him a distinct but hardly mephitic aroma. Perhaps if I’d jested about Stinkor to my grandmother after I received and opened the toy, she would have found the scent unobjectionable and seen nothing wrong with me leaving him around the house like some skunk-man air freshener. Yet this would have lumped Stinkor in with all of my other He-Man figures to be forgotten (and probably sold). And then I’d have nothing to write about this month. 

For further reading on Masters of the Universe and the interplay between toys and cartoons, Brian Brown’s The He-Man Effect takes a thorough look at the history and nature of the whole process. It’s a good primer for anyone navigating the traps of acritical nostalgia, though I think it leaves out a major reason He-Man and similar TV shows caught on: there weren’t a lot of better alternatives in children’s programming at the time. If Masters of the Universe set kids down a treacherous path, I partly blame Turbo Teen and The Biskitts. And since Stinkor wasn’t in the original cartoon, I can’t blame him all that much.

There’s one more thing: Grandma, I’m sorry I made dumb jokes about Stinkor back then. I hope it’s okay that I’m making them now.

Tailenders: Catching Up

I have to pity Tailenders. It’s one of those perfectly entertaining, subtly fascinating creations that was abruptly buried and forgotten due to superior competition. Here that competition was Redline, Takeshi Koike’s brilliantly detailed and lovingly animated slice of futuristic racing cinema; it remains a marvelous film, and there’s nothing I’d change in my ancient review. Released around the same time in 2009, Redline immediately overshadowed Tailenders, and with good reason. Tailenders is merely an anime short with nowhere near the promotion or impact, and yet it’s almost more intriguing in its tale of sci-fi speed demons.

 

Shiro Tomoe is a wreck across the board. His latest race on the planet Terulus shattered his vehicle, his body, and seemingly his ambitions. As he lies on the operating table, a purple-haired woman named Tomoe Miyagura barges in, climbs atop him, and jams an experimental engine into his heart. She’s a mad scientist with a proposition: she’ll build him into a high-velocity cyborg if he’ll aid her research.

The two bond not so much over their common names but over the fact that they’re both out to win the planet’s next big race. She wants to blow up a troublesome terraformer the size of a small nation, and he wants to surpass the legendary Loser King, a racer who apparently attained such great speeds that he vanished into a dimension beyond all time. 

There’s precious little room for Tailenders to do much. Running under half an hour, it barely manages to introduce Tomoe (the Shiro guy) and Tomoe (the scientist) before dropping them into a vicious race, one where they're seeking not so much first place but rather the bizarre immortality of Loser King. Some supporting characters and fellow racers drop in and out, but there’s really room only for our two protagonists and Shiro’s similarly remodeled rival Goodspeed. Oh, and there’s a short clash with a rollerblading dinosaur who’d be straight out of a 1990 kids’ yogurt commercial if he wasn’t rendered in the weighty style of Tailenders.

Yes, Tailenders is all about visual punch. The heavy shading and muted colors make for a tight atmosphere, and the animation’s generally sharp aside from a few dashes of unwieldly computer graphics. Backed by a heavy soundtrack and bombastic acting, it captures a slick yet grimy tone similar to Hiroyuki Imaishi and Studio Trigger’s flourishes. That suits a story about thrillseekers overwhelmed by their single-minded goals in a world where even a clear sky seems a little ominous. 

To be fair, Tailenders isn't entirely stuck on the surface. The world of Terulus is more than a raceway, as it's dominated by malfunctioning terraformers and moving cities that keep humanity constantly on edge. It’s technically science fiction, but Tailenders is unshackled to perfect labcoat concepts of relativity and physics. Tomoe and Shiro and Goodspeed are all chasing a warped enlightenment in the form of Loser King, and their encounter with him, a scarred apparition stuck in a silent temporal purgatory, is fascinating and absurd. Like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer film, Tailenders is a glitzy rush that’s primarily about the appeal of a glitzy rush, but here the stakes are higher and stranger.

 

It would, of course, be more compelling if the characters could develop. Shiro’s just all about racing, so Tomoe is the only one who pushes things into interesting turf. Giving off the same scheming, callous energy as Haruko from FLCL, she has a playful curiosity more relatable than the competitive machismo of Shiro, Goodspeed, and other racers who only want to go fast. There’s a mere hint of romantic tension between her and Shiro, and yet it’s another piece of Tailenders that made me want more. 

I should clarify that I didn’t want more of Tailenders in the form of a sequel. I wanted an expanded version of the same story, broadening and exploring the history of Terulus, the origins of Loser King, and the manipulative symbiosis between Shiro and Tomoe. It’s easy to cast Tailenders as a descendant of the brief, eye-catching OVAs of the 1980s and early 1990s, but even those usually ran longer than this. Tailenders sometimes feels like an extended trailer for a full-length movie or six-part series.

   

Nowhere are Tailenders’ derailed ambitions more apparent than its website, still up after all these years. The cast list shows off dozens of vehicles and their drivers: a cage-wearing goth, a helmeted pizza deliveryman, a tree mutant growing out of a zombie, a simple barber, a cyclops alien, and a mechanical mouse soldier who dries a giant toy train in a circular track, just to name a few. 

Most of them put in only the briefest appearances in the animation. Tailenders was part of the Anime Innovation Tokyo project, and I have no doubt that it was envisioned as a much larger deal, perhaps as a TV series or a video game in the tradition of F-Zero. Too bad we’ll never see more of racers like Kyle Triton, the dolphin guy.

 

If Tailenders was a pitch for something larger, it didn’t work out. It made the rounds and got some attention, but there’s only so much that a 27-minute anime can do without some major backing. It’s not hard to find Tailenders these days so long as you add “anime” to the title in your search, but like so many snippets of the OVA boom and the modern anime industry, it’s forgotten apart from the occasional recommendation by a weirdo fan. 

Well, I’ll be that weirdo fan this time. Tailenders is still enjoyable, with a vibrant look and pace that makes me ponder its hints of meaning and wish there was more to it all. It’s worth a watch and deserves mention if you dive into Redline, track the varied offspring of Speed Racer, or examine the surprisingly broad influence that Wacky Races had on Japan’s pop culture. It may not surpass the best of its competition, but if there’s a lesson in Tailenders, it’s that coming in first doesn’t matter. We find our own finish lines.

Emerald Dragon: Updates and Cows

I wasn’t planning on returning to Emerald Dragon quite so soon, but I’ve seen two important developments. One is a complete fan translation of the PC Engine version, which is my favorite incarnation of good ol’ Emerald Dragon. Released by Stargood, it covers the entire game and even enables the debug mode’s helpful features. The translator’s notes also go into extensive detail about the various Zoroastrian terms that the game appropriates and how complicated it was to trace some of them. Good on them for not going the easy 1990s route and just renaming Atrushan and Tamryn (or Tamrin) to Alvin and Tammy.

 

The translators are also blunt about not being too fond of the game, which is refreshing in contrast to official localizations for which the staff are seldom allowed critical comment. I disagree with such opinions, of course, but they nonetheless make clear that Emerald Dragon is an RPG of a certain era and, more importantly, a certain fashion. That’s part of why I like it. 

Anyway, the translation patch is a good excuse for me to play through the PC Engine version again, And hey, if an unofficial English version of the game popped up a month after I finally wrote about Emerald Dragon, perhaps something else will emerge when I mention it again. 

The second major Emerald Dragon development: I noticed that one of the enemies turns into a cow.

 

You see, all of the foes in Emerald Dragon briefly flash when damaged. So what happens when Atrushan strikes this skull-faced creature, who looks as grim and menacing as you can be when you’re about three square centimeters worth of pixels?

 

It turns pale and looks like a stupefied cow. Perhaps this is entirely by accident, but I like the idea of a graphic designer noticing this back around 1994, having a chuckle, and deciding not to change it. 

In fact, that strikes me more fondly now than ever. As the new year dawns we face a world where a lot of alleged entertainment is vomited out by soulless corruptions of artificial intelligence, to the point where we might doubt even the genuine creations. It’s enough to tilt me toward older books and movies and music and video games, all free of such uncertainties. I can rest assured that yes, an actual human crafted that momentarily bovine monster in Emerald Dragon.

Emerald Dragon: A Magnificent Cut

He’s a dragon. She’s a human. They’re in love. 

That’s not all there is to Emerald Dragon, but it’s the initial hook for this undervalued RPG from Glodia and Right Stuff. True, it was perhaps destined for strictly cult-favorite honors. A following accrued in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but unlike other RPGs it never saw a sequel, never grew into a proper series, never had its own middling two-part anime OVA, and never enjoyed an official release anywhere but Japan. There are worse fates for a game, but Emerald Dragon deserved more attention back then. And despite the wear of a few decades, it deserves that today.

 

Emerald Dragon arises in grim circumstances: in an ancient era, the continent of Ishban fell under a curse that gruesomely infected and killed any dragon within its borders. The survivors fled to a remote isle and founded a dragon settlement of Dragulia, while humans prospered and dominated the mainland. One day a ship wrecks off the coast of Dragulia, and the only survivor is a human girl named Tamryn*. She lives among the dragons and befriends a youngster named Atrushan, but upon growing up she decides to return to Ishbahn and her own kind. Amid a tearful farewell Atrushan snaps off one of his dragon horns and gives it to Tamryn, telling her to summon him if she’s ever in need. Not so long after her departure, Atrushan hears the horn. With help from a local artifact, he finds a way to turn himself human, thus allowing him to visit Ishban and work out his feelings for a woman not of his species. 

Atrushan and Tamryn are a straightforward couple, despite the lingering problem of dragon-human romance simmering between them, and the game introduces the flirtatious prince Hathram and his justifiably irritated friend Farna as a tempestuous counterpoint to the more established low-key affection between the leads. While there’s a quest filled with magical trinkets and evil overlords and eldritch terrors, it’s really all driven by the characters in their interactions and arcs. Even the more sedate party members like the archer Yaman or the elderly wizard Bagin have their own quirks and secrets, and their various exchanges and bickerings enliven a standard plot, much like a Tales RPG or the original Lunar: The Silver Star. Yes, there’s a villain named Ostracon rampaging all over with his monstrous hordes, but that can wait until Hathram and Farna settle a spat over him masking the pressures of royalty under a playboy façade.

 

Many RPGs of the late 1980s stuck to familiar Dragon Quest menus and turns, but Emerald Dragon stretched to more interesting extents. Battles unfold on a field where allies and foes roam and attack as freely as their energy allows, inviting strategy when it comes to positioning party members and judging their range. While the encounters are random, the better versions of the game pace them out well and move everything quick and focused. Characters deliver physical attacks just by running into enemies, similar to an Ys game, and even the more elaborate spells waste little time. 

This brings out Emerald Dragon’s greatest flaw: the player controls only Atrushan. Despite having a full party of warriors, archers, sorcerers and more, you’re limited to directing Atrushan while the computer handles the rest of the characters. In some versions of the game, only Atrushan and Tamryn seem to gain levels and grow, with the rest of the cast coming off as overpowered long-term guests. It’s a curiously limited choice even by the standards of its era, and it hampers what’s otherwise an enjoyable break from RPG combat of this vintage.

 

Emerald Dragon elevates itself in other ways. The character art by Akihiro Kimura is striking in both the designs and the cutscenes. The story has some intriguing little references, with many names derived from Persian myths and Zoroastrianism. The soundtrack hits the usual RPG themes well, and its recurring main anthem is sweeping and catchy. In many respects Emerald Dragon plays it safe as a typical RPG, with anime heroes and familiar beats, and yet there’s always a quality above the norm, a compelling tone in the characters and their adventure. 

And that’s what it comes down to, doesn't it? Video games, and RPGs in particular, can get away with a lot if the story lands right with you. One could quibble over the literary merits of everything from Earthbound to Ephemeral Fantasia, but a narrative doesn’t have to be a masterwork of subtext and eloquence; it just has to draw you in and make you care about the characters. That’s what fed the followings for many revered RPGs of the 1990s, and if you want one lesser-known game that should have stood among them, I’d point to Emerald Dragon. 

This would be the best-known creation of Glodia, one of a number of short-lived developers that broke off from Telenet Japan in the 1980s. They helped bring Emerald Dragon to various computers: the PC-8801 and PC-9801, the MSX, and the X68000. Glodia’s original vision of Emerald Dragon is best on the FM Towns, retaining the same plot, static cutscenes, and that odd feature of many old RPGs: a constant sidebar that shows your party status. Some folks must have liked that. 

There’s a noticeable divide between those older incarnations and the later console versions. In 1994, Emerald Dragon appeared on the PC Engine CD, courtesy of Hudson Soft, Alfa System, and Right Stuff—the last of these being a developer founded by former Glodia staff like Kimura and Emerald Dragon’s scriptwriter and designer Atushi Ii.  And it emerged as a slightly different game.

 

I find that the PC Engine version is Emerald Dragon at its finest. The cutscenes are lavish and dramatic (or melodramatic, if you prefer), the soundtrack is crisp and thunderous, and the characters all benefit from quality vocal performances. The game dispenses with that ubiquitous sidebar and lets players wander the seamless overworld in smoother fashion, and there’s just a greater sense of scale and grandeur. 

The Super Famicom was Emerald Dragon's final stop. This port does its best to evoke its PC Engine counterpart, but the constraints of a cartridge leave it without a CD-based title's cinematic scenes and music (at best you’ll hear a few spoken lines). It’s an easier version of the game as well, and fans sometimes disparage it as watered down in both story and atmosphere.

 

That said, the Super Famicom's Emerald Dragon is still a neat RPG when taken on its own merits. The streamlined narrative leaves the important details intact, the character conversations are amusing, and the combat’s still fast and not too frequent. A "Dragon Change" mechanic allows Atrushan more opportunities to switch forms, and the battle sprites are larger and more animated than those in the PC Engine version. The Super Famicom release was also the only Emerald Dragon to be fully translated by fans for a good while, though the PC Engine version recently got the same treatment.  

How would Emerald Dragon have fared outside of Japan decades ago, anyway? North American fans of RPGs often complained about how seldom they were localized, but at least they had most of the heavy hitters in some form: Final Fantasy, Lunar, Ys, Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest, and even Lufia were all represented, however sporadically. In such a climate Emerald Dragon might have joined that crowd, particularly through its PC Engine edition. The TurboGrafx-16 and TurboDuo (Western versions of the PC Engine and its CD evolution) never had a proper top-tier RPG localized: the Ys games were action-oriented, and Cosmic Fantasy 2, amusing as it was, wasn’t quite an A-lister. Emerald Dragon could have been to the TurboDuo what Lunar: The Silver Star was to the Sega CD: an engrossing, anime-styled quest that stood among the best games on the system.

 

It’s a shame that Emerald Dragon is now among those unfortunate and unappreciated games without any modern reissues. It’s possible that the legal rights are a mess, considering all of the companies involved in its various ports; neither Glodia nor Right Stuff survived the 1990s, and their catalogs seem largely off-limits. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Akihiro Kimura from continuing Emerald Dragon in doujinshi form. His comic series After the End follows Atrushan, Tamryn, and the other characters’ further adventures, and it’s all well-drawn and entertaining for fans of the series. Kimura went further with Elemental Dragoon, a crowdfunded audio drama and RPG with undeniable stylistic ties to Emerald Dragon and Right Stuff’s Alnam series. Meanwhile, Atsushi Ii directed Natural Doctrine, a divisively difficult RPG that I’ll one day have to search for possible Emerald Dragon callbacks. 

If you’ll pardon yet another cliché from me, Emerald Dragon has that certain something. Dissected and analyzed it seems formulaic among Japan’s unlocalized 16-bit RPGs, never as uniquely absurd as Tengai Makyo, as bizarre as Linda3, or as memorably ghoulish as Last Armageddon. Yet there’s a vitality to its characters, a crisp style in the graphics, and brisk enjoyment even within its limited battles. It’s an RPG of the purest romantic incarnation, and there’s always a place for that. And there’s always a reason to lament that it never got a real chance at the entire world. 

(*At the very least, I’d like an official English version to lay down the proper spellings of the characters' names. I’m going along with the fan translation of the Super Famicom version here, but the official guides and artbooks favor various spellings like Atorshan, Thamrin, Husrum, Falna, and so forth.)

Vice: Project Doom's Laser Whip

You won’t catch me saying many unkind things about Vice: Project Doom. It’s one of the best side-scrolling action games on the NES, and boy howdy, there are a lot of side-scrolling action games on the NES. Programmed by Aicom at the top of their talents, Vice is highly impressive in its crafty level designs, its slick controls, and its steadily scaling sense of trepidation and difficulty. It helps that the story, following officer Quinn Hart’s investigation of mutants and conspiracies, is an entertaining little ride despite the restrictions of old NES cutscenes—and that it refuses to give you a happy ending of any kind.

 

I also enjoy Vice: Project Doom’s tiny details, like a red herring computer chip or the way Quinn’s girlfriend/assistant Christy changes her hair color and sprite look to such an extent across cutscenes that you might even think she’s a completely different character. 

 

I have mentioned my fondness of Vice: Project Doom before, and this time I want to focus on a neat little point of its gameplay: the laser whip. Quinn carries a .44 magnum and grenades, but his stock unlimited weapon is an energy flail. Though short of range, it's quick and can damage enemies for as long as Quinn has it drawn, which means that you can strike foes above and behind you.

 

At a glance you might assume this is just poor hit detection, but Vice: Project Doom is assembled too well elsewhere for that. Look closely, and you'll see that the whip arcs behind and above Quinn for just a frame or two, so you can whack enemies like that biomechanical four-winged toucan without even turning around.

It’s not a feature that immediately jumps out, yet it sets up a lot of interesting strategies in the game, especially when it comes to boss fights and thick enemy swarms. Vice: Project Doom is a fast-paced deal where perfect timing is often necessary and always rewarding. It’s never as tough as a Ninja Gaiden, but it’s just as satisfying when you pull off a pixel-precise jump and slash down both a swooping falcon and a vaulting assassin all in one motion. 

The laser whip is a key part of that. Games like Strider and Shinobi III give the player contrails for their sword strikes, but I rather like how the Vice whip even watches Quinn’s back. The chains wielded by Castlevania’s Belmonts somewhat realistically don’t damage foes until they’re fully extended (at least not on the NES) but Vice: Project Doom isn’t having that. It’s having a flexible lightsaber.

I’d also like to know just how much of Vice: Project Doom grew from The Mafat Conspiracy, the Golgo 13 outing that Aicom developed for the NES. There’s not a lot of specific staff overlap, but Vice really feels like an improved version of Mafat’s genre-straddling attempts. Vice gives its side-view levels smoother controls and smaller, more manageable characters, and its driving stages and first-person shooting galleries are far less awkward. Quinn shows too much emotion to be a Golgo-grade assassin, of course.

Vice: Project Doom didn’t really get its due back in 1991. It had a nice Nintendo Power cover, but the release battled for attention amid everything from Sonic to the Battletoads, and its shelf date was possibly delayed atop all that. In fact, Aicom was even competing against themselves, since Jaleco released their Totally Rad and its bodacious surfer lingo around the same time. Bummer. 

That’s okay, because Vice: Project Doom is enjoying itself these days. It hasn’t seen a fancy re-issue, but it’s easily available on the Switch Online’s NES selection—a nice alternative to paying a relatively hefty chunk for an old cartridge. I can only hope that Vice: Project Doom’s reputation deservedly grows until someone attempts a speedrun where they defeat every enemy with the back end of Quinn’s laser whip. It merits that sort of attention. 

McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure: Truth in Advertising

To continue last month's unwavering nostalgia current, what might be your favorite McDonald’s thing? 

Should you even have one? Criticism of the fast-food titan is nearly as commonplace as their restaurants, whether it’s scathing industry breakdowns like Fast Food Nation or more specific chronicles like The Founder. Even setting aside business practices and concerns about unhealthy eating, there’s the view of McDonald’s as an instrument of America’s corporate imperialism, often employed as blatant symbolism for a  generic cultural erosion of global scale. All of that hangs over even some ancient curiosity like McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure.

 

There is, however, more to McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure than another licensed 1990s side-scroller for the Sega Genesis. It was the first game completed by Treasure, the small and highly talented developer that deserved much more than a decent cult following. This was not their first game to hit the market, as President Masato Maegawa reportedly preferred that the company debut with the all-original Gunstar Heroes. Yet they never neglected Treasure Land Adventure, and playing it reveals how its creators were fresh on the scene and trying their hardest to impress everyone. 

Treasure Land Adventure introduces no complexities to Ronald McDonald: he’s a chipper, crimson-haired clown who readily sets out on a treasure hunt after finding a piece of a map in the forest. Nor does he gain any spectacular powers. He can jump, vaporize enemies with glittering magic, and use his scarf to grab overhead handles. 

It’s the stages themselves that stand out, as Ronald’s led from one memorable encounter to another. A train ride turns surreal as Ronald leaps across a line of pirouetting rabbit ballerinas on a rail. A city street is distorted by the stomps of grunting sumo wrestlers. A spaceship’s laser slices the lunar landscape as Ronald jumps from one disintegrating cliff to another. And there’s often a web of ziplines or a wall of handholds for him to grab and navigate. Despite the game spanning just four levels, each has numerous substages, and almost every one introduces some new gimmick or challenge.

It's all full of bright colors and charming details, and not much of it comes from McDonald’s. Ronald meets up with Birdie, Grimace, the Fry Kids, and other friends, of course (CosMc is strangely absent despite the game’s interplanetary climax). However, the enemies and scenery are apparently all Treasure creations. The initial levels have metal turtles and armless, horned ogres who wander around smiling like pastel Totoros, and the game isn’t afraid of weirder designs, including an isle of top-hatted cactus men and metallic tribal warriors (who replaced the Japanese version’s more offensively depicted foes) or a low-gravity moonscape that includes living asteroids and a tree that sheds smiley-faced fruits. And then there’s the pirate captain whose head is mostly a giant cackling pair of lips, as though Treasure took a page from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Treasure even rendered Ronald at his best, giving him goofy mannerisms and a perfect clown walk. It’s amusing just to watch him gleefully stride into whatever dangers the game presents, be it a sunken pirate ship or the mouth of a giant stone dinosaur, and it’s even a nice touch when he’s summoning that McDonald’s logo out of thin air. And it’s amusing to see the cutscenes and wonder if some unlucky Treasure employee had to call up McDonald’s and ask how much of a buttcrack Ronald should have.

The music also goes above and beyond. Norio Hanzawa’s bouncing tones highlight many Treasure games, and here they’re at their most whimsical and upbeat, including the gentle title theme and a particularly catchy tune for the island boat ride and pirate ship. Yet it’s the boss music that stands out the most, an intense little beat that always makes me want to draw out the battles.  

Most remarkable is Treasure Land Adventure’s sense of balance. No one would expect grueling action-platforming from a McDonald’s title, and instead the designers hold a player’s interest in other ways. Levels have just enough nooks and secrets to invite modest exploration, and the rewards include extra lives, continues, and a balloon that instantly rescues Ronald from pits. Being an easier game even allows it to experiment here and there. Bosses are vulnerable only after they siphon away Ronald’s energy jewels, forcing the player to actually take damage in order to beat them—and adjust their tactics accordingly. Sorry, you can’t do a no-damage speed run here in Treasure Land.

On all but the highest setting there’s not much challenge. Ronald finds frequent moneybags as well as stores to buy power-ups (chiding you with “Not Enough Golds!” if you’re short), though it’s more sensible to save money for the game’s bonus puzzle game. A falling-block challenge similar to Tetris and Puyo Puyo, it’s a fun and surprisingly strategic diversion, and I usually end up playing it so much that I max out Ronald’s arsenal and leave him with dozens of lives more than he’ll ever need. McDonald’s is all about excess, you know. 

That McDonald’s name clearly mandated a cute and harmless tone for Treasure Land Adventure. Routine enemies are zapped away without malice, bosses surrender instead of exploding, and Ronald is a consummate softie who ends up not even caring about the treasure at the end of the game. 

My favorite testament to his nature would be the second-stage boss, a machine-piloting gremlin who tries to swipe Ronald’s gems and then bursts into tears upon defeat. Ronald then simply gives him some jewels to cheer him up. When even Mario and Kirby games can be casually unkind toward enemies, it’s refreshing to play something where no one ends up unhappy. Even if it’s all just to make a burger chain look good. Perhaps Treasure resented that a little and decided to make Dynamite Headdy a mean little Muppet.

In fact, Treasure Land Adventure is very much a test run for the developer’s later side-scrollers. Ronald’s limited grapple-trick led to Dynamite Headdy’s multi-directional climbing methods, and you’ll see visual motifs that Treasure reused in Silhouette Mirage, Mischief Makers, and perhaps even the scarf-driven Stretch Panic. Yet while those games are more complex and sometimes more satisfying (my jury’s still out on Stretch Panic) than Treasure Land Adventure, they’re also denser, more challenging, and more reliant on the player mastering and enjoying a specific play mechanic. This silly McDonald’s outing has more room to breathe, to be a basic romp of walking and jumping and grabbing things. And it’s darn good at being that. 

Is McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure somehow more insidious because it’s a well-crafted game? If it were disposable, tedious fare, it would be easily forgotten, cast aside like a cheeseburger wrapper or an unpopular Happy Meal toy, and serve no further as an instrument of the fast food industrial complex. But it’s too impressive as a game to be dismissed so easily, even if it can’t help but promote the McDonald’s monolith at every moment Ronald is on screen.

Granted, we’re well past the age when impressionable children might be the prime audience for this. With no official digital reissues, Treasure Land Adventure is now the purview of collectors, enthusiasts, and nerd historians all old enough to play through it without emerging with a trenchant craving for McNuggets and milkshakes, though McDonald’s recently brought over some drinks from that short-lived CosMc’s chain, and I wouldn’t mind trying a Toasted Vanilla Frappe or…uh-oh. 

That aside, there’s the highest compliment for Treasure Land Adventure: it not only rises above its license, it even improves it. I have no problem calling this my favorite piece of McDonald’s. That’s not saying too much, but I admit that it raised my opinion of Ronald, a character who I usually regard with the same neutrality and ironic tone I’d show Snuggle Bear or The Cookie Crisp Cop. I now I appreciate him in this game as a relentlessly enthusiastic side-scroller protagonist who’ll share his very life energy with bosses who were trying to kill him just moments prior.

It’s also a compliment to Treasure that this endearing, inventive side-scroller is far from their best game. It’s certainly up there with Astro Boy: The Omega Factor and those Bleach DS fighters as their best licensed work, even if the McDonald’s tie-in makes it harder for Sega to revive it like they occasionally do with Gunstar Heroes or Alien Soldier. Maybe that’s for the best. McDonald’s recently brought Ronald and his McDonaldland retinue back to the marketing forefront in an uncomfortably blatant play to nostalgia. I can resist that, but I would be at their merchandising mercy if they also revived Treasure Land Adventure.

Battle Beasts: Animal Collecting

If you asked me to pick my favorite toy from my childhood, I would consider that question carefully and wonder if you were surreptitiously sizing me up for identity theft. But if you asked me my favorite line of toys from my childhood, I’d have an easy answer: Battle Beasts. 

Even if you’re never heard of Battle Beasts, you've at least heard of the toys that spawned them: Transformers. Back in 1987 Battle Beasts first showed up in Japan as Beastformers, a spin-off of Hasbro and Takara’s successful empire of transforming robots. The two were technically part of the same series, and the Beastformers and their homeworld appeared in a single episode (a backdoor pilot, if you will) of the Transformers Headmasters TV series, complete with its amazing, infamous dub. 

In the West, Hasbro licensed these animal-themed figures and dubbed them Battle Beasts for a separate and much lower-key release. As Battle Beasts they had no obvious links to Transformers, and for promotions they enjoyed only a short, obscure comic and a TV commercial that made kids wonder how wood actually defeated water.

 

I was very fond of the Battle Beasts, and not so much for the reasons extolled in the commercial. Their gimmick was a rub-and-reveal sticker on the armor of each figure, with fire, water, and wood assigned at random. The beasts’ battles took place in rock-paper-scissors format; fire and water’s attributes were clear, and wood technically bested water by floating on it. 

Yes, that was a stretch, but it wasn’t the competitive aspect of Battle Beasts that I liked anyway. I thought the figures were highly cool on their own merits. They were only a little larger than Army Ants or M.U.S.C.L.E. or a number of other small-scale toys, but Battle Beasts were far more detailed and varied, combining animals with cybernetic attire worthy of any 1980s mecha anime.  

They were also compact and affordable, and the fact that they had no real backstories allowed me to imbue them with whatever personalities and plots I devised. One day they might be relentlessly bellicose gremlins squabbling to escape a doomed planet, and the next day they’d be comical little creatures living harmoniously and Smurf-like in the wilderness.  

I sold off the majority of my childhood toys long ago, and I do my best to avoid falling into blank nostalgia or collectible clutter. Battle Beasts are one of the few cases where I’ve not only kept my original collection but actually added to it. And since I haven’t blathered about toys in a while, I’ll round up five or six Battle Beasts of personal note. 

BLOODTHIRSTY BISON 

Let’s start with one of my favorites. Technically his name’s Bloodthirsty Bison, but I was largely unaware of the official titles for any Battle Beasts. I quickly picked him as the leader, named him Taurus, called his ram counterpart Aries, and thought I was clever. This would be the limit of my Battle Beast nomenclatures, though, because I just called most of the others things like Bearton and Boarton. 

Taur...uh, Bloodthirsty Bison shows off the typical and surprisingly intricate design of a Battle Beast. Most have gauntlets, shin guards, and armor, plus some decorations like that little light panel on his forehead, presumably so he can see where he’s charging at night, and the similarly and inexplicably illuminated codpiece. I’m still impressed that despite the small size of the figures, there’s very little repetition across Battle Beasts. A lot of 1980s toy lines would repurpose production molds by recoloring them (for example, most He-Man characters have the same body), but not Battle Beasts, Every one of them is a unique creature with its own outfit and embellishments, like Bison’s horseshoe-claw hand. 

With most old toy lines the accessories are often harder to find than the figures, and that certainly applies here Each Battle Beast came with a weapon, and if you look close you’ll see tiny numbers on both the armaments and figures. I don’t have Bison’s corresponding weapon, so I gave him a few random ones and pretty much recreated the Cow Tools from The Far Side. 

MINER MOLE 

There’s something inherently cute about Battle Beasts, even when they’re positioned as a warlike throng of cyber-suited lions and eagles and iguanas. Miner Mole captures this well; despite all the technological adornments, our mole has a little nose and rounded head that would fit in any Russel Hoban children’s book. Also note the giant claw. A shovel would make more sense for a mole, but it wouldn’t look as cool. Besides, maybe a cyborg burrowing mammal has to use it in combat with all the giant mechanized grubs and insects awaiting underground. 

You’ll note that Battle Beasts tend to lose their rub stickers over the years, and the stickers that remain often degrade to the point where they no longer show their fire-water-wood symbols. I’m sure some collectors prize figures with intact stickers (or apply their own replacements), but I pay no mind to that detail. When I was a kid I actually peeled the symbols off so my legion of Beasts would all be friends and not squabble over social constructs like fire, water, and wood. I was a strange child, but it’s saving me money on my Battle Beast budget years down the road.

POWERHOUSE MOUSE AND HUNCHBACK CAMEL 

These two are grouped by a curious designation. While Battle Beasts originated in Japan and saw more toys released there, Powerhouse Mouse and Hunchback Camel were by all available accounts never sold on the Japanese market. 

They’re Western exclusives, and they’re fairly neat figures. I like Camel’s uniform desert color scheme and the look of sheer derangement that Mouse wears. If you go by the size of their real-world animal counterparts, Powerhouse Mouse might be the smallest of the Battle Beasts next to the spider, and you've got to put up an imposing front. 

Battle Beasts were most commonly sold in pairs, though some were in larger sets. Usually the two-packs matched up the Beasts by number, so the Mouse and Camel would not have been available together. However, I’d swear than many of the sets I bought in Germany had the figures randomly bundled in defiance of their numbers and proper Teutonic alles-in-Ordnung structure. And today, when Beasts are randomly strewn about secondhand shops and eBay listings, it’s sometimes satisfying to reunite them with their store-shelf companions like they’re mismatched partners on the police force. They’re Powerhouse Mouse and Hunchback Camel, teaming up to catch a killer and finally get a trip to Japan.

MUSKY OX 

Take a close look at Musky’s hands. Yes, that’s right. His arms are upside down. This could be a manufacturing error, but I suspect it was the work of a former owner who yanked off Musky’s limbs and put them back wrong in subtle Frankenstein fashion. You’ll occasionally see this sort of thing on Battle Beasts. Their owners got tired of the basic figures and swapped the arms around. The problem was that Battle Beasts were never designed to have interchangeable arms, and much of the time kids just broke them. 

As 1980s action figures go, Battle Beasts are sturdy; they’re made out of hard rubbery plastic, and their arms are the only moving parts. So when you see partly dismembered figures, they’re likely the result of someone’s failed experiment in customization. It’s also common for broken Beasts to just get their arms glued back on, so if you’re selling or buying these toys, consider some photos of Battle Beasts with their arms in different positions. Just a tip there. 

Musky Ox has one of the less intimidating names among Battle Beasts, who go by everything from “War Weasel” and “Sly Fox” to “Bodacious Bovine” and “Ossified Orangutang.” My favorite from the first three series of toys would be “Wolfgang Walrus,” which could be a threatening adjective only if you’re Salieri in Amadeus.

BLUE EAGLE 

The last wave of any toy line is usually the rarest, and for Battle Beasts that final run was called Laser Beasts in Japan and Shadow Warriors in the West. These replaced the rubsigns with crystal spheres that revealed fire, water, and wood symbols when you held them up to a light source. 

Japan got the entire Laser Beasts run while other markets had fewer types of creature available, and just about any figure in this final set is pricey today. So if you’re sorting through a tub of old toys at a garage sale, keep an eye out for Battle Beasts with that circle symbol. 

Blue Eagle, with an admittedly limited blue coloration, is the only Laser Beast I own. That’s partly due to this being one of the more common figures from the set, at least as far as I can tell. I couldn’t capture it in pics, but that symbol has the wood icon inside. Because eagles can perch and nest in trees, that’s why. 

Blue Eagle also reflects an unflattering memory. I had a bunch of Battle Beasts as a kid, and of course I wanted Laser Beasts. I spotted some, including Blue Eagle, in a German toy store once, but my mother forbade me from getting them, and I consequently threw a tantrum. It was the last time I remember getting mad over being denied a toy, and I was so embarrassed by the incident that I avoided buying any Laser Beasts even when I could easily afford them. I lucked into Blue Eagle through a friend of a friend decades afterwards, when I was well past the statute of limitations on my childhood shame.   

Battle Beasts have seen only a few small revivals over the years, and sometimes those comebacks bear only limited resemblance to the 1980s line. That’s rare in a world where an entire quadrant of the toy industry specializes in serving up Ninja He-Man G.I. Joe Ghosbuster Transformer Turtles crossovers and “retro-play” reissues for middle-aged nostalgists, but then Battle Beasts were never a major name in the first place. 

And I like it that way, since rampant reissues and new versions of toys accurate to the originals would only tempt me to spend more money—and perhaps make me weary of such oversaturation.

The closest thing to an all-out Battle Beast renaissance was Beast Saga, a 2012 toy-and-media effort from Takara Tomy. The figures resemble Battle Beasts (or rather, Beastformers) that hash out their differences by launching dice instead of revealing their elemental allegiances. The Beast Saga toys are surprisingly high in quality for their price point and target audience, but the whole thing crashed quick and hard, leaving behind canceled figures and a middling anime series. It was also exclusive to Japan, aside from a dubbed version of the show that apparently aired on some satellite channels. This didn’t stop me from collecting a load of Beast Saga stuff, but that’s a story for another long and confessional post. 

To return to that opening question, I’m not sure if Battle Beasts were my favorite childhood toy line when I was actually a child, considering all the competition. Yet they’ve risen through the ranks over the years, partly on account of their simplicity.  They’re unobtrusive enough to store my entire collection in a shoebox, but crafted well enough that you can admire the design work in a two-inch figure of a cobra or beaver or sabertoothed tiger outfitted like a high-tech Roman gladiator. I think I’d like them even detached from any youthful ownership or memories of questionable fondness, just because they’re neat little toys.

Golden Axe: Playing Favorites

Golden Axe is perplexing in the Sega catalog. It’s not a mammoth name like Sonic, but it’s often trotted out for classic reissues and merchandise. To be fair, it got off to a good start: original Golden Axe set new standards for arcade brawlers back in 1989, and even now it remains an exemplar for video games fused with barbarian fantasy. 

Yet the Golden Axe series walked a rough road. The first game was a hit in arcades and on the Sega Genesis, but the two Genesis follow-ups were seldom praised. A further look reveals disappointments like the laborious Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe for the Game Gear, the ungainly, forgotten 3D remake for the PlayStation 2, and the infamous Golden Axe: Beast Rider. Decent spin-offs like Golden Axe Warrior and Golden Axe: the Duel remain obscure, and the best game in the entire line, Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder, was only available as an arcade release until the modern era.

 

It’s mostly the first Golden Axe that sustains a reputation. It was an arcade centerpiece back in 1989, drawing players in with a vision of sword-and-sandal violence and brutish fantasy staples, as facsimiles of Conan and Red Sonja and your favorite Tolkien dwarf slew enemies by hacking them, kicking them, casting elaborate spells, and hijacking dragons and cockatrices. Today the controls are a little awkward (and the scoring system is bizarre), but there was no matching it for spectacle in the late 1980s.

A lot of arcade games, and Sega games in particular, drew in kids with video-game simulacra of the movies they probably weren’t allowed to see just yet. Your parents might not let you rent some cheaply made barbarian flick with an incongruously amazing cover full of muscular warriors and hideous demons in the style of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, or Julie Bell, but they couldn’t stop you from playing Golden Axe. And while those cheaply made barbarian flicks never remotely lived up to their box art, Golden Axe delivered monsters and violence aplenty.

I first saw Golden Axe during one of those unfortunate arcade situations when I had plenty of time to kill but was also flat broke and all by myself. So I just wandered around and watched the games. And nothing there was as fascinating to watch as the Golden Axe demo. It showed just enough of the game’s varied fantasy scenery and screen-filling magic spells to get me curious, and it also introduced the playable characters. And I most of the afternoon to ponder and choose a favorite.

 

Hmm. So the broadsword-swinging Ax Battler (or rather, Axe=Battler, as though the characters are all odd equations or progressive rock songs) wants revenge on Death Adder, who slew Ax’s mother.  Yes, that was very tragic, in line with the original Conan the Barbarian movie that I hadn’t yet seen.

 

Ah, and Gilius Thunderhead seeks similar vengeance for the death of his brother. That seemed like a good motivation. Incidentally, Gilius’ brother is apparently called Gari, though that’s never mentioned in the game, possibly because a name that could be read as “Gary” doesn’t evoke an atmosphere of ancient conflicts and dwarven vengeance.

 

But what’s this? Tyris Flare, the amazon warrior, lost both her mother and father to Death Adder! To me that made her the most immediately sympathetic of the trio. Sure, Ax and Gilius were out to avenge family members, but they weren’t made orphans like poor Tyris. And since Golden Axe showed a harsh fantasy world lacking even the Dickensian standards of workhouses and gruel, Tyris must have grown up fending for herself, a parentless and destitute urchin in a land of monsters and bandits and countless medieval cruelties. That may explain why she can’t afford much in the way of clothing.

There are obvious reasons why a preadolescent boy would find Tyris Flare the most appealing of the three Golden Axe characters, but I’m not kidding when I say that it was her single-sentence backstory that won me over. Watching Golden Axe’s display over and over let me envision a childhood of Tyris begging and scraping by like a humbled Disney princess, and the game clearly didn’t allow for perky animal sidekicks or heartening musical numbers.

So when I finally had a quarter and the opportunity to play Golden Axe, I picked Tyris and sped her forth on the game’s most justified quest for recompense. It lasted all of three minutes. I wasn’t very good at video games.

This was a lot to extract from just one sentence, but that was the way of things. If we didn’t have a magazine like Nintendo Power handy, we knew only what the game told us, and Golden Axe’s introductions were fairly detailed for the era. Such limited narratives often enhanced a game, amplifying each little fracas and victory into something important.  And if our impressions were wrong, there was no vast online repository of wikis and forums to unravel our beautifully entwined ignorance and imagination.

So was many years later that I learned the truth about Golden Axe. I looked up the actual backgrounds for the characters and saw that Tyris is the princess of the Firewood Kingdom and that Death Adder destroyed it and slaughtered her parents…when she was seventeen. 

Not to downplay the grief of such a loss, but this was not quite as vicious as my earlier concept of Tyris losing her family and being cast out into the world in early childhood. That was usually how these stories worked: the hero or heroine witnesses horrors as a kid and forges a bitter desire for revenge throughout a hardscrabble youth. Golden Axe’s arcade demonstration had not directly misled me, but I saw it as a lie of omission. How dare this video game’s threadbare storyline manipulate my simple young mind.

 

Hold on, though. The PC Engine version of Golden Axe has more elaborate cutscenes for the characters, and it revamps Tyris Flare’s origins. She’s now all of four years old when Death Adder arrives and kills her royal parents, thus setting off the tale of shattered childhood happiness that my pre-teen brain extrapolated from the arcade attract-screens. She’s found and raised by a tribe of amazons, of course, and I gather that makes for an upbringing better than begging on cobblestones or eating rats in a ditch. Golden Axe for the PC Engine is seldom praised, as it removes the multiplayer element and disrupts the pacing, but I salute it for proving me right about Tyris Flare in some capacity.

One might expect Tyris and her combat swimwear to be the most popular part of Golden Axe, but it’s actually Gilius who shows up the most. He’s in some Sega racing games, and he provides a recurring gag in the surprisingly funny Sega Hard Girls anime series. Tyris only gets the spotlight in Beast Rider, a game beloved by no one but Dave Halverson, and that seems to have done her few favors as a Sega mainstay.

No matter its history, Golden Axe gets periodic revivals and promotions from Sega. The latest is a Comedy Central animated series from some of the folks behind Star Trek: Below Decks and American Dad. The press release describes Ax Battler as a warrior whose “brain outweighs his brawn,” Gilius as having “poor hygiene,” and Tyris as deadly with “her sharp wit,” which is what happens when writers are afraid to assign a woman actual flaws. And there’s a new hero, the earnest neophyte adventurer Hampton Squib (or possibly “Hampton=Squib”). Comedy Central hasn’t shown a trailer yet, but I admit that the show is already evoking some nostalgia: once again, I feel sorry for Golden Axe’s characters.

Three Sentences About Three Gundam DVDs

You and your friends were really into Gundam Wing midway through high school and when they picked out their crushes from the show you went with Trowa even though Duo was your favorite because one of your friends had a scarily intense infatuation with Duo and you didn’t want to get in her way, and then in senior year that friend gave you this Gundam Wing DVD as a joke present for your birthday even though you’d all long since stopped caring about the show and she’d moved on from a crush on Duo to a crush on Kyo from Fruits Basket to a crush on a guy from the next town over who said he was eighteen and had just graduated so you and your friend sat down and watched the DVD and laughed about how much this show had once mattered to you and she teased you when Trowa was on the screen and you thought about telling her that Duo was your favorite anyway and you also thought about telling her that the guy she liked looked at least twenty-one and not exactly on the level to you but then you decided not to say anything even though you really should have.

This one guy you knew your last year of college found out you liked anime because you made some remark about watching Gundam Wing and G Gundam and he was aghast that you’d only ever seen those and insisted that you should watch the good gundams, as he put it, and you mentioned you’d seen the first few episodes of The 08th MS Team so then for Christmas that year he gave you the second 08th MS Team DVD and you watched it and it was okay albeit sorta cliché but the real problem was that he’d given you a gift even though he barely knew you so you had to find a last-minute reciprocal Christmas gift for him over the break but you didn’t want it to be anything remotely romantic because this guy wasn’t your type at all and you were worried that he’d ask you out and get awkwardly rejected so you got him a Best Buy gift card even though you hate how impersonal gift cards are and you also gave him your honest opinion of the Gundam DVD and he said that some other series are even better and he gave you a bunch of mecha show fansubs burned to a stack of CDs five inches high and you ended up watching some of the movies and shorter series one week while you were stuck housesitting for your aunt and War in the Pocket was pretty good and Do You Remember Love was fun and some of the others were all right but not mind-blowing and a few were flagrantly sexist so you actually formulated some trenchant criticisms to share with this guy but before you could he dropped out of school to teach English in Japan and you and one of your friends later got into a debate over whether this guy was creepy or just awkward and you favored awkward because he was never creepy with you, just nerdy and a little snobbish, and even though your friend maintained that he was creepy she couldn’t give any examples or explanations because she said that sometimes people just make you feel that way, and you agreed with her on that at least.

You and your roommates liked watching G Gundam together for one freshman semester in college when you’d all get high and yell the Shining Finger speech and you’d all never get together for a show like that again because by the end of the year you had a part-time internship that sorta sucked and didn’t pay but you thought it was good exposure and one roommate started working a late shift so you never saw her and the other roommate moved out to get a place with her boyfriend and the next roommate after her hated everything you liked right down to your breakfast cereal so for the next year of college you lived in your grandmother’s spare room and commuted to save money because at least your grandma didn’t complain about every album you owned or lecture you about the additives in Cheerios every morning and then eight years later you were at an FYE store that was clearancing a lot of DVDs at three for fifteen bucks so you picked up My Best Friend’s Wedding for your mom because she loved the movie but refused to buy it just like she refuses to buy herself anything inessential for human survival and you also got Happy Feet because the last time you babysat your niece she loved Happy Feet and wanted to watch it more than anything but the DVD wasn’t in the case or the player and you spent almost an hour looking for it while she was on the verge of a full-bore tantrum and you debated calling your sister’s cell but decided not to because this was her first real date since the divorce and you didn’t want to bother her and your niece just ended up watching Corpse Bride even though it was a little dark for a four-year-old but she fell asleep on the couch anyway and when your sister got home she spent twenty minutes complaining about her date before you could ask about the damn Happy Feet DVD and it turned out your sister didn’t know where it was either and that’s why you decided right there in FYE that you were not going through that again but then you needed one more DVD because they would otherwise be seven bucks each so you found volume five of G Gundam and that was good enough and you watched it and had a laugh about the guy named Schwartz Bruder who was secretly the hero’s brother but it wasn’t the same without your old roommates and you thought about selling the DVD but then you decided to keep it because people, normal people, usually have dozens of DVDs but you have just a fullscreen Matrix Reloaded that one of your exes didn’t want, Happy Feet, three random Gundam DVDs, and the suspicion that you’re turning into your mother.

Little Things: Fire Shark

I admit it: I neglected Fire Shark for a long while. You can’t blame me that much. It seemed mundane when I sampled it during my trips through Sega Genesis shooters, and even the label for the North American version of Fire Shark is a boring black-and-white deal without illustrations, apparently due to someone’s desperate attempt to trim costs. So the game was easily overlooked amid the throng of M.U.S.H.A., Gaiares, the Thunder Forces, Phelios, Grind Stormer, Sol-Feace, Wings of Wor, Dangerous Seed, Forgotten Worlds, Arrow Flash, Hellfire, Vapor Trail, After Burner II, Zero Wing, Bio-Hazard Battle, Insector X, Gleylancer, Atomic Robo-Kid, Whip Rush, Burning Force, Steel Empire, Truxton, Panorama Cotton, Galaxy Force II, Eliminate Down, Sagaia, Curse, Elemental Master, Task Force Harrier, Air Diver, Air Buster, and, of course, my beloved Trouble Shooter series.

 

Sorry, Fire Shark, but you didn’t wink at me like Trouble Shooter did.   

I’ll still acknowledge that Fire Shark doesn’t look like much at first: you pilot an ordinary biplane into an oncoming force of tanks and aircraft, also of mediocre appearance. Yet things perk up very soon. Enemy fire constantly forces you to dodge and destroy as quick as you can, and the weapons gradually change from a routine spread shot to a twirling spiral green laser and a screen-filling octopus of a flamethrower. The opposition also gets more impressive, growing into more stylish assault vehicles and immense stage bosses. It’s a fantastic workhorse of a shooter. It’s not always pretty, but it’s constantly challenging you, leaving you wanting more at your inevitable defeat and even dropping small details for you to appreciate when you're not weaving through certain destruction. 

When it comes to those details, my favorite is the ground crew that awaits at the end of each stage. They’re tiny green figures that scamper across the curiously friendly airfield where your plane lands, somehow in the middle of hostile territory, and those mechanics are usually up to something. At the game’s start they’ll form an encouraging arrow for you. On another level one of them will try to fly a plane like yours, only to crash it and apparently survive. 

The best ground-crew routine appears at the end of stage four, when they’ll rush toward the landing strip and line up…except for one crew member, who trips over the barrier.

Whoops! Quick, get up and get in line before someone notices!

Uh-oh. Your boss noticed, and you’re getting chewed out.

But it’s okay, because now you’re back with the others…only you’re just a little out of step with the rest of the crew. That’s really a nice touch.   

Toaplan went on to make more complex shooters with more complex background details, perhaps reaching their apex with that gorgeous spread of ocean life in Batsugun’s first stage. I think that Fire Shark was the start of that. There’s a certain care to it that isn’t really apparent in earlier works like Tiger-Heli, and it set a lot of standards for shooters both inside Toaplan and out of it. For example, Seibu Kaihatsu's original Raiden has a lot in common with Fire Shark, from the round, bullet-spraying tank turrets to the overall intensity of it. So when people talk up Raiden, you can mention that it swiped a lot from Fire Shark. You’ll be the old-school shooter version of those people who won’t let anyone mention the Ramones without bringing up MC5 or the Dictators or the New York Dolls.  

There are several ways to enjoy Fire Shark, including a recent port of the original arcade game for the Toaplan Arcade Garage. Yet the Genesis version, which Toaplan themselves programmed, is hardly irrelevant, and I actually prefer it in many ways. The soundtrack has more impact there, and a special code lets you max out your weapons at any time. This fixes one of the game’s few general flaws: power-ups are a little too infrequent in the face of the opposition. So don’t feel guilty about pumping up that  fire cannon and filling the screen like some b-movie giant spider. 

So now I appreciate Fire Shark. I don’t like it quite as much as I do M.U.S.H.A or the Trouble Shooter titles (did I mention those?), but I think Fire Shark places in the top five shooters on the Sega Genesis. And on a system so full of them, that’s saying an awful lot.