Farewell to Forums: Digital Press

The Digital Press forums are gone. This may not seem important or even shocking to those unfamiliar. After all, forums are a relic of the old Internet, a discussion venue long since outpaced by speedier forms of social media. Many message boards are now lost to the ages, and that’s just the way of progress. Yet the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable is a loss worth noting.

 

For starters, it was one of the first message boards where I regularly hung out. I joined around 2002, not long after the forums were established (though the Digital Press fanzine dates all the way back to 1991). The forums attracted a mix of older and younger fans, veterans who remembered the Atari days mingling with folks younger than the Sega Genesis. It was my introduction to the staples of a busy forum: the in-jokes and feuds and gimmicks and contests and meltdowns and drama and moderator squabbles and the occasional threats of real-life physical assault over differing opinions on Springer or Darius Twin. 

I miss it in some ways. Today’s social media lets us connect with others quickly and conveniently, but that immediacy is its own cost. I liked the way the Retrogaming Roundtable was never too big. I could log in once or twice a day without the risk of missing out on anything, and I could take time to compose a post without fretting over wordcount limits. It was a place where, to borrow that myth of small-town Americana, everyone knew everyone. And sometimes hated them. 

Beyond any personal connection, the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable had a lot of useful information. Industry veterans would occasionally pop in with stories, and technical questions invariably attracted people who knew what they were talking about. It was a place for diving into the obscure, whether it was uncovering Micronics’ covertly programmed titles or finding out if certain Sega CD and 32X games ever saw official releases. And those subjects aren’t as obscure these days, now that retro-game collecting has wider scope and higher prices. 

Like most forums, Digital Press declined as the 2010s arrived and everyone migrated to Twitter, Facebook, and other venues. The forums chugged on, kept afloat under new management, but I only stopped by on occasion. Sometimes I wasn’t in the best of moods, as I was disdainful of game collecting and other nerd passions for what I now realize were silly reasons. At the time I honestly didn't care if I got banned, but now I'm glad I didn't.

It seems that the forums are backed up, though a searchable database might not emerge. I’ll miss those occasions where I went looking for some ancient scrap of video-game history and found it on an old Digital Press thread where I’d actually posted many years ago. There’s a lot of valuable information there, so I’m glad it’s preserved somehow. 

I did little to help that, I’m afraid. For all of the unique material contained on those forums, the only posts I saved were a few that amused me. Perhaps I can wring some meaning from them. 

A lot of Digital Press chatter started off with someone needing help in getting past a boss or a puzzle. Forum user “grape,” however, perhaps had other motivations.

Well, sure, but why are the boots so important?

Uh…

You don’t say. 

Threads like this made me realize something: for just about every character in video games (and perhaps all fiction) there’s at least one obsessed fan. Sometimes those fans are just fascinated by a humble enemy’s design or a shopkeeper’s mannerisms. Sometimes they’re innocently sympathetic to a memorable character with a small role. And sometimes they’re just unabashed pervs.  

I met plenty of cool people through the forums, and one of them was the artist known as Bratwurst. He’s made all sorts of great comics, illustrations, and technical wonders (and my site’s banner), and his forum antics always amused me. This one still makes me burst out laughing.

Perhaps Kaine was naïve to assume that any old video games would remain on store shelves for long, but this was an era when such things were in lower demand. Thrift shops and flea market vendors might have bins full of old NES or Sega games for a few bucks each, with future high-ticket rarities like Wild Guns and M.U.S.H.A. just sitting there unwanted.  

In recent years the Retrogaming Roundtable’s traffic was low enough that some members realized they could post incoherent rants without many people mocking or challenging them. Some of these diatribes were about video games, but other posts had a lot bubbling below the surface.

Nostalgia drove a lot of the discussion on Digital Press. If nostalgia is superficial at its base level, it’s often a springboard to more interesting matters: historical studies, debunking an idealized past, humorous anecdotes, and even personal growth. Yet it’s easy to sink thoughtlessly into that pool, and the above nostalgia-poisoned ramble shows just what happens when you never shake the myth that everything was better simply because you were young and never required to think too much about anything. I believe the person who posted that thing was banned for it, and I hope he gets help. 

If there’s any real lesson here, it’s that you might want to save interesting things you find on message boards. The Internet’s a fragile thing, after all, and there’s no guarantee that something you like will stick around. It’s not exactly fair, but hey. Them’s the breaks.  

Little Things: Whip Rush

What follows is my attempt to talk about Whip Rush and only Whip Rush. I will deliberately avoid mentioning its connections to Trouble Shooter. Instead I’ll just focus on Whip Rush, the 1990 Sega Genesis shooter developed by Vic Tokai. This isn’t an easy task. 

That’s because there isn’t much to say about Whip Rush. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s very much a middle-grade shooter from an age when its kind swarmed the market. Notably reminiscent of Irem’s R-Type, this is a standard side-scrolling affair (with occasional vertical interludes) where the player controls a cute little spaceship called Whip Rush and two accompanying weapon pods. There are lasers, missiles, fireballs, cityscapes, enemy bases, organically pulsating tunnels, and all the other expected sights of nearly every shooter from the early 1990s.

 

You’ll see glimmers of invention in a few boss battles, yet there is no elevating Whip Rush. It’s an unremarkable specimen of its day, harsh in the least compelling fashion. Surviving the levels depends entirely on powering up your weapons and keeping them: one hit demotes you to a pea-shooter and all but seals your fate. Perhaps an easier game would have gone down better, or perhaps that would have given it even less staying power. 

Is that all there is to Whip Rush? Hmm...well, there’s something I like about the opening.

One cliché that I always enjoy at least a little is the mysterious disappearance of some exploratory vessel, whether it’s a high-seas clipper or, as Whip Rush introduces, a trio of deep-space ships dispatched to discover new worlds. The mission is deemed “missing and presumed lost” five years into their journey, and their last transmission sees them approaching the planet Voltegus.

But hang on a second. The game then tells us that “less than a week after the incident” an ominous alien force arrives to attack Earth. So those three ships were listed as MIA within a week of losing contact? That seems hasty. What if their communication relays shorted out? What if their lone tech-department wizard was on vacation? What if they just got lazy and didn’t feel like sending those control freaks back at Earth updates about every incremental piece of their voyage? 

Anyway, this is as much storyline as Whip Rush gets. It doesn’t even show an anime pilot at the controls of its ship. Even so, it's a shooter that's worth trying for a few minutes, I guess. Maybe you'll even stick with until the second stage, when you get to that underwater part where everything slows down. That's where it gets dull. 

Okay, fine. I’ll talk about Trouble Shooter. Whip Rush is notable for me only because of its connections to Vic Tokai’s next offering in the genre, known as Trouble Shooter in North America and Battle Mania in Japan. Whip Rush’s staff included Fujito Takada, a.k.a. Takayan the Barbarian, and in a Shmuplations-translated interview he mentions how he was the programmer for Whip Rush while the design was handled by someone else. 

It’s not hard to see Trouble Shooter growing out of Whip Rush. They’re similar in their approaches, mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling, and the available weapons and sound effects all seem from a similar source. 

Yet they’re exceedingly different where it counts. Whip Rush is unobtrusive and mediocre in appearances, while Trouble Shooter has personality at every turn, peppering widespread anime-heroine hyperdestruction with all sorts of tidbit references from whatever Takayan happened to like. It’s also a much easier game, more concerned with colorful details and large characters than it is with how long it might take the average player to reach the ending. 

The Whip Rush ship appears in Trouble Shooter, toting power-ups for protagonists Madison and Crystal (or Mania and Maria) to collect. It’s entirely appropriate for a spacecraft that always looked a little too compact and cuddly for a blistering space shooter. I like to think that Madison and Crystal adopted it as a pet, much like Nanmo from Dirty Pair. I have to mention Dirty Pair at least once in my Trouble Shooter writeups, lest anime fans think me ignorant of the debt that just about everything with futuristic gun-slinging women and copious explosions owes to Kei and Yuri. 

Battle Mania Daiginjoh, sequel to Trouble Shooter, goes with a sleeker ship for its power-up deliveries. Is it a guest star from another Vic Tokai game, or perhaps a reference to another shooter from a rival company, like Technosoft’s Thunder Force? Or is it just a glimpse of how the Whip Rush ship might have been upgraded for a sequel it never had? 

No Vic Tokai game is getting a sequel these days. While Tokai Communications still exists, they’ve long since left the game industry, and their catalog seems off-limits for reissues and new creations. If that ever changes, Whip Rush would not be my first choice for a follow-up, but perhaps its ship could sneak into a third Trouble Shooter game.

Mariner's Run: A Sea Dog Sighting

You know what I always like discussing? Well, yes, Trouble Shooter. Oh, and Gravity Rush too. And don’t get me started about Angel Cop. I could go on for days. 

However, I also enjoy talking about canceled stuff: games and movies and other creations that never saw the light of day. And it’s especially fascinating when those projects are effectively finished and qualify as lost media. That’d be actual lost media, the sort that is possibly gone forever, and not just something that you can’t find on YouTube or the Internet Archive after an intense eleven-second search. 

Mariner’s Run, or Sea Dog in Japan, might be one of these. It’s a rare sort of genre-hybrid video game, mixing an RPG with oceanic explorations. Vic Tokai announced it for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Famicom in 1991, and screenshots appeared in a few publications. It was to follow The Krion Conquest (Magical Doropie in Japan) on release schedules, but Vic Tokai decided to join those companies pulling out of the Famicom/NES market once it was clear that the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were taking over. Cowards, all of them. 

So Mariner’s Run was canceled everywhere, leaving behind some vague descriptions, a few images, and speculation about whether or not it was even finished. Games from the NES era had short development times, remember, so it wasn’t out of the question that a completed and market-ready title would get the axe.

 

Well, Mariner’s Run at least existed as a working game. Here’s some very brief footage of it running at what was probably an exhibition in Japan, as the game has the title of Sea Dog. We get short glimpses of a ship navigating ocean depths, plus artwork of a half-cute mecha-submarine with arms, a missile-launching mouth, and a helmet that Metroid’s Samus Aran might have worn. 

I’ve mentioned Mariner’s Run before, and I still think it’s among the most interesting unreleased and as-yet-undiscovered NES games, right up there with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey. For one thing, it has few direct relatives. The blend of submarine expeditions and RPG features sounds unique; the aquatic dives were apparently side-view action, while the other half of the game involved wandering towns with an overhead view. There are other games with similar mixes, including Deep Sea Adventure on the PlayStation, but there was nothing like this on the NES back in 1991. 

I wish I could credit whoever shared that video on Twitter back in 2022, but the account no longer exists. I saved it at the time and uploaded it to YouTube just this month, so let me know if you’re the one who originally posted this video…or the person who shot the footage in the first place.

At least I can properly credit this clearer scan of a Mariner’s Run screenshot. It was posted by Frank Cifaldi of The Video Game History Foundation, and it shows one of the few known images of the game in welcome detail. We can see the layout of a town that the player would visit to…um… 

Wait. Is that shopkeeper a dog?

 

Perhaps it’s just a trick of the pixels, but that looks like an apron-clad merchant with the head of a dog or possibly a cat. Yes, an actual sea dog in Sea Dog. While it might just be a typical white-bearded vendor (as implied by another, blurry town screenshot I discussed before), the figure has a wide grin and an actual nose that none of the other human townspeople possess. One of the neater elements of Mariner’s Run is the implication that it takes place in some futuristic world of rising ocean levels and lost technologies, and perhaps mutant animal-people were part of that mix. 

Even if I’m wrong and Mariner’s Run possessed a more mundane setting, I’d keep calling it a standout among unreleased video games. Vic Tokai has a very intriguing catalog, from Clash at Demonhead to those Trouble Shooter games I always bring up, and a submarine RPG would fit right in there. So I hope we’ll one day find Mariner’s Run or Sea Dog or whatever else it might have been called. It would show the world a promising, perhaps unfairly canceled game. Or at least it would solve the mystery of that shopkeeper.

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 all by relentlessly promoting He-Man action figures with a cartoon thanks to loosened FCC restrictions. This may go down as one of the lesser machinations of the Reagan administration, but the competition there is fierce. 

Evil or not, toy companies swamped the airwaves with their TV shows. Among the creations that sprung from 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 Thanksgiving Day 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 robot elephant trunk. 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 came 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 series featured him and tried to develop some backstory, but there’s only so much you can do with a character called Stinkor. 

The recent Masters of the Universe: Revelation, continuing 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 pandering 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 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 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 sent 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 great 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. The little creature 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 better. 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.