El Viento Returns, Sorta

El Viento remains a fascinating artifact from a facinating era. Like many early 1990s games heavy on anime style and resolute heroines, El Viento is cut from the same manic energy as anime OVAs of the decade prior. Yet it steps beyond the typical fantasy or science fiction milieu of the time, and it’s all the more enticing for that. 

Our story is technically about a green-haired Peruvian woman named Annet who wields wind magic and well-trained boomerangs as she fights mobsters, cultists, and vaguely Lovecraftian nightmares in 1928. That alone makes it stand out among side-scrolling action games of this vintage, but it doesn’t even cover the giant pixelated octopuses, the dolphin-riding, the skyscraper full of pteruges-wearing lizardmen, the Mount Rushmore totem-pole robots, or the speakeasy somehow full of ice dragons, sunglasses-sporting rats, and bartenders who look like mohawked versions of the Butterball cenobite.

 

In her journey Annet brilliantly embodies the allure of an entire era's anime OVAs and action games, both of which thrived on embracing weird sights and not caring one iota for how much sense it all might have made. Yes, El Viento has the usual cliches and the rough edges that typified even Wolfteam’s best games (of which El Viento is one), but it’s such an energetic and inventive journey that it’s hard not to emerge satisfied, endeared, or just sympathetic toward poor Annet at the downbeat conclusion. 

Physical copies of El Viento are expensive these days, as is the case with just about every decent Genesis and Super NES game that isn’t Pac-Man 2. Fortunately, El Viento isn’t trapped in some frustrating legal miasma like some other cult-favorite Genesis games that I definitely don’t talk about too much and definitely aren’t called Trouble Shooter. El Viento is legally available on the Evercade system already, but the recently announced Retro-Bit reissue of the game tries to come close to the original Genesis case and cartridge. 

Retro-Bit’s done a few reissues like this in recent years, offering Genesis cartridges with packaging that includes both the Japanese and international covers, plus a full-color manual and some other extra. And their El Viento re-release, announced alonside Sol-Deace, looks sharp in its recreation of the original Kazutoshi Yamane cover and the Renovation cover that I wrote about who knows how many years ago.

One thing bothers me: the cartridge itself. I’m not fond of translucent plastic in general, and pink is a strange color choice for El Viento. Yet what really jumps out at me is the label itself. The manga artwork, taken from ads and Yamane’s own El Viento comic in Beep! MegaDrive magazine, just doesn’t look right on a cartridge label, particularly when it’s cropped so awkwardly, and combined with the color choice it looks like someone cut out a manga panel and stuck it on a Jolly Rancher. 

It's almost enough to put me off buying Retro-Bit’s version of El Viento—or at least enough to take it from something I’ll instantly purchase, squawking like a trained parrot all the while, to much vaguer status. 

Am I being too picky? Shouldn’t I be glad that El Viento is available for less than a family of three’s monthly food budget? Should I really count it a deal-breaker just because I don’t want to look at that neon lollipop of a cartridge in my Genesis and reflexively think it’s a bootleg? Shouldn’t I get this in the hopes that we’ll see reissues of more Genesis rarities and perhaps the other two decidedly lesser games in the El Viento trilogy, Earnest Evans and Annet Again? 

Really, why do I care so much about this trivial detail? Perhaps I should look to El Viento for the answer.

Ah, yes. Now it all makes sense.

Bounty Arms: Going Data West

Uh-oh. I haven’t written about Bounty Arms in over a year! That’s perhaps understandable, since an unreleased PlayStation action game from 1995 doesn’t exactly make daily tabloid headlines (like BANNED BOUNTY BABES BOUND BACK). Yet I, as the president and sole member of the Bounty Arms Preservation Society, remain dedicated to chronicling every new mention and detail about this intriguing and still partially lost game. 

The standard introduction applies: Bounty Arms is a canceled action game from the first year of the PlayStation, and it combined familiar genre staples as mecha enemies and stylish anime heroines with a unique multifunctional Relic Arm weapon. It looked neat and got as far as a bare-bones demo (which you can find here), but publisher Data West delayed and eventually canceled it, leaving Bounty Arms yet another intriguing and likely unfinished title. 

Data West intrigues me as well. They were yet another technology company that dipped into game development and pulled out when it stopped making them money, and they’re still around today. Their website offers some of their old games for sale, though only for Japan. That may reflect the fact that Data West’s games were seldom known on an international scale. Even today, a lot of people assume you’re talking about Data East. 

That brings me to the catalyst for this update: a nice YouTube video from F_T_B, discussing Data West’s history with an eye on their adventure games. It’s a reminder of just how much of Japan’s game industry remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. Series like The 4th Unit and Psychic Detective had strong followings in Japan yet no recognition in the West outside of some scattered and astute importers. And again, even today people might assume you’re talking about the unrelated Electronic Arts FMV game that was also called Psychic Detective.

The video refers to Bounty Arms as a shooter, however, and that is incorrect. As you can see from the demo itself, the game allows heroines Chris and Rei to wield their telescoping cyber-arms like whips, grappling hooks, bullet-deflectors, and spinning flamethrowers—but never firearms. That’s part of what fascinates me about Bounty Arms.

That aside, the video does a great job of covering Data West’s catalog beyond Brave Prove and the Rayxanber series. It makes one realize how graphic adventures like The 4th Unit were the company’s most abundant creations, and it makes the cogent point that Data West often backed the wrong horses when it came to putting their games on consoles like the LaserActive. 

In fact, that makes Bounty Arms all the more tantalizing. For once Data West was on a winning team, getting in at the ground floor of the PlayStation’s first year and, according to an interview with Yasuhito Saito, getting Sony’s earnest support for the game. By the time they canceled Bounty Arms and published Brave Prove in 1999, the PlayStation scene was far more crowded. 

So would Bounty Arms have succeeded back in 1995? It might have been overshadowed by other action games like Gunners Heaven, but there certainly wasn’t anything like Bounty Arms’ 2-D overhead approach and Relic Arm mechanics in the PlayStation’s early lineup. Would fans of arcade-style action games and traditional hand-drawn graphics have rallied around it, or would Bounty Arms have been seen as archaic and limited by critics who dismissed traditional games while feverishly lionizing many mediocre games with new 3-D visuals that would age as well as sour cream on the summer pavement? Could Bounty Arms have made it in a world where a magazine might fawn over the embarrassment of Toshinden while fobbing off such hand-drawn brilliance as Darkstalkers 3 and Guardian Heroes with banal three-out-of-five-star reviews? No, I’m not still bitter over that. Not me.

These are the things we might discuss at regular meetings of the Bounty Arms Preservation Society. Joining is free and confers nothing, but since the society has no vice president, treasurer, press secretary, minutes-taker, research assistant, or caterer, all of those positions are open to the first applicants. They’ll look sharp on your CV or resume.

Mechanized Attack: The Mystery of Maiko

Anyone who praises the innocence and honesty of children has never heard them discuss video games and invariably lie. This was especially common during the height of Nintendo’s popularity in the late 1980s, when millions of homes had the Nintendo Entertainment System and millions of children had excuses to make up all sorts of nonsense about it. 

The most daring falsehoods often involved nudity. Finish Metroid five times and Samus Aran will be naked. Beat Super Mario Bros. in two minutes and both Mario and Peach (known then in the West by the superior title of Toadstool) will be naked. Input a special code at Double Dragon’s title screen and everyone will be naked in every way imaginable.

These were lies, of course, and such filth was not hiding in any NES game. Except one.

Mechanized Attack is an obscure game no matter where you look. Even the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection didn’t bother with either the arcade original or the NES port. And yet that NES version is unique, for it makes those bawdy playground myths come true.

A special code, documented by The Cutting Room Floor, unlocks a "System Construction Figure" menu that lets players skip levels, adjust their arsenals, and so on. A blue-haired woman in a dress and sweater navigates the options, and certain selections cause her to gradually lose her clothing to the point where she becomes completely naked.

Going beyond that removes our hostess entirely and replaces her with a hexagram, as though the programmer who created this was intent on featuring everything Nintendo wouldn’t allow in the North American market (and Mechanized Attack was only released there). The game already has rampant violence, so why not add nudity and a potentially religious symbol? 

This secret menu is, we remind you, accessible in the standard cartridge release of Mechanized Attack. There’s no ROM hacking needed. Every impressionable child and concerned parent in America could see this just by holding down the right buttons at the title screen. 

A small mystery is hidden in the game’s code, however. The words “Maiko’s Special Mode” lie unused in the data files and definitely refer to this debug menu. It has a nicer ring than System Construction Figure, at least.

But who’s Maiko? No character with that name appears in Mechanized Attack. As far as I can tell, the game has no story scenes of note and no cast beyond its largely unseen Terminator-inspired protagonists. Its ultimate villain is a giant computer-encased brain (as in Lupin III: The Mystery of Mamo and a hundred other works) instead of a human terrorist ringleader, and the ending simply shows the enemy base exploding and thereby restoring world peace. There’s no blue-tressed woman to sell the heroes weapons, scamper across the battlefield, or await rescue at the game’s conclusion. 

Maiko could be from a different SNK title, but I find no leads there. It’s also possible she was a singer, actress, or some other real-life celebrity who caught a programmer’s fancy. And it’s not out of the question that Maiko was the actual programmer—or perhaps some SNK employee who the Mechanized Attack staff exploited with a hidden menu. That would fit with artist Hiroko Yokoyama‘s stories of SNK’s chauvinistic work climate in the 1980s. 

The most likely and reassuring theory is that Maiko is just an original character devised entirely for this menu, with no links to the real world or other games. Her purpose was merely to guide players through a debug lineup and, many years later, to exonerate those misguided youth who concocted stories about video games hiding all sorts of lascivious depths. 

Of course, those kids are only off the hook if they were discussing Mechanized Attack. The rest of them proved themselves vile little distortionists with their risque conjectures about Mario and Zelda and dozens of other games. Given Nintendo’s recent legal pursuits, they're lucky that the statute of limitations on slander has expired.

News: Full-Motion-Video Classics Become the Next Great Game Adaptations

(Hollywood, California) No longer the beeps and bloops of Pac-Man, video games are growing up. Cable and streaming services, emboldened by HBO’s critically lauded The Last of Us, are hoping to find similar success by adapting games that already mix in the magic of movies and TV: they're the full-motion-video masterpieces of the 1990s. 

"With its harrowing vision of everyday people struggling to survive in the face of a devastating apocalypse, The Last of Us represents a new apex for video games and great original stories in general," said Gregor Madison, a pop-culture critic who also believes that The Walking Dead invented zombies and that Harry Potter was the first ever fiction about a wizard school. “Audiences want to see more of that, so studios are seeking out the finest games to adapt for TV.”

A second season of The Last of Us is already on the way, but HBO hopes to deliver another game-inspired and binge-worthy series while fans wait: Night Trap, based on Sega’s 1992 FMV adventure game, premieres this summer. The series explores a house full of young women menaced by vampire-like creatures called Augurs, with Scarlett Johansson starring as agent Kelli Medd and Daniel Day-Lewis emerging from retirement just to take on the role of Commander Simms. 

“You usually don’t think of video games as having actual stories,” said Randy Evans, lead writer for the Night Trap series. "Most of them are just dots on the screen. But there was a whole variety of these amazing full motion games in the 1990s that brought together movies and video games in amazing ways.” 

Night Trap is only the first of several Sega FMV games optioned by studios and streaming services. Apple TV recently announced a Sewer Shark limited series starring John C. McGinley as Ghost, while Hulu is currently developing an original movie based on the zombie-filled Corpse Killer. 

Not to be outdone, Netflix revealed plans to adapt a number of FMV games, including the cyberpunk thriller Burn Cycle, the monster-themed horror tale It Came From the Desert, and the surreal action saga Duelin’ Firemen.

If audiences like what they see, there’s plenty to feed future series. The FMV genre enjoyed its heyday on consoles like the Sega CD and Panasonic 3DO during the mid-1990s, when developers used the then-new CD format to create entire games with footage of live actors. Though some derided these games for their crude production values and limited interactivity, many in the entertainment world now see them as the ancestors of modern high-budget titles like The Last of Us—and perhaps their successors as well. 

“This forward-looking full-motion-video stuff was the closest that video games ever got to quality television until The Last of Us came along,” explained Netflix producer Terry Stein. “My daughter told me about this game called Undertale that seems to be popular with a lot of kids. But when you look at it, there's nothing to work with. The graphics are all just these pixels. Nothing looks real. The main character, you know, the hero of the story, doesn't even have a name."

Stein instead decided to adapt a standout of the FMV era: the rollicking and risqué comedy Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. Netflix has already renewed it for a second season. 

Indeed, a popular video game doesn’t necessarily make for good TV. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series was long known for its cinematic sequences, but when Starz producer Jayden Morgen dove deep into the company’s catalog, the pick of the litter was obvious: the 1997 adventure game Another Mind.

“Final Fantasy might work as a video game,” Morgen said, “But we wanted something that could deliver the impact of truly good television, with real actors that rise above that whole cartoony kiddie pool of most games.” 

Other studios are willing to take a few risks when it comes to adapting full-motion-video games. Amazon Prime has optioned several 1980s FMV games that employ animated footage instead of real-life actors: the mystic fantasy Strahl, the post-apocalyptic revenge tale Road Avenger, and the whimsical sci-fi adventure Time Gal.

"It might be hard to adapt a video game that doesn't slavishly reproduce the atmosphere of a routine prestige television series or an Oscar-bait film," admitted Crystal Meyer, director of the Time Gal series. "But I think we can pull it off with a great cast, great storytelling, and the appropriate level of contempt for the source material." 

Even so, the current trend of studios sifting out the best and brightest of video games has some hiccups—or glitches, perhaps. Netflix recently canceled plans for a series based on the 2018 cinematic adventure game Detroit: Become Human due to what an anonymous source describes as "the amateurish source material."

Journey to the Center of Wurm

Those of cynical mindset could deem Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth a messy game, but they’d be wrong. At the very least it’s several messy games combined into one. A 1991 NES release from Cyclone System and Asmik, it's a multi-genre hybrid that delivers shooting stages, side-scroller levels, unique first-person boss battles, and through it all the story of a spirited lady protagonist named Moby. 

 

Well, that’s what the manual calls her. See? There’s something charmingly odd about the low-key chauvinism of labeling her a “lady protagonist,” perhaps in testament to how few games in the Nintendo Entertainment System's library actually have women in lead roles. However, there’s more to Moby and Wurm itself.

For starters, they’re both ambitious. Our green-haired heroine captains a tunneling craft called the VZR-5, drilling deep into the earth in a search for previous VZR expeditions—and, in particular, her boyfriend Ziggy (possibly named after the David Bowie album and probably not the bulbous-nosed comic character). She stumbles into a complicated subterranean war between the remnants of ancient kingdoms who somehow combine every major mythic lost civilization into a single tale.

And Wurm winds her journey across four types of levels. The VZR flies through caverns in horizontal stages as well as vertically scrolling ones, while Moby ventures out of the ship to wander ruins and tunnels sparsely populated by beasts. Each chapter showcases a clash between the VZR and a large monster, which requires Moby to talk to the crew for hints and “possibility” points while dodging and shooting down the creature’s attacks. And there’s a little tedium in every format: the VZR shooter levels are simple, the on-foot stages have little variety in their enemies, and the boss battles involve a lot of seemingly pointless chatter and awkward aiming.

Yet it’s a fascinating game in full, as each piece of Wurm has its layers. The shooter levels may not be very complex in their design, but they let the VZR transform into different forms that gain new weapons, abilities, or just better fuel rates. A depleting energy meter keeps Moby’s crew from being too cautious, and a regenerating energy shield makes their ship vulnerable only when it takes damage rapidly. That balancing act lifts the stages beyond the typical NES shooter.

Moby’s side-scrolling forays are simpler in their demands: she explores, she jumps, she kicks, and she wields a handgun with a limited ammo supply. Yet the stages she wanders are intriguing sights, with their random backdrops of ancient ruins and empty caverns, and the subtle colors mix well with a soundtrack that’s bubbly, sharp, and just a little haunting.

And the first-person battles with massive creatures? True, Moby spends a lot of time chatting repetitively with crew members who try to puzzle out a creature’s weakness and raise that possibility percentage to a hundred, at which point a single shot brings down your foe. However, there’s some personality in the conversations (including a Helen Keller reference you might not expect) and a share of twists along the way as the boss lineup expands to an organic-mechanical creation and a face-off with Moby's own ship. Wurm’s plot twists aren’t elaborate, but they’re plentiful for a title from 1991. If there’s ever a dull point in the story or the gameplay, there’s always something new right ahead.

Moby herself shows the same variety. She’s seemingly pulled straight from an outlandish 1980s anime OVA, sashaying through hostile terrain in epaulets and a battle leotard while the rest of her crew wears sensible jumpsuits, but she’s a surprisingly resolute main character for an NES game. Wurm lets her face trepidations, grieve her losses, marvel over discoveries, brim with vengeful fury, and, even taunt arrogant underworld rulers. It’s no competition for our modern array of complex heroes showing us all that games are serious entertainment (and don’t you forget it), but for an era when video games had threadbare premises and silent heroes, Moby certainly gets her moments. The best ones come when she’s sassing monstrous thugs who, apparently shocked at the idea of NES-era protagonists with actual personalities, can only muster retorts of “Whaat!”

Wurm stands alone, though it bears more than a faint resemblance to Vic Tokai’s original Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode. Moby doesn’t seduce secret agents in hotels or snipe Hitler’s pickled brain, but her sprite has a similar soft-edged look, and her game has similar diversity (though she moves much faster and smoother than Duke Togo). That’s no accident, as designer Shouichi “Angela” Yoshikawa was the driving force behind both games. Together with producer Hiroshi Kazama and developer Cyclone System, Yoshikawa drew inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lost in Space, and Cyborg 009, casting a web wide enough that Wurm never feels bluntly derivative of one particular source

Yoshikawa even maintained a website all about Wurm. It’s apparently lost now, but there’s still a great in-depth interview at the GDRI. Even without the creator’s site, Wurm has steadily gained a better reputation, evolving from a possible “kusoge” to an expensive Famicom title and, I hope, a genuine cult favorite. Is it just the plucky lady protagonist? Perhaps that’s part of it, but Wurm offers more than that. There’s a vision behind it, an inspired tone that comes from a creator believing in their creation and overseeing it every step of the way. Heck, Yoshikawa even did the localization!

I was harsh toward Wurm when I wrote about it for GameSetWatch many years ago, citing its jumbled approach and frequently empty stages. Yet I’ve come around, and now I count it among my favorite NES titles. The gameplay mixture is enticing, the vacant side-scrolling levels evoke mystery in ways I never noticed before, and Moby sticks around in memory after most protagonists (gentleman or lady) fade away. I had yet to realize that it doesn’t matter if games are critically, objectively good, if such a thing even exists. All that matters is whether they’re interesting or not. And Wurm is.

Bunny Girls Interrupted

The Playboy bunny girl costume is an unavoidable fixture of sexist pop culture—and a persistent one in video games. Showing women in rabbit ears and scant corsets isn’t just for pandering fighting games like Dead or Alive and Variable Geo; the practices arises in Emerald Dragon, Lunar: Eternal Blue, Super Robot Wars Original Generation, several Dragon Quests, and so forth. And in that warren of rabbit-girl getups there’s an equally varied history of how publishers censored them. 

One example lies in Heavyweight Championship Boxing, an early Game Boy outing from Tonkin House and the furtively prolific developer Tose. It’s an ambitious but clumsy game with only a few dabs of personality; there’s a nice soundtrack to bounce everything along, and I salute the Tose graphic designer who put extra effort into making the obligatory ring girl a vision of ‘80s anime style.

There’s even a hint of Haruhiko Mikimoto about her, as though Minmay from Macross is working boxing matches after her experimental prog-industrial album failed to chart or to pacify a fleet of grouchy alien giants.

The original Japanese game, titled Boxing with the refreshing directness of an early Game Boy release, had a few more details. The ring girl sports rabbit ears and stand-alone shirt cuffs, and there’s a bonus code that lets players confirm that she’s also wearing the fishnets typical of a woman promoting Playboy-brand objectification. Activision took these details out of the game’s North American release, presumably for the same precautions that led the publishers to rename characters like “Mai Taison.”

Most North American game publishers of the era, however, were not so skittish. If some games removed bunny girl depictions they were expunged entirely, presumably more for their suggestive nature than legal concerns. Other games showed no concern. For example, the waitresses of Casino Kid still sport their bunny ears, albeit only in portraits that would draw neither lawyers nor complaints of risqué content.

Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting, a light-game from Nintendo themselves, goes further when depicting shooting-gallery hostess Trixie in a bunny girl outfit throughout the game. This wasn’t a case of the Japanese release’s design choices slipping through, either, since Barker Bill was released only in North America and Europe.

Then there’s the most prominent bunny girl in video games: Rami from the Keio Flying Squadron series. She goes through two games thwarting the monstrous forces of a tanuki despot (a raccoon if you’re playing the localized Sega CD game), all while wearing a distinct Playboy bunny outfit.

JVC changed nothing about Rami’s outfit for Keio Flying Squadron’s North American release. Indeed, magazine spots even play it up, encouraging the reader to “strap on your bunny ears and save the world.” The Sega Saturn sequel skipped the Western hemisphere, but the European version of Keio Flying Squadron 2 features Rami and her bunny attire on the cover, as though in open defiance of any Playboy attorneys who might spot it.

It seems that bunny girl outfits aren’t much of a legal hurdle after all. They appear in anime from FLCL to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to something called Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, and no one seems to mind in the international market. Gainax’s original Daicon IV convention promo has a famous depiction of a bunny girl heroine who flies through undisguised depictions of everything from Golden Bat villains to Star Wars ships. And there she’s probably the least of the short film’s gleeful copyright infringements.

Playboy-style bunny costumes, as far as they appear in Japanese media, are such a cliché that any legal challenges would be closing the barn door well after the cows left. Or shutting the pen after the rabbits hopped out. Or changing Playboy club standards after the waitresses all quit in protest over the outfits they had to wear.

Yet Activision and Tose might not have been entirely overcautious in excising the ring girl’s bunny garb in Heavyweight Championship Boxing. In 2020 Playboy sued costume manufacturer Fashion Nova for “disregarding trademark protections” with a line of bunny outfits. One can only hope they won’t go after Nintendo, or else we might never see a revival of Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting.

Notes for the Gravity Rush Movie

Gravity Rush is getting a movie, if you remember. It was announced four months ago, so that’s plenty of time for us to forget all about it or file it away with Metroid, Spy Hunter, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and other game-based film projects never to be made. 

You must forgive my jaundiced view of this. When I covered anime industry news for a living, each month brought some new announcement of an anime, manga, video game, or related property optioned for Hollywood treatment, whether it was a Robotech film with Tobey Maguire attached, Tim Burton’s Mai the Psychic Girl musical, or ADV Films’ long-discussed (and apparently scripted) Evangelion movie. And most of them vanished without a trace.  

Yet perhaps I should hope that this Gravity Rush movie will go into production. I pretty much gave up on seeing more of the series once Gravity Rush 2 wrapped up almost everything, and a movie has the potential to further explore the games’ fascinating world, dizzying aerial acrobatic combat, and charming characters. I’ll be optimistic enough to deliver some suggestions as to what a Gravity Rush movie should entail. 

-Kat, our gravity-controlling heroine, should see a thing happening and then say "Well, that just happened." This will convey to audiences that she is a sarcastic and astute observer of events that transpire within her field of perception.  

-Dusty, as her cat companion, should deliver quips such as "Don’t ask me! I’m just here for the free mice!" and "Flying is easy! I always land on my feet!” 

-The movie should feature the Superjesus song “Gravity,” because no one buys movie tickets more than fans of underappreciated Australian alternative bands.  

-A character should make a joke about the word "pussy" and its varied meanings with regard to Dusty and Kat. Perhaps Kevin Smith could guest-write this gag. 

-The credits should contain no less than 26 stingers for other possible films in the PlayStation Cinematic Universe, including but not limited to Horizon, Infamous, Shadow of the Colossus, Knack, Tokyo Jungle, Journey, MediEvil, Tiny Tank, Elemental Gearbolt, Wild Arms, Project: Horned Owl, Arc the Lad, Motor Toon Grand Prix, Gunners Heaven, Crime Crackers, and the Legend of Polygon Man.  

-All characters should speak in the fictional, vaguely French language invented for Gravity Rush, with no subtitles present throughout the entire movie.* 

-In her efforts to protect the people of Hekseville, Kat should run afoul of a newspaper editor who declares her a “menace” while unwittingly buying photographs she takes of herself. Kat should also run up against a Kat clone who later reveals that she is the original Kat and that the Kat the audience knows is actually the clone. This plot twist will be dismissed in the sequel due to everyone hating it. 

-Any possible lesbian subtext between any characters should be limited to scenes that can be easily edited out by cowards and/or bigots.  

-Kat should be played by a snowy white actress, a terrible decision that the production staff will defend in numerous ill-advised and covertly racist ways. This will all work out in the end because there’s no such thing as bad publicity.  

-When the Gravity Rush movie is nearing its debut, all press materials should say "Gravity Rush drops into theaters on [date here]."  

And that’s just what I’m giving away for free! I have hundreds of completely original ideas for the Gravity Rush movie, available to any producer who wants to hire me as a creative consultant. I assume that would entail me playing Gravity Rush games all day and occasionally suggesting that Kat or Dusty should make jokes about barfing up hairballs.  

*I actually like this idea.  

Super Mario Bros. 2: Pity Poor Pidgit

There’s a lot to enjoy in Super Mario Bros. 2. It took all things Mario from a revolutionary but straightforward action game to an endearing cartoon adventure, imbuing the simple characters with the seeds of personality that turn a mere video game into a pop-culture smash. To this day, even the best Mario creations feel a touch lacking if they don’t let you control Luigi, Princess Peach, and some version of Toad alongside Mario himself. 

One thing I always enjoyed about Super Mario Bros. 2 was its comparatively pacifist approach to enemies. You can jump atop them and harmlessly ride them, and if you pick them up and toss them, they’ll suffer damage only when they collide with each other or some hazard. Throw them on the ground, and most of the Super Mario Bros. 2 foes will just trudge off, sent thoughtfully on their way with perhaps just a little more wariness about meddling with plumbers and royalty.  

Not every enemy is so lucky. Consider Pidgit, a crow-like creature that appears riding a magic carpet. I describe him only as crow-like because unlike real-world corvids, he cannot fly. The game’s manual explains that chief evildoer Wart gave Pidgit these carpets to compensate for their stubby wings and so that they may fly around bringing bad dreams to all.  

First appearing in the second stage, the common Pidgit floats above the players and darts down. The idea is to leap upon him, pick him up, and steal his carpet to cross a large chasm. You can chuck Pidgit at enemies or just throw him into space, but what if you want to spare him and set him down unhurt upon solid ground?  

Well, you can’t. If you lob Pidgit at any surface, he’ll pass right through and presumably fall into oblivion. The designers of Super Mario Bros. 2 either neglected to code any environmental collision detection into Pidgit or just deemed him undeserving of the player’s clemency.  

That’s enough to make me feel a little sorry for Pidgit. I’m sure that, like Opus in Bloom Country, Pidgit long envied birds capable of flight and was overjoyed at getting his own flying carpet. Just look at how happy he looks atop his little aerial conveyance.  

And you, the player, took that from him. Perhaps he plummets through the ground of his own accord, choosing a quick demise over life without flying.

So what if he’s there to deliver bad dreams? Even nightmares have their purposes, and I’m sure there’s some quote from The Sandman to illustrate that only through bad dreams can we appreciate good ones.  

At least Pidgit was not left behind among Mario enemies. Unlike Ostro, Flurry, or the vastly underappreciated Porcupo, Pidgit followed up his Super Mario Bros. 2 appearance with spots in Super Mario World’s secret mode, Wario’s Woods, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, and other games. Even if he can’t survive the game without that flying carpet, the unfortunate Pidgit bounced back in other ways.  

Phantasy Star IV Disarmed

It recently came to light that Rieko “Phoenix Rie” Kodama passed away in May of this year. Kodama was a pioneer among women in the game industry as well as an incredibly talented designer, artist, and director. Just about all of her games, from early Sega arcade titles to the more recent 7th Dragon series, are well worth playing. If you’re unfamiliar with her work and want to start at the pinnacle, however, I’ll point to Phantasy Star IV as the best game that involved Kodama—and perhaps Sega itself. 

Phantasy Star IV is a sci-fantasy RPG of rich and constant spectacle, a quest that spans a star system and rarely lacks for some cool new discovery. There are spaceships, sandworms, mutant conspiracies, tragic deaths, monstrous forces lurking behind other monstrous forces, and vast tributes to the previous Phantasy Stars. An even if you go in completely unfamiliar with the series, it’s easy to get caught up in the well-paced storyline and the cast of bounty hunters, androids, aliens, sorcerers, and other oddities for the player to recruit.

One standout party member is Rika, a genetically engineered bestial Numan with an upbeat, mostly innocent worldview and big pointy ears. She’s also the subject of a little false advertising.

The back cover of Phantasy Star IV’s Japanese release shows Rika front and center with a giant mechanical arm. It’s something that would fit right into the game’s particular vision of space opera, where wizards and swordfighters could easily join up with a beast-girl armed with an unwieldy bionic appendage. 

The Mystery of The Missing My Little Pony Music

I am always intrigued by deleted scenes, especially when they’re presumed lost to time. It ties into my fascination with unreleased media in general and the innate appeal of uncovering a secret. Whether it’s the spider pit horrors in the original King Kong, a gruesome death scene from Disney’s The Black Cauldron, or just a short and meaningless clip excised to trim down running time, there’s a certain thrill in encountering something that you, the audience, were never meant to see. 

That might be why I went through the trouble of seeking out a deleted musical number from the 1980s My Little Pony cartoon. 

I should explain my history with this show. After my family moved to Germany in the mid-1980s, my grandmother sent me and my sister tape after tape of cartoons she had recorded (even going so far as to edit out the commercials, bless her heart). These tapes had a variety of Looney Tunes shorts and semi-educational programs, but they were heaviest on episodes of My Little Pony and Friends. 

I scoffed at the cartoon until my family moved off-base and loss access to the Armed Forces Network, and then I was grateful for any shred of American television. That’s why I have seen every episode of the 1980s My Little Pony series multiple times, and why I still can recall the personalities of every toy-shilling horse, from Wind Whistler the sesquipedalian pegasus (and, for the record, the show's best character) to Gusty, a grouchy unicorn voiced by Nancy Cartwright with the same voice she’d later use for Bart Simpson. 

My sister and I were discussing this unavoidable childhood diet of My Little Pony not so long ago, and we learned something: the original broadcasts of the show’s “The Glass Princess” episodes featured a song called “Hurry” in the fourth and final part, but this song and the accompanying animation were removed for all subsequent airings. The missing footage has never reappeared, not on VHS or DVD or streaming services like Tubi. It was also nowhere to be found online.

I actually remembered seeing this musical number on the old tapes my grandmother sent us, and that made me all the more curious about why it was pulled from broadcast. My sister did all the work of digging up the old VHS tape and recording the screen, and you can thank her by checking out her comic. 

Here’s the song sequence in full. Now everyone can find out what the My Little Pony cartoon deemed too shocking, too extreme for the airwaves of the 1980s. 

 

As you can see, it’s a brief and anodyne little number that shows the ponies and their sentient tumbleweed friends, the Bushwoolies, making a quilt. Meanwhile their human allies, whose hands would presumably provide more dexterity than hooves, offer no assistance and merely look on with vacant smiles. There’s no hint of controversy in this “Hurry” song and no inappropriate detail in the animation. In fact, there’s nothing objectionable about this scene. 

Or is there? Check out the Bushwoolie creatures around the 39-second mark and you’ll see them dashing around with a pair of scissors and wielding them perhaps a bit carelessly. That might’ve been enough to draw complaints and get the whole musical interlude yanked for fear that impressionable children would ignore that ancient wisdom about scissors and running.

It may seem odd that the show would delete the “Hurry” scene and leave much darker elements untouched in other episodes; for example, the very first My Little Pony cartoon features a demonic centaur king who kidnaps ponies and transforms them into giant helldragons. Then again, there’s far less chance of a child imitating that. 

Was the song cut for time? I doubt that. A rough comparison shows that the fourth part of The Glass Princess is at least a minute and change shorter than every other episode in the series, suggesting that it wasn't going over any limit. 

We can’t really wrap up the mystery until someone from the production team confirms or denies that this My Little Pony cartoon generated complaints about improper scissors usage. Yet seeing the deleted song bit is enough to satisfy my curiosity—and to free it up so I may focus on other things lost to the ages, no matter how trivial they might be. A secret is a secret, after all. 

Old Games and New Questions

There I was the other night, playing Eco Fighters on the new Capcom Arcade 2^nd Stadium collection. Eco Fighters is a creative and unfairly overlooked 2-D shooter, and the Capcom Arcade Stadium presents it well. Yet as I wove through flurries of enemy fire and blasted construction vehicles into scrap in some dubious effort to save the environment, one thought consumed me: how will future generations appreciate these old games?

It's perhaps not a pressing matter or even a serious one. There’s no lack of repackaged older games these days, whether they’re cheap digital reissues or lavish physical copies meant to sit on the shelf beside those decades-old original games without complicating the effect. Yet there’s a haunting reminder that a lot of these re-releases trade heavily on nostalgia—and that when this nostalgia runs dry there’ll be no appetite among the new generations for Gaiares or Dragon View or the original NES Duck Tales. 

Nostalgia is an unreliable thing, after all. It can be the catalyst for personal reflection and historical analysis, and it can be an unchallenging refuge that lets us wallow in the past. Whatever the incarnation, nostalgia is an undeniable part of anything “retro,” to the point where the actual quality of the work might not matter so much as the memories it evokes. 

How, then, does one make these games relevant and palatable for modern audiences with no compelling recollections of, say, unwrapping Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on some distant birthday?

One possible solution is to grant the player unprecedented freedom in playing the game. The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection introduced a feature that let players skip to any point in a pre-established playthrough, just as easily as they might advance to a certain scene in a film. Most of the games in the collection weren’t all that interesting regardless of where one might skip to, yet it was an inventive new way to experience them—particularly in the collection’s standout, the phenomenal action/RPG Crystalis. 

Other re-issues dig into the games themselves, altering a few things to make them smoother or more interesting. Developer M2 seems to delight in rooting through the nuts and bolts of older games, especially those in the cruelly short-lived Sega Ages series, and adding a new feature or two that opens things up in new ways. Phantasy Star gets adjusted battle rates and experience levels that greatly improve its pacing. Lightening Force and Gunstar Heroes offer easier access to their arrays of weapons. It’s a great way to bring out a game’s best features and give those older fans a reason to pick up something they might've thoroughly explored already.

And what of the historical context of these games? Some retro-game reissues pattern themselves after the Criterion editions of movies, offering art galleries, interviews, and other extras that simultaneously entice hardcore fans and frame things for newcomers. 

Even so, such enhancements are preaching to a very devout High Seas Havoc choir. If nostalgia-free players, spoiled for choice with modern games that often imitate and even exceed the older ones, don’t care about Gunstar Heroes in the first place, they're not likely to care about new options or an interview with its designers.

It’s best to accept that these games will be forgotten by most. That’s the way of all entertainment or art: movies, television, books, theater, radio, postcards, billboards, backs of cereal boxes. The majority of it won’t be remembered at all by the majority of its audience. Why should video games dodge the inevitable?

Westone’s Clockwork Aquario arrived on modern consoles last year, nearly three decades after the game’s original arcade release was canceled. Some people ignored it. Some played through it once and forgot about it. Some enjoyed it thoroughly. And a few adored it enough that they’re still playing it regularly even though it’s only 28 minutes long and I have dozens of other games howling for my attention. 

Things would have been much the same had Clockwork Aquario actually come out in 1993: it would have been dismissed by some, briefly enjoyed by others, and dissected and venerated by an exacting few. Such is the life cycle of most video games. 

And there’s the best answer we have: let these old games decide. Enhance them and remaster them and surround them with extras, but don’t be afraid to throw them on the mercy of new eyes without a hint of nostalgia. Let them be judged on their own merits. If they were ever good games in the first place, there’ll be some kind of audience for them. 

I have no doubt that modern reappearances of the Battle Mania/Trouble Shooter games, as much as I adore them, would meet with little success beyond the Sega Genesis faithful and fans of hyperdestructive ‘80s anime heroines, but I’d also hope that at least one person with no great overriding affection for the 16-bit era still would find them charming and memorable. 

That’s why it’s sometimes enough just to see an older game bundled in a collection, translated for new audience, emulated perfectly, or even rescued from the lost dimension of cancelled things. It has a chance, just as it would have had ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and even if great hordes of modern audiences fail to mass around it, don’t worry. Someone will care.

Voyage Into Darkstalkers

I usually can tell right away when I’ll like a game. It may take a little while to fully seep into place, but even then there's something that grabs my reptilian synapses right away: a striking title screen, a memorable piece of music, a first-stage appearance by a skeletal villain who calls himself the chief of governors. It's also rare for me to initially dislike a game and then come around to utterly adoring it. 

Well, I didn’t like Darkstalkers at first glance. It was the winter of 1994, and I was still very much enamored with a hyperviolent arcade fighting game called BloodStorm. That’s a strange tale in itself, but the short of it is that I really liked BloodStorm and couldn’t understand why it had disappeared from every arcade in Ohio. I held out hope during a Christmas visit to my grandparents in New Orleans, where the arcades were better supplied and surely would maintain a BloodStorm cabinet for me and the fifteen other fans it had across the nation.

They didn't, of course. The New Orleans arcades had a plethora of new and interesting sights, but BloodStorm was long gone. One of the games that had taken its place was Darkstalkers, Capcom’s head-to-head fighter starring various classic monsters culled from myths and movies (it started off as a Universal monsters pitch, in fact). Its fluid animation and ornate designs were amusing and impressively detailed beyond any game of the era.

I hated it. What was this weird new thing with a grotesque assortment of creatures? Who were these warped and cartoonish versions of boring old movie monsters? Where was the conventional and comprehensible gore of BloodStorm or Mortal Kombat II? And is that cat-woman naked? Can they actually show that?

Darkstalkers earned only one try from me. I picked the spindly fish-man Rikuo, made it a few matches in, and then walked away. I couldn’t wrap my head around the bizarre sights and the bright backgrounds and the animation that was somehow a hybrid of Disney-style smoothness and anime expressions. And though I was accustomed to just about every fighting game dressing its female characters in impractical attire, I wasn’t going to be seen playing something with a character like Felicia, who indeed wore nothing but suspiciously sparse fur. 

So I shunned Darkstalkers and sulked over to the new Killer Instinct machine. Its robots and ninja warriors and off-brand velociraptors presented far more comfortable characters, and the game’s sole human woman only briefly turned into a cat and faced away from the player when she pulled open her top for a finishing move. It was nice to see things back to normal. 

 

Yet things changed over the next year or so. I started reading GameFan Magazine, where Nick Rox and Takuhi and other writers would lionize the wonders of Capcom’s hand-drawn animation while pish-poshing the “plastic rendered deathfest” of Killer Instinct. Several 1996 issues had lavish spreads about the upcoming PlayStation version of Darkstalkers and the Saturn version of its semi-sequel, Night Warriors. I spent far too much time examining all the screenshots and artwork, picking out the details in the characters and their oddball attacks. 

 I was ready to give Darkstalkers another chance, and after getting a PlayStation later that year I lucked into a heavily discounted copy of Darkstalkers at a store-closing Babbage’s sale. I now had time to enjoy the game at home and soak in it all. 

And I loved it. Playing Darkstalkers outside of the arcade let me take everything: the colors, the animation, the background details from the swinging bar sign in London to the neon riot of the Las Vegas stage. Characters that I’d once written off as generic or silly now seemed remarkable. Jon Talbain wasn’t just a werewolf; he was a werewolf with nunchucks, a hilarious taunting pose, and a special move that sent him hurling like a ping-pong meteor all over the screen. Morrigan wasn’t a mere standard-issue sexy vampire woman; she was a playful succubus with Elvira-like swagger. Sasquatch wasn’t just another bigfoot; he was an adorable goof from his giant teeth to his huffy frost breath. 

As for Felicia, I was still uptight enough to dismiss her as a shameless piece of pandering. Then I saw the win pose where she turns into a regular cat and emits a pitch-perfect meow. At this point I grew convinced that she was the greatest character in the history of all artistic expression and that any who denied this should be exiled to a habitable yet remote island until they were willing to recant such heresy.

 

Darkstalkers even made me want to be better at fighting games. Capcom’s entries in the genre had always seemed a little complex to me next to Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct, but with Darkstalkers I had an incentive to learn every move, as they always resulted in some entertaining new sight. It was worth struggling with a stiff PlayStation controller to see Bishamon slice his foe into halves like some Looney Tunes gag. 

All this grew from the less-than-perfect PlayStation port of Darkstalkers. It’s an impressive feat for what it is, but it has strange bouts of sluggishness and seems brutally hard. It took months for me to beat even the lowest difficulty setting. Yet it was a great introduction, and I was intrigued by the idea of a much better version. I can’t say that Night Warriors was my only reason for getting a Sega Saturn the next year, but it was the first game I picked up for the console. 

I never drifted away from Darkstalkers. I was there to import the Saturn version of Darkstalkers 3 and its RAM cart, there to buy Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower for the PSP a week before the actual system came out, and there to complain when the Darkstalkers collection for the PlayStation 2 never got translated and when no one bought Darkstalkers Resurrection years later. 

The lesson? Don’t give up on something after a rough first impression. Especially not if you’re a teenager who likes BloodStorm—or even an adult who still likes it.

Video Game Rental Stickers Tour: Part 2

I discussed my fascination with rental stickers a while ago, and I haven’t let go of it. As physical media grows scarcer and the last remaining rental stores vanish, it’s fun to look back on a lost era of game cartridges and discs that were covered in labels and warnings. So here’s another round of rental stickers found on eBay. And hey, you can buy them if you like! 

 

ART’S VIDEO CENTER’S KINGS OF THE BEACH 
Seller: Corey7521 
This one has it all: a shiny and professionally printed sticker slapped right on top of the game’s label, a less professional sticker with an inventory number, and then, on the back, a marker-written reminder that this is Property of Art’s Video until the end of time. It even refers to the game cartridge as a “tape,” because sufficient numbers of parents still called them “Nintendo tapes” circa 1990 and it would cost a store good money to print up new labels just for the game rentals.

Unfortunately, Art’s Video Center seems to be so long and so far gone that I can’t find any record of it online: no placeholder Yelp pages, no vague directory listings, no ancient archived news stories about the store’s grand opening. This auction and my article might be the only record of this rental outlet existing, so I’m glad to spotlight it here. And unlike other games I’m covering, Kings of the Beach is dirt cheap, just in case you want to own a piece of Art’s Video Center. 

 

AN UNKNOWN STORE'S PRINCESS TOMATO IN THE SALAD KINGDOM 
Seller: awfulwaffles76
Some rental stores used generic cases for their video games, but this Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom has a less common white housing that I particularly like. Why? Because it makes Princess Tomato look like a kids’ movie in one of those cushioned, oversized white VHS containers. 

You can see it, right? A Princess Tomato cartoon, perhaps rendered in authentic Claymation or a reasonable facsimile, sitting right there next to the Disney films and Don Bluth movies and the censored, disguised anime imports in the children’s section of the video store? Perhaps some employee actually misfiled Princess Tomato there once or twice, either disappointing some poor kid who didn’t have an NES or delighting some fortunate kid who got a game rental for the price of a regular VHS checkout. 

Of course, Princess Tomato is not an animated film. It’s a cute adventure game where you explore a world of talking vegetables and where a sidekick persimmon throws out your items without asking. Like most cult-favorite NES games, it’s now very expensive. Still, if I was paying for a copy of Princess Tomato, I’d want the white Disney box with it.  

 

Unlimited Continues and Limited Enjoyment

Cotton Fantasy arrived this month. It’s a cute, colorful, charming little shooter in all respects, and I said as much in my full review. It has a creative power-up system, clever stage design, and a great variety of playable characters. There isn’t anything really wrong with the game apart from one glaring, grating, unfortunate design choice: it gives you unlimited, on-the-spot continues. 

Upon losing all of their lives or energy, players are given the chance to continue. Some shooters boot the player back to the beginning of a level or an earlier point in that stage. But Cotton Fantasy lets players pick things right back up at the exact point where they perished, and the only penalty is the score resetting to zero. 

 

This isn’t uncommon in shooters. It’s a feature born from arcade games, where continuing requires the player to stuff another credit in the cabinet. In that light, getting to carry on the game with no pushback or punishment seems fair—a lot of shooters or side-scrollers even dole out power-ups to reward the player’s money.  

It’s not as welcome a feature in a game developed for a home system or an arcade game ported there. You’ve paid your money up front, and now it falls to the game to challenge you. That doesn’t happen when you can continue on the spot as much as you like.  

Unlimited continues rarely provoke any criticism from the devoted contingent of 2-D shooter fans who play their favored genre for high scores and the accomplishment of beating a game on a single credit. They’ll argue that shooters are meant to be one-credited and played for score, though if this were true the game shouldn’t let you continue at all.  

Some developers work around this. Treasure’s home versions of Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga instituted a clever rule: players got a few continues to start, and each hour of time spent with the game granted another continue. And it worked. By the time you’d played enough to unlock free-play mode or rack up enough credits, you had also played enough to learn the patterns, master the weapons, and hone your reflexes well enough that you could make it to the last boss and its “BE PRAYING” admonitions anyway. It’s a shame that more shooters don’t apply that structure. 

Were shooters always like this? No. A glance across the libraries of the Super NES, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine reveals a wealth of shooters and action games, both original creations and those titles based on arcade games. And I have trouble finding a single one, from Axelay to Insector X to Spriggan to Zero Wing, that allows the player the crutch of unlimited, penalty-free continues right off the bat.  

When did this change? I’m not entirely sure, but I remember the problem coming to light when Strider 2 arrived on the PlayStation in the summer of 2000. GameFan, by then well into its second generation and billing itself as The Last True Enthusiast Magazine, ran a fawning review of the game, half of which was spent complaining about the Internet and sales figures instead of actually discussing the game in question. A month later, Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewed Strider 2 in somewhat positive tones but knocked it for giving the player unlimited, on-the-spot continues that, in their view “destroy this game for a wider audience.” 

Arcade of My Youth: Cap'n Bogey's Golf & Games

A woman knocked on our door one summer evening in 1992. She was circulating a petition against the planned construction of a huge arcade and mini-golf course not far from our neighborhood. As a Concerned Citizen, she felt that it would lower property values and promote delinquency in the delicate suburban environs of Beavercreek, Ohio. 

I feel bad for that woman. Not only did my father, a man so cautious he balked at giving his credit card to Blockbuster, decline to put his name on the petition, but her visit guaranteed that arcade one more customer: I couldn’t wait to visit Cap’N Bogey’s Golf & Games. 

 

Cap’n Bogey’s was close enough to our neighborhood to worry overprotective homeowners, and that meant it was within easy walking distance. Every weekend I’d hike there, usually early enough to avoid major crowds, and spend far too much time lost in a maze of arcade cabinets. My sister would tag along, but I’d make her walk a good distance behind me. Because you needed to look as cool as possible when you arrived at Cap’n Bogey’s.  

There were many arcades in the Dayton suburbs, but compared to the typical nook in a mall or the back room at a pizza joint, Cap’n Bogey’s wasn’t just an arcade. It was a kingdom. The main building surrounded itself with a golf course, bumper-boats, and batting cages. Inside, the first floor was devoted to a snack bar and redemption games, with everything decorated in white, blue, and occasionally pink. I usually walked past such juvenile distractions and made straight for the upper level and the genuine arcade games.

This was the 1990s, and that put me right in the middle of the fighting-game craze. Street Fighter II had started it in 1991, Mortal Kombat had cemented it in 1992, and within a few years every arcade had a wealth of head-to-head fighters and the coin-op industry was bigger than it had been since the early 1980s.

Cap’n Bogey’s arcade was stocked with every genre, including four sit-down Dayton USA cabinets, two T-Mek machines wired for versus play, the elaborate foot-pedal setup of Time Crisis, and the glorious driving-shooting hybrid of Lucky & Wild. Yet it was the fighting games that drew me. The gaming magazines of the day couldn’t stop hyping up the latest Street Fighter or Darkstalkers or Samurai Shodown or Virtua Fighter, and the first place to see them was the arcade. This was well before consoles were on par with arcade hardware, and unless your parents bought you a $600 Neo Geo home system, the arcade versions were always just a little bit better.

Some of these games would vanish within a month, but the big names stayed and took me through the heights of an arcade renaissance and its whimper of an ending.

KILLER INSTINCT
Is Killer Instinct the best fighting game of the 1990s? Hardly, but I think it’s the best example of a 1990s fighting game. Rare and Nintendo fashioned it with CG-rendered visuals that looked impressive in early 1995 but awkwardly plastic by that September. The game boasted every possible stereotype in its lineup: a Predator-like robot, a mystically powered ninja, a boxer, a velociraptor, a low-detail ice alien, an equally low-detail fire mutant, and, of course, a female character whose signature finishing move involved pulling open her top to give her opponent a heart attack. I'd say that the 1990s were a different time, but in this case I'm not sure that applies.

I actually learned to play fighting games on Killer Instinct. I’d enjoyed Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, but I was never particularly good at them, rarely pulling off a special move more complicated than jamming a button really fast. Killer Instinct was approachable enough that I could pull off the special moves and even trigger the extended combo attacks that made the game’s announcer yell BLASTER or AWESOME. And when I went back to playing Street Fighter Alpha or The King of Fighters ’95, I actually understood what was happening.

There’s a better reason I remember Killer Instinct well. One Saturday, local radio station Z-93 set up a contest with a Super NES and the newly released port of Killer Instinct. The previously selected participants didn’t show, so the station held a quick lottery and drew names of five random arcade patrons. I threw my name in and, thanks to the relatively light crowd, I got picked.

The contest wasn’t an actual tournament. Instead of facing each other, the five of us just played solo, using the ninja Jago, to see who could rack up the highest score in a single match. This was clearly planned by someone who still thought that video games were in the score-driven heyday of Pac-Man and Space Invaders, even though an actual fighter like Killer Instinct was all about beating an opponent and showing off an ULTRA combo.

And I won. I managed to perform a bunch of combos and Jago’s finishing move, which put me well ahead of the other participants. I got a nearly new Super NES and made a brief appearance on the radio. To this date it remains the nicest thing I’ve won in a contest, eclipsing the cake I got at a county fair when I was five and even the used DVD of Steel Angel Kurumi Encore that I received in a trivia challenge at Anime Central.

In retrospect, spending all my time in the upper-level arcade of Cap’n Bogey’s wasn’t as practical as visiting the lower-level, where at the very least I could have played skee-ball, earned tickets, and exchanged them for prizes. Yet that day I walked out with a game system and the assurance that, for once, no one could tell me that I’d wasted my time at an arcade. 

Valkyrie Elysium: The First Profile

Gosh, I really wish someone would make another Valkyrie Profile game. It's been over a year since Valkyrie Anatomia shut down, and that was a mobile game with all the expected baggage. It's gotten to the point where I'll latch on to any unrelated name with Valkyrie in the title, like Square Enix's newly announced Valkyrie Elysium.

Oh wait. Elysium actually IS a new Valkyrie Profile. It has the signature series silhouette in its logo, after all.

Yet the game's initial trailer doesn't show much immediate connection with earlier Valkyrie Profiles. We're told that Odin has summoned a valkyrie to ferret out the reasons for the apparent ruin of the worlds both below and above. And as Valkyries are wont to do, she’ll roam the land and recruit the souls of brave and dead mortals to join her cause. 

It’s the same premise as the original Valkyrie Profile, but Elysium has an apparently new heroine and a new emphasis on combat. The first trailer shows off a 3-D action game in which the blonde heroine (who’s seemingly not Lenneth Valkyrie OR her sister Silmeria) leaps and slices and dashes around. Square Enix’s initial writeups promise that her einherjar recruits can join her in battle, though there’s only a flash or two of that in the trailer.

As many have critically observed, Valkyrie Elysium doesn’t look so great. The scenery is sparse well beyond an intentionally bleak landscape, and the battle system doesn’t show enough to set it apart from any other brawler where you might juggle enemies for mid-air combos. It resembles a routine mid-level action game from the PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 3 era.

And I'm looking forward to that. The rising budgets of the modern game industry eroded a lot of the middle ground over the past generation, bifurcating the market into indie creations and expensive triple-A blockbusters. In its primitive looks and apparently ambitious plot, Valkyrie Elysium hearkens back to an era where developers didn’t worry if their ideas were too big for their budgets—an era of Bujingai, Gungrave Overdose, Red Ninja, Spy Fiction, Nano Breaker, Folklore, and other 3-D action games with unique styles and compelling mechanics wrapped up loose and cheap, like a Christmas present from a younger sibling.

Developer Soleil Game Studios seems new and untested, but their catalog is awash in B-level action. Games like Wanted: Dead were once commonplace, and though they couldn't stand next to polished, lengthy, and balanced blockbusters, they could at least share a store shelf.

That’s why I’ll refrain from judging Valkyrie Elysium on appearances. It’s always the part of a game that interests me the least. I’m more intrigued by the prospect of Valkyrie Profile’s button-jabbing, combo friendly RPG battles morphing into a faster-pacer action game. I’m looking forward to seeing just what Elysium does with the whole concept of valkyries, a myth seldom explored fully by video games. If I were hung up on how nice a game looked or how smoothly it ran, I might have discarded Nier, Pandora’s Tower, Advance Guardian Heroes, Drakengard 3, or perhaps even dear Gravity Rush. How disturbing.

 

Besides, Valkyrie Profile fans must admit that we weren't getting another game in any fancier packaging. Valkyrie Anatomia lasted four years but now seems largely forgotten. Covenant of the Plume, the DS strategy-RPG, earned far less of a following than it deserved. And even Valkyrie Profile 2, the last outing for consoles, didn’t catch on like the original. We're lucky to have a new Valkyrie game, opaque as it may be in referencing the original series. 

Of course, there are links to be found. You’ll see the field of weeping lilies that figures prominently into Valkyrie Profile motifs, and the official art and the last shots of the trailer show a halberd-wielding, raven-tressed armored figure who's a dead ringer for Hrist. She's the grouchiest of the three Valkyrie Profile sisters--and the only one who didn't get her own game.

The main illustration implies that she’s equal to the protagonist, though I'm afraid that 1980s cartoons like G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, She-Ra, Beverly Hills Teens, Visionaries, and Lady Lovely Locks conditioned me to assume that all fictional dark-haired women are innately evil. I'm not sure if I'm kidding.

And what about the new valkyrie heroine? My nutty suspicion is that she's related to the amalgam Valkyrie we saw at the end of Valkyrie Profile 2, when Hrist, Lenneth, Silmeria, and human princess Alicia all combined into one warrior like little Norse toy robots. That likely won't bear out in the game, but I should get it out there just in case I'm right and Square Enix owes me a payoff to keep me from suing. I'm pretty sure that's how spoilers work.

I might never be able to fully hate anything that involves Valkyrie Profile, but I think there’s some valid anticipation here. Valkyrie Elysium looks like a potentially cool new take on a favorite series and the sort of mid-range action game I’d like to see more often. And hey, the music’s nice.