Major Miclus Moments

I just don't think that kids today know enough about Miclus. I'm sure they're familiar with video-game mascots like Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man, Jack Frost, Wonder Boy, Randar, G-Mantle, Disk-Kun, and the internationally famous duo of Rei Misazaki and Chris [LAST NAME NOT TRANSLATED YET], but Miclus remains obscure. That's understandable, though there was a time when you could find Miclus in just about every arcade worth visiting.

Miclus is a mostly blue dragon devised by Seibu Kaihatsu. Apparently without an official gender, the creature first appeared as the final boss in Wiz, a 1985 side-scrolling arcade game with a pointy-hatted protagonist and an unbearably repetitive soundtrack.


Miclus had more exposure in Raiden, Seibu Kaihatsu's landmark vertical shooter. By the early 1990s, Raiden was everywhere: full-blown arcades, mini-golf centers, bowling alleys, Chuck E. Cheeses, knock-off Chuck E. Cheeses, laundromats, 7-Elevens, and anyplace else that needed a decent coin-eating attraction wherein a lone jet dodged and blasted several hi-tech armies. Miclus appears briefly as a bonus icon; the player usually grabs medals (which always looked like stubby bombs to me) for points, but Miclus shows up for an extra score boost at times. You'll usually see it by the second level, but it'll appear on the first if you explode too often.

Later Raiden games give Miclus bigger roles. Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet make it a playable character that sweeps the screen with fiery breath. There are other ships to choose, but Miclus is clearly the best.

That aside, my favorite Miclus appearance comes in the Japanese manual for The Raiden Project.

While it's not a highlight of the PlayStation's first year, The Raiden Project was comforting at the time. Many early PlayStation games showed us fancy 3-D effects that would age rapidly, but The Raiden Project revealed a more enduring advantage of Sony's new system: letting us play nearly perfect renditions of older arcade games. The Raiden Project offers the original game and Raiden II in arcade-faithful style, aside from some loading times. Its default presentation puts big borders on the screen to show all of the vertical playfield, but you can turn your TV on its side to get a more accurate full-set look. That's where Miclus comes in.


The manual's last pages find the fat little dragon delivering a warning about flipping your TV for  arcade mode. On the left, Miclus turns away in disgust from an anthropomorphized and improperly rotated television. On the right, Miclus looks on in approval. Or maybe it's inspecting that humanoid TV for genitalia and other Videodrome-like abnormalities.

This Miclus comic wasn't necessary for the North American version of The Raiden Project. Sony technically left in the full-screen mode, but with only side-scrolling controls. They didn't want customers damaging their TVs. And yet I think Miclus could've given Sony airtight legal exoneration. If a tiny dragon cautions you about rotating your set, it's your own fault if you don't listen.

Monster Wrecks

What’s the anime-manga industry up to these days? Monster girls, from the look of it. Mike Toole recently wrote an Anime News Network article about this trend, which seizes the base elements of sex comedies or domestic dramas and adds centaurs, lamia, harpies, mermaids, ogres, spider-people, slimes, and other creatures, most of them female.

I find this fascinating in concept. I always like it when people appropriate legends and creatures in new and ridiculous ways, so I see nothing wrong with a sitcom about a guy forced to share a house with a snake-person or a pile of sentient protean goo. I’m sure the storytellers of ancient Greece and general antiquity came up with things like this. They just didn’t write them down.


The problem with most of these monster-girl series is that they’re typical stories beneath the new paint. The leader of the whole movement is Monster Musume, a manga and anime about an average guy with various roommates from the monster realm: first a lamia who can’t keep her coils off him, then a juvenile harpy, then an uptight centaur, and so on. It adheres to the same bland template as countless other risque comedies, as nearly all of the mythical beast-women want the protagonist in one way or another. That's why I gave up on the series. Well, that and I started feeling sorry for the lamia, who met the protagonist first and clearly liked him best.

Monster Musume doesn’t hesitate to overload on titillation, and rarely does it take its premise to imaginative heights. For example, we’re told that lamia are all female and thus require human males to breed (gosh, how convenient), even though many brands of fiction have male snake-men. What about Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel, where a male lamia is called a lamius? What about the G.I. Joe movie, which features a serpent-emperor voiced by Burgess Meredith? What about those Piers Anthony novels that a lot of people warned me against reading? I’m sure at least one of them has a male lamia.

There’s another section of the monster-girl trend that I enjoy much more, if only for selfish, nerdy reasons. It’s a manga called T-Rex na Kanojo, or My Girlfriend is a T-Rex.


It’s ostensibly a parody of the whole monster-girl thing, and it envisions a world where dinosaurs didn’t go extinct so much as they evolved over untold epochs to live and work alongside humans. Of course, this evolution means that dinosaur girls look human as far as their heads and torsos are concerned—everywhere else they have scales, claws, horns, or armor plating.

Depressing Game Endings: El Viento

El Viento is among my favorite weird games, perhaps because it isn't all that weird. Compared to Katamari Damacy or Cho-Aniki or even the culturally ratified oddities of Super Mario Bros., El Viento is ordinary. It’s a side-scrolling action game with jumping and boomerang-tossing, and its base effect isn't so different from the many other Sega Genesis titles where a fetching heroine saves the world from some eldritch menace.

Look closer, and you'll see invention. Like the two other (lesser) parts of the Earnest Evans trilogy, El Viento is steeped in 1920s adventure and interdimensional horrors, as it sends lithe Peruvian explorer Annet from Chicago streets to hellish caverns and an Empire State Building designed to summon demons. Like Indiana Jones with gangsters and Lovecraft beasts instead of Nazis and chilled monkey brains, El Viento brims with lower-key strangeness, and it's more fascinating for that.

So much of El Viento mixes typical action with fabulously bizarre details. Annet starts off by fighting Al Capone's thugs, but then she leaps across a Mount Rushmore full of smiling gun turrets and a floating cactus chain. Then she raids a blind-tiger club full of tiny imp mobsters and sluglike bartenders who explode when struck by her boomerangs and magic spells. Then she hops on a dolphin and rides straight into giant pixel jellyfish-octopuses. They explode as well. Most of the enemies come in weird and flammable varieties, and there’s never a reason why. Even the rats that pester Annet in a sewer look like they're wearing little sunglasses.


See? They're cool rats.


Annet does all of this to keep cultists and criminals from summoning the ancient deity Hastur, but she's also out to rescue her apparent sister Restiana. Despite rampant evidence that the cult's planning to sacrifice her, Restiana is convinced that she'll become a veritable goddess with Hastur's powers, and she openly asks why Annet opposes them. Annet's response?

Arcade of My Youth: Landstuhl

A lot of us had childhood arcades, and most of us saw them change. If you’re my age, you might’ve watched a gallery of varied offerings, Final Fight and Ghosts ‘N Goblins and Raiden and all, shift into a throng of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and every fighting game aping their success. If you’re older than I am, you might’ve seen an arcade trade pop-culture staples like Pac-Man and Space Invaders for things with vaguer goals and smaller crowds. If you’re younger than I am, you might’ve had time only to observe a neighborhood fixture waste down to a few prize-grabber machines and an Area 51 cabinet with only one plastic pistol working. Then it finally closed and signaled that the modern world has little space for childhood arcades.

I say all of this in envy, because I never had much of a childhood arcade. I spent five years of that childhood in Germany, as my father was in the Air Force. Instead of living on an American military base, we lived in a German village, and if that warren of half-timbered homes and dangerously sharp turns had an arcade, I never found it.

The closest I had was the small arcade at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. It was a mere nook in the base cafeteria, but it was my best vision of quarter-devouring culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The selection was the video-game equivalent of the Armed Forces Network, where you’d see current TV shows like ALF and In Living Color aired in tandem with black-and-white movies. Older Kung-Fu and Tiger-Heli cabinets would sit alongside Cabal and Golden Axe, and I couldn’t be sure if a game would stick around for the next time my family dropped by the BX.

In this arcade the size of a small moving van, I remember three games most vividly.

WARDNER 
Arcades intimidated me, and I doubt I was alone. A game on the computer or NES could be practiced in your own home, but arcade titles were merciless and impatient. You put in a quarter and tried to grasp the gameplay through a joystick and buttons, and heaven help the slow learners.

My mother always admonished me against playing arcade games. I once thought she merely disdained them as unproductive wastes, but I now think she had a more insightful motive. She didn’t want me spending money on arcade games because I was terrible at them.

That’s why Wardner got my attention. Arcade games tended to kill you off in barrages of enemy bullets or throngs of street punks, but Wardner was less threatening at first. It was a side-scrolling game where a pudgy hobbit bounced across forest floors and threw fireballs. It was a lot like Super Mario Bros., and I already knew how to play that! This Wardner thing should be easy!


Well, it wasn’t. Wardner is an action-platform game from Toaplan, a company better known for crafting impressive shooters like Batsugun and Outzone. Those shooters are tough, and so is Wardner. It sees its rotund hero waddling through a fantasy realm in search of his girlfriend, who’s encased in crystal and offered to the local tyrant, Mr. Wardner. Our protagonist can boost his fire magic and don a protective cloak, but at the game’s start he tosses only one limp flame at a time, and a single hit does him in. I’d later learn that his name is Dover, but after losing a few quarters to the game, I was more inclined to call him Fatsy Bumbledick.

As frustrating as Wardner was, it fascinated me with the loose, unexplained logic arcade games often put forth. The second level is a dilapidated factory where Fatsy faces whirling blades, conveyor belts, spiked drones, and other challenges required by any game where someone can jump. Yet I was intrigued to see all of this pop up after a stage full of forests and castles and dragons. Was Mr. Wardner trying to industrialize this peaceful land, like something out of that unnecessary chapter at the end of The Lord of the Rings? Or did Wardner actually occur in the future, when gnomes and fairies live among the ruins of humankind and an entire factory still treads on in ignorance, slowly devolving into one massive death trap?


I also liked what awaits at the end of the factory. You’ll see a woman pacing in a locked room, but once the level-boss dragon is defeated and the door is opened, she turns into a generic ghoul. If that occurred only on the second level, I just knew that the game held stranger twists later on. Perhaps the real villain would be Fatsy’s crystalized sweetheart or some mutated, long-lived survivor of whatever catastrophe had ended human civilization!

Wardner wasn’t worth my speculation. As I found out years later, it grows wearisomely hard by the last stage, and there are no shockers apart from Mr. Wardner transforming from an aged sorcerer to a hirsute demon. That's really a standard disappearing-handkerchief trick among the dark sorcerers of video games. Wardner is just an average action title with a few neat ideas and solid Toaplan execution. It’s Ghosts ‘N Goblins after a big meal, but for a little while it opened up a post-apocalyptic fantasyland for me. In several ways.

Nintendo Power's Greatest Gossip Gremlins

Nintendo Power had a fascinating look in its early years. It was, of course, a promotional sheaf for all things Nintendo, but the magazine’s staff enjoyed an unprecedented relationship with Japanese publishers. With that came artwork and layouts rarely spotted in America.

Within Nintendo Power you’d see spindly Clash at Demonhead heroes, plastic Blaster Master and Metal Storm models, Mega Man robots somewhere between an American cartoon and a Japanese comic, and lavish art for the lesser-known likes of Astyanax, Code Name: Viper, and Legacy of the Wizard. And you’d see the detailed illustrations of the now-respected Katsuya Terada adorning features for Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Ultima. Even the comic-strip adventures of Howard and Nester, the former based on Howard Phillips and the latter a bratty little mascot, had distinct manga styling courtesy of artist Shuji Imai. Nintendo Power wasn’t just a bundle of previews and tips and news about video games that would define an embarrassing volume of childhoods. It was a kaleidoscope gaze into another realm.


The Gossip Gremlins had a small but memorable role in this. No doubt borrowed from Japanese publications, the Gremlins were fanciful critters who popped up at the bottom of Nintendo Power’s Pak Watch previews section. They spouted tidbits about games too early to have plentiful screenshots or solid details, giving the magazine a cute package for random information.

The Gremlins also offered some of the most creative art in Nintendo Power, as they weren't based on actual games. Unburdened by commercial demands, the artists cut loose and drew marvelously odd creatures from the heart of Japan’s late-1980 pop culture. And I picked out my favorites.
 
THE EYE KNIGHT 
January/February 1989 
If the Gossip Gremlins rarely came from real NES games, many were cut from the same aesthetics. The Eye Knight is a perfect example, familiar enough to make young readers wonder if they'd encountered such a creature in The Legend of Zelda, Dr. Chaos, or the inner reaches of Deadly Towers that few had the patience to reach.


An armored warrior with a huge Technodrome iris where his face should be? That’s almost too good of a design to waste on a blurb about Defender of the Crown—a blurb that’s half inaccurate, since the game isn't really about Robin Hood.


In fact, Nintendo Power liked the Eye Knight enough to use him (her?) twice. The creature shows up again in the March/April issue to mention some news about Hi-Tech. Too bad, Eye Knight. You deserved to be skewered by Link in Zelda II, not reduced to bandying Chessmaster rumors.

Mega Man's Legacy

The Mega Man Legacy Collection is not the first time Capcom reissued and repackaged the initial six Mega Man titles, but it might be the most precise. Capcom and Digital Eclipse intend to preserve Mega Man’s initial outings just as they were on the NES, complete with slowdown and flicker and various filters. It’s an important step in game archiving and presentation, and the press releases and interviews liken it to the Criterion Collection and its artful packaging of notable movies. And Michael Bay’s Armageddon.

That’s a close comparison, but the Mega Man Legacy Collection lacks one essential piece of a Criterion set: a long and possibly misguided explanation of a film’s cultural importance. Capcom plans to release a physical version of the Legacy Collection next year, so there’s still time to outfit its instruction manual with an essay about Mega Man’s inner meanings.

And I have just the essay.

A Leap Ahead

I reviewed Lost Dimension earlier this month, and it was a tough game to judge. It has novel ideas and flows pretty well, but it just doesn’t make an impact. Hunting a traitor in your midst is intriguing. The battles are fast-paced and fun. On the whole, however, Lost Dimension can't summon the memorable characters or intricate approach that an interesting game really needs. It passes through like a cereal commercial.

Yet I’ll say this for Lost Dimension: it lets you stand on someone's head.


Technically, only one character in the game can do this. Lost Dimension puts you in command of an elite squad of psychic soldiers infiltrating the fortress of a world-dominating villain, and one of the special agents is Nagi Shishiouka. She’s a laconic and efficient woman who’s spent perhaps too much time as a military operative, and she glides around the battlefield in her impractically long combat dress. Position her just right, and Nagi can perch on a teammate’s head. Sadly, she can’t attack from that position. Nor can the other characters move with Nagi atop.

Standing on another character’s head is a feature too often ignored in video games. Plenty of action cavalcades let players leap momentarily upon an enemy, but it’s usually just a means of attacking. Seldom is it merely a neat trick to be enjoyed. And I think that’s a shame.

Rygarfield: The Third Impact

I realize that I let Rygarfield fall behind schedule, as I've made only two strips in fifteen months. I’m not worried, though. All of the best webcomics and many of the terrible ones go on long, largely unexcused hiatuses, so it’s only natural that Rygarfield reflect its medium. And I think the third strip is the best yet!


Abysmal webcomics aside, making Rygarfield led me to appreciate the NES version of Rygar more and more. It already occupied a special place in my nostalgia, since it was the first NES game I saw nearly in its entirety. A neighbor kid had mastered most of it, and he spent one afternoon showing me the whole game up to the final boss. I was so fascinated by the sprawling scenery, the cool monsters, and the little secrets that I didn’t realize I never actually got to play the game. Rygar may as well have been a crude pixel movie for me.

More to the point, Rygar is highly impressive for a 1987 NES offering. Most of that period’s worthwhile games came straight from Nintendo themselves; the majority of third-party titles were simple arcade derivatives or crude side-scrollers. Yet Tecmo recast the boring arcade Rygar as a spacious NES quest that mixes overhead stages with horizontal stuff, offering the player RPG-ish leveling and an arsenal of neat accessories (well, the grappling hook is neat; the rest are rarely used). The creatures encountered are remarkably varied, and there’s a lot to explore as each new item opens up previously impassible areas, like some fantasy-themed Metroid. It even has one of the earliest floating castles in an NES game!

I’m surprised that Rygar didn’t become a series-launching cult classic along the lines of Castlevania or Mega Man. Tecmo tried a PlayStation 2 remake, but it doesn’t count.

No matter. I’m sure that Rygar will see a parasitic resurgence once Rygarfield lands itself a movie deal, a low-budget CG cartoon, and fields of merchandise. Maybe someone will make bootleg T-shirts that show Rygarfield peeing on, say, a Sega Master System.

A Lack of Lunar, Elucidated

The first two Lunar games remain cases of RPG clichés done unimpeachably right. They button up every little part of the genre that grew old during the early 1990s, but they do it all with exceptional artwork, grand music, likeable characters, and cinematic aplomb (oh, and goofball Working Designs localizations that I still find irresistible). That’s especially true of the second game, Lunar II: Eternal Blue. In fact, in the whole skein of RPGs where plucky young heroes meet mysterious, blue-haired women, Lunar II is the best damn RPG where a plucky young hero meets a mysterious, blue-haired woman. And you can quote me on the box.

The original Lunar: The Silver Star gets most of the attention when it comes to remakes, but you’ll find that Softbank’s Lunar artbook, source of early production art and other things, grants a touch more space to Lunar II. For example, the second game gets this comic strip by artist Akari Funato. In it we see Eternal Blue protagonists Hiro and Lucia visiting their makers at the Game Arts offices.


It’s easy to follow if you have even a minor understanding of Japanese and game-development gags, but here’s a rough translation anyway.

Five Amiibo I Would Buy

Nintendo’s Amiibo figures drive people mad. You might not suspect that from a glance at the Amiibo displays in Target or Toys R Us, where plastic effigies of Mario and Link and other popular Nintendo marketing tools are in good supply. It’s the rarer figures, often based on less prominent characters, that send collectors into fits. Otherwise honest adults camp outside of Wal-Marts, refresh pre-order webpages like lab rats, rip open shipping boxes before store employees can touch them, and forge pre-sell tickets so they can trick some unsuspecting Toys R Us cashier into reserving them an exclusive piece of plastic and microchips.

The Amiibo craze isn’t quite as insane as the Star Wars frenzies of the late 1990s, but it’s approaching that critical mass. And, as with all waves of consumer hysteria, it’s fun to sit back and watch.



Have I bought any Amiibo figures? Nope. I don’t have any Wii U games that interact with them, and none of the character selections compels me. I like Bowser and Luigi and Kirby just as much as any kid who grew an overactive video-game fixation like a brain tumor twenty years ago, but I don’t like them quite enough to buy a twelve-dollar figure that I can’t put to its intended use. Yet there are indeed some Nintendo characters that I’d buy in Amiibo form, interactivity be damned. I doubt I’ll see any of them, but they’re all under Nintendo’s aegis in some way. That makes them extreme longshots instead of mere ridiculous fantasies.

5. MAVDA FROM PANDORA’S TOWER 
Pandora’s Tower is the darkest thing to come out of Nintendo since the finale of Mother 3. True, Nintendo only funded and co-produced Pandora’s Tower while Ganbarion, an outfit known mostly for One Piece games, did most of the work. Yet Nintendo had to approve the idea of a priestess named Elena suffering a curse that gradually mutates her, which sends her boyfriend Aeron into a ring of towers suspended above some hellish fissure. He slays beasts and brings their organs back to Elena, who must devour them (reluctantly at first, then rapaciously) lest she turn into some misshapen horror. All with the Nintendo seal of quality, of course.


Aeron and Elena are good kids, but the most interesting character from Pandora’s Tower is Mavda…or rather, Mavda and her husband. Mavda is a mysterious peddler who knows way more than she lets on, and that giant skeletal nightmare on her back is her spouse, rendered monstrous and gibbering by some alchemic misadventure long ago. He’s a nice fellow, though! And he and Mavda would make the most delightfully unorthodox Amiibo.

That won’t happen, of course. Pandora’s Tower is pretty obscure already, as Nintendo didn’t even publish it here. And Mavda and Mr. Mavda are far too elaborate a pair to capture in Amiibo plastic. But I’d like to see Nintendo try.

My Super Famicom Vacation

Not so long ago, I thought about visiting Japan once more. That idea fizzled due to a lack of time and money, but in the aftermath I decided to list all the things I want to do on such a trip. There was a problem with every pursuit I devised, whether it involved seeing Hokkaido in the winter or trying out weird arcade prize-grabbers in their native habitats. It required me to be within the actual borders of Japan.

Yet the list had one feasible, low-priority entry: buy some cheap old video games. It’s very easy to find imported games on eBay these days, and many of them aren’t even expensive. Sellers frequently put up lots of potentially decaying cartridges and start the bidding low, counting on their exorbitant shipping fees to turn a profit. I watched for a few weeks before deciding on my inexpensive and possibly damaged vicarious Japan-trip shopping spree: a bundle of four Super Famicom games.


Were these games that I’d buy on a trip to Japan? Well, one of them is. The others are just a sampling, the Super Famicom version of a cheese-and-sausage platter you get at Christmas. Let's unwrap it.

F-ZERO 
Condition: Decent front, faded back
Working: Yes

F-Zero was very important to the Super Famicom’s Japanese launch in 1990. It was slightly less important on the Super NES a year later. The Super NES had a wider array of games when it arrived in North America, but on that November 1990 morning at Japan’s toy and electronics shops, the world's first Super Famicom owners had F-Zero, Super Mario World, and nothing else.

Both were necessary. Super Mario World was the better game, and yet it looked and played like a prettier version of Mario’s older, regular-NES outings. F-Zero was something new, a dizzying futuristic racer that did things Nintendo’s old hardware never could. You played Super Mario World much more, but you showed F-Zero to parents and friends who scoffed that this “Super” Nintendo was the same old circus.


Today, F-Zero wants for impact. It’s a solidly designed game, but so much has happened since its debut. It doesn’t have weapons or a split-screen multiplayer mode, and the player gets only four different hovercraft to control. The designers make the most of what was brand-new hardware, though you'll note that later courses are just tighter, meaner versions of previous tracks. It’s a show-off game.

The Japanese version of F-Zero is the same as the U.S. version, aside from a slightly different ending. The cartridge label, however, sports an elaborate tagline entirely in English: “THIS IS THE FIRST ADVENTURE OF OUR NEW HERO ‘CAPTAIN FALCON’. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT HIM, EXCEPT THAT HE WAS BORN IN THE CITY OF ‘PORT TOWN’ AND HAS BECOME THE GALAXY’S GREATEST PRIZE HUNTER.”

It’s odd to see Captain Falcon built up as an enigmatic Samus Aran, since F-Zero has no story mode. The hovership-selecting screen doesn’t even list the craft’s pilots. And why’s it so important that our hero was born in “Port Town”? Did Nintendo hope that Captain Falcon would be their next breakout star? Well, he’s in Super Smash Bros., so that counts for something.

Will I keep it? Ehhh. It’s straightforward fun, but I’m not attached to F-Zero. I don’t really need to prove the technical prowess of my Super NES to anyone now.

Mega Man Legends Untold

Sony’s Greatest Hits line is straightforward and mostly beneficial: publishers shamelessly reissue their games, and any interested holdouts or impulse buyers get to nab previously full-priced titles for about twenty bucks. These Greatest Hits revivals show slightly new packaging, however. Original PlayStation re-releases have a neon green border, while PlayStation 2 and 3 titles bear red standards. This doesn’t sit right with some collectors, who resent those colors glaring at them from a shelf otherwise filledwith traditional Sony-brand black labels.

I suppose that’s important, but I’d like to tell you about one Greatest Hits game superior to its original release.


That game is Mega Man Legends, the first in a series that reimagines Mega Man as a 3-D action game in a world of floating isles and mechanized treasure hunting. It’s a wonderful line carried by capable designs and adventurous charms (for which Capcom looked more to Yatterman than Astro Boy), and I recommend all three titles.

I’d like to say that Capcom will put them on the PlayStation Network in North America just as they’ve done in Japan, but that’s unlikely. The most prevalent rumor is that Capcom doesn’t want to re-license the English voice acting. Using those performances might be controversial, anyway, since Teisel Bonne’s voice actor was convicted of child porn possession in 2008. Recording new voices or otherwise editing the game would be expensive and contrary to Sony’s PSN standards. And Mega Man Legends never was a huge seller in the first place.

If you want the Legends games legitimately and in English, it’s the second-hand market for you right now. Mega Man Legends 2 and The Misadventures of Tron Bonne already climb to exorbitant prices, but the original Legends is more common and thus costs less than it did brand-new back in 1998 (and by the recently ballooning standards of retrogame collecting, that’s a bargain). If you go for it, don’t be ashamed of getting the Greatest Hits version and its day-glo cover. Here's why.


This is what you’ll find if you open the original black-label version of Mega Man Legends. The manual’s back cover promotes Breath of Fire III. Lacking the impressive artwork that accompanies even mediocre Breath of Fire games, the ad isn’t all that interesting. By the way, I stole the photo from this auction, so let’s be nice and visit it for the next few days.

And what about the Greatest Hits edition? It may be the color of a radioactive party favor, but within lies a nice surprise.


Yes, the back of the manual shows Data, Mega Man’s loyal Save Monkey! Fans of the series seem to adore the Lego-esque Servbots, but Data is every bit as cute. He saves your game, provides upgrades, and even does a little dance if you stand there and watch him. He’s much better than some pitch for a middle-ground Capcom RPG.

You’ll note that the Greatest Hits disc itself is a stodgier black instead of the original release's authentic Mega Man blue. Yet that's a cavil easily pushed aside. The Greatest Hits version of Mega Man Legends has a precious little monkey-robot welcoming you every time the case pops open, and so it emerges as the better choice.


Even so, those persnickety collectors may have a point about the Greatest Hits label. It looks a little strange in my game library.

Unexplained Readings: Flying Saucers and the Scriptures

No grade school class is complete without one kid fascinated by the paranormal. I did my best to fill that role.

I read books on UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, Bigfoot, assorted lesser cryptids, and anything that fell under the label of “the Unexplained.” I watched Unsolved Mysteries faithfully, hoping each time for a UFO case or a haunting instead of those tedious “Fraud” stories. And of course I spent bedtimes and evenings in the fearful hope that a UFO would zag across the sky or, better yet, an alien would phase into my living room.

I read fewer and fewer of those books as I got older, and I was far more skeptical when I returned to the ideas as a teenager and a warped adult. I realized that there’s little credible evidence for extraterrestrials, that Bigfoot would’ve been captured by now if it existed, and that, heartbreakingly enough, Nessie is a fish, a fake, or a swimming deer. Oh, and the Flatwoods Monster, Mothman, and the Hopkinsville Goblins all were just owls.

Of course, that doesn’t shake my fascination for the Unexplained, even when it’s easily explained. I love weird creatures and crazy theories and anything that lurks just outside of the plausible world. So when a friend of mine mentioned a book called Flying Saucers and the Scriptures, I knew I’d have to read it one day. This was due in part to a minor mystery. My friend had borrowed it from the library of a Christian college in Ohio, but it had disappeared from the shelves when he sought it out years later. Someone or something wanted this book to be forgotten. That, or they wanted to sell it to me for twenty bucks on Amazon.


Books that combine UFOs and the Bible generally take one of two paths. Devoted UFO nuts maintain that scriptural accounts of Ezekiel’s fiery flying wheel or the Book of Enoch’s fallen angels are veiled descriptions of alien visitations, refracted through a culture that had no concept of such things. Many Christian interpretations take the opposite track: UFOs, including those of the modern age, are either heavenly or demonic messengers, and today’s secular science interprets them as alien in origin. Flying Saucers and the Scriptures leans toward the latter school of thought…but it’s not what I expected.

A Demo Demo Dilemma

I discussed the Demo Demo PlayStation series here before, partly because it has the only publicly released bit of Bounty Arms and partly because it’s a neat relic of the PlayStation’s uncertain first year. The Demo Demo line appeared in store kiosks shortly after the PlayStation’s debut in late 1994, when Nintendo and Sega and even the NEC-Hudson alliance dominated much of the game industry’s giant Risk board. Demo Demo lasted only a few years and was soon forgotten, but it helped show off Sony’s new system in time of need.

Demo Demo discs weren't sold commercially, but they had to catch the eye in stores. That’s why a lot of them have comics on their covers. They’re simple strips with a few recurring characters, and among them are two girls who serve as a doofus and a straightman (or “boke” and “tsukkomi” if you want the Japanese terms) as they promote Sony products. I previously looked at one of their cover comics, and I now present their first appearance, which comes on the only Demo Demo PlayStation disc I still own. Through no coincidence, it’s the one with the Bounty Arms demo.


I guessed wildly and incorrectly when I summarized a Demo Demo comic before, so I’ll translate it here. Neither character has a name as far as I can tell, and it’s tempting to label them Demo and Dummo. But I'll be consistent.

PANEL ONE 
Brown-Haired Stupid Girl: I wonder if these games are any good…
Blonde-Haired Smart Girl: Why don’t you just go to the store and try them out on Demo Demo?

PANEL TWO
Smart Girl: Check out videos of new and upcoming games! Play demos yourself! And there’s a new edition every month!

PANEL THREE 
Stupid Girl: Wow, this game’s really interesting! Oh, but so is THIS one! Uh oh, which one do I want?
Smart Girl: Sigh. There she goes…

There’s less of a joke here than we see in the girls’ later outing, but it revolves around the fact that someone can’t decide what PlayStation game to get. And why? Because every PlayStation game is amazingly good. It doesn’t matter if it’s Nekketsu Oyako or Cosmic Race or TAMA or Toshinden or Kileak: The Blood, my dear, because you’re guaranteed to love it!

Our indecisive heroine’s friend could just tell her to get Ridge Racer, which was the console’s most impressive first-round release and still plays well today. However, Sony has a Demo Demo quota to meet this month. Something’s gotta move PlayStations, and I’m afraid it won’t be Bounty Arms.

Explanations

As you know, I don’t update very often. I’d like to have new stuff at least once a week, but the uncomfortable truth is that this website is my seldom-watered houseplant. I want to fix that. To give it more attention, I’m going to expand its scope just a little. So don’t worry if you see something here that has nothing to do with games or cartoons. Rest assured that most of my updates will remain focused on old Compile shooters, canceled anime series, or a spill of cranberry sauce that forms the Angel Cop logo.

Hmm. That’s pretty lean for an entry, so I’ll explain something else: the name Kid Fenris.


The short answer? It’s a play on Kid Icarus, the old Nintendo game. For those unfamiliar, Kid Icarus is a staple of the early NES library, an action-adventure game that stars a plucky, heroic version of Icarus. In Greek myth Icarus flew too near the sun and became an avatar of overconfidence, and Nintendo just made him a little archer who saved a goddess from the clutches of Medusa. He also appeared in the Captain N cartoon, but we can't hold that against him.

The strange thing is that I didn’t even like Kid Icarus during the NES days. I only played it at demo stations, and I was frustrated at how barren the levels seemed, how easy it was to fall off the screen, and how Icarus collected hearts for money instead of health. That went against everything Star Tropics and The Legend of Zelda taught us! I’ve since come to appreciate it (though I still prefer its structural cousin Metroid), and I really enjoyed Kid Icarus: Uprising on the 3DS. I even like playing Pit and Palutena in Super Smash Bros.

Back in 1991, there wasn’t much Kid Icarus. We had an NES game and a Game Boy sequel, and that made many young Nintendo cultists wonder about a Kid Icarus title on the Super NES. I imagined something more ambitious. If Nintendo could make Kid Icarus out of bowdlerized Greek myths, why not make a similar game out of another legend? And at the time, I liked no legend better than the Fenris-wolf from Norse canon.

A Huddle of Huddles

I liked watching football more than any other sport when I was a kid. Part of that came from the dynamism of play, how it was possible for either team to score and even pull ahead at any point during the game. What’s more, football helmets and gear looked cooler to a kid than anything baseball or soccer allowed. And I never played football in the organized, school-validated way, so the sport had the gravity of some arcane ritual involving first downs and wide receivers.

More than anything, though, I think I liked football because of the NFL Huddles.


Football teams had mascots since well before the league’s inception, but it wasn’t until 1983 that the NFL put together a line of plush toys, cards, decor, and little rubber figurines called Huddles. Each represented a particular team, some more creatively than others. I’m not sure if they were sold in toy aisles or in the sporting goods section. I suspect they went to both. Huddles were aimed just as much at kids as they were at adults who wanted to festoon every inch of the living room with Chargers or Packers merchandise.

I bought one or two of the small Huddle figures on my own, and my grandmother got me the rest as birthday presents. I suspect she nabbed them on the discount racks, as this was several years after their debut. Indeed, the Huddles didn’t make a huge impression, and praise for them is scant even on an Internet that finds nostalgia for Macron-1 and Food Fighters. They seem to have passed through the market without much attention, but they’re an adorable pop-culture collision of football and toys.

The Finest Art of Gift-Giving

Did everyone have a good Christmas? I certainly did, and that was partly because of a wonderful present from a friend who prefers to be known as Magic Trashman. He’s an artist and comic-maker, and since he doesn’t yet have a website I’ll have to settling for linking to his DeviantArt page. For his gift, he seized upon an idle Twitter post I made years ago about bugging him to put canceled video-game characters into classic works of art.


I forgot all about that post, but Mr. Trashman did not. This past Christmas he sent me a framed portrait with this response on the back.


And what’s inside the frame? No, he didn't draw characters from canceled video games. He drew something better.


It’s wonderful. It repopulates one of the dogs-at-poker portraits with things I like. The brownish creature on the left is Quilli, heroic porcupine from Quill Quest. It's a video game I sketched out as a child (before Sonic came around, I swear). His fellow players should be more familiar, as they're from Mystery Science Theater 3000, Monster World IV, Darkstalkers, and my favorite shot of actor Billy Barty. Maybe there's even a Bounty Arms reference someplace. I'll have to look closely.

The table shows that Quilli is betting with power-ups from Quill Quest: a hamburger, a watch, and even a Mondo Magnet. Also on the pile is a Mighty Orbots figure, which mystified me at first. I’ve never been more than a mild fan of the show; it has some of the slickest animation ever seen in a Saturday morning cartoon, but even as a kid I found the robots dopey and irritating compared to Robotech or any Transformer. Upon investigation, I realized its purpose: a line of planned Orbots toys was never released, so it’s possible that someone, likely Crow or Tom Servo, put this ultra-rare prototype up as a gambling chip. How clever of the artist to include it.

Little Things: Tricky Kick

I suspect that Tricky Kick wanted to be obscure even by the standards of TurboGrafx-16 games. It presented a deliberately confusing front back in 1990. The title suggests a soccer game, but it isn’t. The “family” label suggests a party game, but it allows only one player. And the box art, with its cave-guy and samurai and schoolgirl standing on an eye puzzle, fits nothing so much as the cover of an unclassifiable prog-rock album with a title like Precambrian Odditure.


The Escherian topography of the cover hints at the truth: Tricky Kick is a puzzle game. Its characters advance through stages by booting an enemy, usually a harmless one, around the screen until it collides with an identical foe and vanishes. That’s about it. A few creative obstacles and enemy-launching gadgets pop up, but the game remains limited in what you see and what you can do. It never gets even half as interesting as The Adventures of Lolo or Kickle Cubicle, but TurboGrafx-16 owners didn’t have much in that category. If they wanted to shove things around a screen with little threat involved, Tricky Kick had them captive.


The best parts of Tricky Kick have nothing to do with the gameplay. Each character gets a cute, short introduction and a unique setting: elven hero Oberon takes on an evil sorceress, schoolgirl Mayumi finds her way to her classmate Biff’s party (yes, Biff), a kid named Taro undergoes some haunted-house hazing, the feudal Japanese prince Suzuki schemes his way to rule the nation, and an Ultraman knock-off called Udon punts giant monsters around city streets. Oh, and a caveman known as Gonzo heads out to slay a big meaty mammoth.


Gonzo’s intro is my favorite piece of the game by far, due to its delightful vision of Paleolithic life. The matriarch of the family, in the absence of modern diapers, has swaddled her youngest child in her mass of untamed cavewoman hair. Gonzo’s eldest son takes after him, one of his daughters takes after her mom, and the remaining kids look like troglodyte versions of Charlie Brown…or Bonk, the bald cave-boy who became the TurboGrafx’s only respected mascot. In fact, we might be seeing Bonk’s origin right here! And maybe the purple-haired girl grew up to become Flare from The Legendary Axe or the mysterious assassin from The Legendary Axe II! It’s another point for the Grand Unified Theory of TurboGrafx games!

Most of all, I like Gonzo’s expression. You can see a determined grimace there in his beard, but a quicker glance makes it look like he has the smiling, noseless, innocent face of a Lego figure. I like that duality, even though Gonzo’s obviously not supposed to look upbeat. He knows that he faces a harsh task and perhaps a harsher return home. Should he survive his foray, he could come back to find that one of his children was snatched up by a Haast’s eagle, that his family was devoured by a sabertoothed tiger, or that his entire tribe was wiped out by an avalanche or some neighboring clan that just invented spears and genocide. But he can’t let anyone know that.

Interview: Fester's Quest

Fester’s Quest is a curious sight in the landscape of NES games based on movies and TV series. The Addams Family wasn’t particularly prominent during the late 1980s, and yet Sunsoft created a game all about it—and not just a predictable action game starring the members of Charles Addams’ macabre clan. No, Fester’s Quest is all about Uncle Fester fending off an alien invasion, with the rest of the family popping up to provide the pasty hero with potions, whips, and restorative vises.


That alone would mark Fester’s Quest as an oddity, but there’s more to its reputation. It's one of the toughest NES games around. Tougher than Battletoads. Tougher than Ninja Gaiden. Perhaps even tougher than that Captain Planet game. Fester can take only two hits (four if you uncover secret health boosts), enemies are relentless, and defeat sends Jackie Coogan’s finest television role back to the very start of the game. It vexed children of the NES era to no end, and many hate Fester’s Quest to this very day. I don’t think it’s a bad game, though. It feels a lot like the overhead sections of Blaster Master, and it has that sort of hyper-catchy music that Sunsoft always pulled off in their NES games. Plus it gave us this!

A lot about Fester’s Quest puzzled me, so I went to the source. Richard Robbins was the game’s producer (and pretty much its creator), while Michael Mendheim served as designer as well as the illustrator for the game’s cover (and over a dozen other game boxes). Both went on to more popular things: Robbins worked on the Desert Strike series and Crüe Ball, while Mendheim was part of Battle Tanx and the Army Men series. The two of them also crafted the cult classic Mutant League Football. In fact, Mendheim and others revived it this year—check out the website! Before all of this, though, they were the minds behind Fester’s Quest. 


Fester's Quest has a strange premise for a licensed game. How did Sunsoft decide to combine The Addams Family and an alien invasion? And why make Uncle Fester the hero?

Robbins: I had a dream, literally, for a game called "Uncle Fester's Playhouse." Pee-wee’s Playhouse was airing then. We came up with the alien idea as a quest, to save the family.


The Addams Family seems to have been a fairly quiet property in the late 1980s. Why did Sunsoft option it for a game? Did they get it as a package deal with Platoon?

Robbins:  I was a huge Addams Family fan. I called Charles Addams’ widow Lady Colyton literally at a chateau in France and started a dialog. It took many, many expensive long-distance calls and a sort of romancing to convince this regal lady to let us do a game. Lady Colyton kept talking about a movie deal, which I thought was a bunch of baloney at the time. The Japan folks at Sunsoft were extremely skeptical and gave me a real hard time. They really questioned who would care about this really old weird TV show.  

Three Irrelevant Things About The Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn turns twenty years old today, November 22. That’s going by the launch date in Japan and not the sudden and problematic American debut. But no matter where you pinpoint the console’s birth, it’s a favorite of mine.

The Saturn doesn't get enough credit. The poor thing trailed the Sony PlayStation for nearly its entire life, and Sega never recovered from the damage done there. I had a PlayStation first, and yes, I liked it a little better. But I also bought a Saturn and realized how underrated it was. The Saturn had excellent ports of Capcom and SNK arcade games. The Saturn had weird, cool little titles like Burning Rangers and Sakura Wars and the Panzer Dragoon series. The Saturn let you play import games with ease. The Saturn turned me into a bigger game geek than I had ever been before, and it made me enjoy that.


Plenty of websites took a look at the Saturn this week, and you’ll see no shortage of recommendations when it comes to the system’s best games. It’s easy to find a rundown of just about every notable Saturn release. And I don’t know if I could really say anything new if I just went on and on about Darkstalkers or Steamgear Mash or Last Bronx.

So I won’t. Instead I’ll discuss three things that I remember about the Saturn and its under-appreciated library. Not one of these things really mattered in making the Saturn a magnificent sleeper system, but they were important to me. That's what counts here.

Time of Eve-rors

Animation mistakes are inevitable. They’re also amusing. Some fans laughed over a braid whiffing through Elsa’s arm during that big musical number in Disney’s Frozen. Others got angry about it, and that was doubly hilarious. After all, such mistakes are everywhere, from gleaming cinematic treasures to those dollar-bin knockoff cartoons seemingly composted of nothing but animation mistakes. Mike Toole put up a column and a Tumblr dedicated to anime gaffes, and this feed shows us that you’ll find goofs in just about every big-budget animated film.

But hey, those little slip-ups seldom harm the story. A security guard’s misshapen arm or a magical schoolgirl’s chameleon eyes won’t confuse the audience that much. At most, a few kids might wonder why Brawn and Windcharger show up in the background of third-season Transformers episodes even though they died horrifically in the movie. Then their parents can explain that cartoons are not always perfect and shatter one key childhood illusion.

My favorite animation error comes in Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s Time of Eve, and it may be the only time that such a mistake altered the entire context of a scene.


Time of Eve, or Eve no Jikan, is a six-part series set in a future where androids can pretty much look human—so much so that they wear legally mandated hologram halos. The TV even runs commercials admonishing citizens not to fall in love with machines. Average teenager Rikuo notices some odd datestamps surrounding his family’s house-bot, Sammy, and he and his friend Misaki track the mystery to a café called Time of Eve. Inside, androids discard their halos and act like regular humans, leaving newcomers like Rikuo and Masaki unable to tell just who’s a robot and who’s a meatform. 

Cry On Over

No video game ever made me cry. Nope, not one. Many games get to me in some way, because I’m a big, sappy, hopeless mark when it comes to full-bore blasts of melodrama. Yet I have a hard time remembering any game, book, movie, song, comic, painting, sculpture, water ballet, or 15th-century Italian woodcut that’s brought me to tears. I suspect I’m just not built to sob over fiction and art. That part of me prefers that I just sulk around stunned and despondent.

I don’t think I would’ve wept over Cry On, but I wish I could’ve found out.

Making us weep was, believe it or not, the goal of Cry On. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi hoped that the game would make players cry, both in joy and sorrow, and so great was his ambition that he put it right there in the title. Cry On wasn’t a weird side project, either. Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio announced it for the Xbox 360 late in 2005, with publisher AQ Interactive and developer Cavia on board. Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu signed up for the soundtrack, the illustrations came from Drakengard artist Kimihiko Fujisaka, and the budget hovered around $8.5 million.

Cry On promised more than wailing and rending of garments, of course. Described as an action-RPG, it showed a world not that different from a rudimentary Final Fantasy spread of medieval mythic scenery speckled with airships and other machine anachronisms. Here humans live alongside Bogles, glazed golems that transform from small totemic statues to fearsome giants. A particularly intelligent Bogle partners with the game’s heroine, a young woman named Sally.

Players were to control Sally, but the Bogle may have been the real star. According to interviews, the little ceramic gremlin would ride on Sally’s shoulder as she explores and solves those environmental puzzles that every action game demands somehow. Yet the Bogle would transform into its larger incarnation, changing its general form each time, and it could accessorize itself with rubble and other debris. The Bogle would handle much of the fighting, though Sally does have that knife on her.

Halloween Moods

I wanted to do this for a good while.


Over the past month, Dinosaur Dracula readers have posted Halloween Mood Tables of all sorts. I liked the idea, but I didn’t have that much in the way of Halloween decorations or scary movies. So I improvised with Darkstalkers stuff and Ghosts 'N Goblins, and I stretched the definition of just what a scary movie means (I even used Titanic: The Animated Movie, which is scary in several ways). Here’s a less moody version if you want a better look at the accessories!

Happy Halloween, folks! Play Darkstalkers games if you got ‘em! And, uh, if you’re old enough.

Little Things: Ninja Combat

I remember it with perfect and disquieting clarity: a line from an early 1990s issue of GamePro. A writeup about a new arcade game stated “the all-girl round is imaginative, and it starts with a surprise that we can’t reveal here, but watch out! These women are MEAN!”

This evocation of feminine mystery must have lodged deep within my borderline-teenage brain, because it stayed with me long after I forgot even the title of the game it was talking about. I recalled only that it was some side-scrolling brawler, and the arcades of the 1990s practically used those to prop open doors and whack cockroaches. Well over a decade later, I remembered that curious phrase and finally figured out that it described Ninja Combat for the Neo Geo.

The second stage of Ninja Combat leads the player to a group of women menaced by the game’s generic ninja. They even call for help with a plaintive sound effect. And you, as the hero, clearly should rescue these women just as you would a kidnapped president.

Then comes the surprise. Once you advance, the terrified hostages reveal themselves to be disguised ninja women and attack you. I’m not sure why the Gamepro blurb connoted this as “mean,” but I'll say this much: it would have surprised my younger self. Hostages were a cliche in arcade games even back in 1991, but we were used to freeing them for bonus points, whether it was the children in Moonwalker or the stone-encased citizens of Black Tiger (all of whom were old men for some reason). It’s a tradition that lives on today in any arcade light-gun shooter where unfortunate civilians cringe and dash through zombie outbreaks or anti-terrorist firefights. These citizens are inevitably mowed down by unwary younger players, who learn that shooting the innocent costs soldiers or police officers only a chunk of life meter. Or a few weeks of paid leave until the investigation clears them.

Ninja Combat isn’t very good. It’s the sort of primitive arcade title that gave the Neo Geo a reputation for mediocre games costing $200 and lasting about forty-five minutes. Yet it’s not without some invention. Enemy mid-bosses become playable characters once defeated, the cutscenes have some hysterical acting, and the enemy ninja include such novelties as harpy ninja, fan ninja, and burly executioner ninja whose Klansman-like hoods weren’t changed to appease North American audiences.

Is there more to Ninja Combat's little joke about captive damsels in arcade brawlers? Is it subtly telling us that the concept of helpless, imperiled women pleading for rescue is an outdated and chauvinistic ideal, and that those who accept it do so to their ninja-swamped misfortune?

Probably not.

Rygarfield Returns

I'm afraid that Rygarfield has not yet emerged as this century’s hottest new comic strip. At first I didn’t know what the problem might be. It has everything kids like: video games, webcomics based on video games, and ironic Garfield humor. Then I realized what was wrong. Rygarfield had only one panel instead of the multi-panel format used by every good comic that isn't The Far Side!


Now Rygarfield is the complete work that it should have been at the start. It also delivers biting commentary about cats and the marginal secrets of old NES games. It's like Howard and Nester meets Heathcliff!

Good Box Art: Advance Wars

Remember when I used to write about awful box art? Well, I actually updated the old gallery with an entry on Wing of Alnam. Lots of people discuss bizarre game cover illustrations these days, but as far as I can tell, nobody's taken a crack at this one just yet. Besides, I enjoy pretending that the last ten years haven’t happened.

I also want to highlight good box art—the stuff that sells a game better than any panting laudatory quotes or pre-order gadgetry ever could. I’ll start, in no way alphabetically, with Intelligent Systems and Nintendo’s original Advance Wars.


Advance Wars is a game of jovial strategy, a game where little rounded helicopters and puttering tanks and squat, rifle-toting troops clash in big colorful battlefields. And the cover illustration captures it perfectly. Three young heroes commandeer a tank and rush into battle with such energy that the treads lift off the churned concrete. Andy, an Orange Star officer, mans the controls with a maniacal cartoon grin. It’s all a good taste of what’s inside Advance Wars.

Yet Advance Wars, like many outwardly cute video games, is rather depressing when you think about it too hard. The most disposable pieces of any Advance army, as Andore Jr. eloquently points out, are the humble soldiers in your basic infantry units, and at least a few of them are guaranteed death every time they rise to attack or defend. Advance Wars may be precious and gleeful, but it’s still about wars.

This brings me to my favorite part of the cover. Andy may brim with gusto as he guns that tank toward victory, but his companions don’t. Max wears a look of grim caution, while Sami stares numbly before her. Because they know.

Darkstalkers Redirection

Sometimes I have to ask myself why I have a set of Darkstalkers novelty head-wings. The answer is complicated.

It’s exactly what it looks like: a promotional Darkstalkers Resurrection band that you can wrap around your head like a Burger King crown. The bat-wings imitate the headgear of Morrigan, as she’s the focus of the Resurrection art and the main character of the series. Darkstalkers is notable in that respect. Street Fighter and Guilty Gear and Tekken and most other major fighting games deem men their iconic leads, but Darkstalkers has Morrigan. I suspect that's because she usually looks ready to spill out of her demon-lady costume if someone so much as pats her on the back, but hey, small victories.

Capcom gave away these bat-crowns at conventions back in 2012. They had just announced Darkstalkers Resurrection, a collection of the two best games in Capcom’s monster-fighter series, and so they put together a large booth for the game. It was a fine time to like Darkstalkers, as I certainly do. Resurrection was a great repackaging of the series, and Capcom strongly implied that they’d make an all-new Darkstalkers if the reissue did well enough.

A little blot of dread grew in me. As excited as I was at the promise of a new Darkstalkers, I suspected that Resurrection wouldn’t do so well and that Capcom wouldn’t make much Darkstalkers merchandise beyond this little strip of paper that looks vaguely like a crab's maw if you view it from behind. So I resolved to save mine. I made sure I that I got it home in one piece, and I didn’t try wearing it at the convention, even though that would’ve given me a shot at winning a free download of Resurrection (I was content to buy the game twice, once on Xbox Live and again on the PlayStation Network). I would not tarnish so wonderful an artifact with my slovenly nerd-brow.

I was right. Horribly, horribly right. Resurrection didn't sell nearly well enough to begin a new golden age of Darkstalkers, and Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono, who for years claimed “Darkstalkers are not dead,” is now a shade more taciturn about the subject. Yet Capcom still keeps Darkstalkers alive with artbooks, this poster set, and suggestively posed Morrigan statues that I wouldn’t put on my shelf. So the series will survive as long as fans lurk in the wastelands of Resurrection’s online lobbies or needlessly remind people that Morrigan is a succubus and not a vampire. They’re keeping the faith, and so am I.

Drakengard 3: Four

Drakengard 3 arrived last month. It’s a very strange game, abusive and self-mocking and technically graceless. It’s a monster that won me over in ways I never expected. It’s a lot of things, but it’s most clearly a portrait of Zero, a goddess-like Intoner who goes around a twisted medieval Europe and murders her deified sisters with a mixture of vicious abandon and blasé cruelty. I’ve talked at length about just what Drakengard 3 did to me, and it’s time for an addendum about one of the game’s more interesting characters. She’s not who you might think.

Four is the least threatening among Zero’s numerically named sisters, all of whom decided to rule the world and rather rudely didn't invite Zero. We meet them when Zero attacks their city stronghold. One is the rational leader, Two is cheerful, Three is spookily distracted, and Five is hedonistic to no end. Four seems the most reluctant to fight; during an initial free-for-all with Zero, Four pleads for her sister to reconsider such violent rebellion. Later in the game, Four is the second victim in Zero’s conveniently numbered murder spree. En route to a mountain fortress, Zero tells her companions that Four is an uptight virgin and that “deep down, she’s evil.”


If Four’s evil, we don’t see it in the prime stretch of Drakengard 3. Upon confronting Zero, Four again begs her to stop and proclaims how highly she thinks of the murderous Intoner. So great is Four’s faith in her sister that she’s even willing to fall for a blatant and deadly ruse. Later, as the game’s timeline unravels into chaos and paradoxes, Four reappears as a lunatic, driven mad by the ominous floral entity that birthed all of the Intoners. She’s a piteous sacrifice, hiding in poorly concocted innocence and a mess of happy, Zero-centered memories that aren’t even real.

For a look into Four’s true depths, one must venture beyond the central game. The short stories available on the Drakengard 3 website introduce Four as a teetering stack of neuroses. Traveling with her sisters (minus Zero), Four worries about her sibling Intoners, mends their clothes, tries to keep a borrowed house clean…and then explodes into a room-wrecking fury and seethes with hate for her family. And herself most of all.

Dark Matters

[The following article discusses rape and other forms of sexual assault as they are depicted in video games. Please avoid reading further if this subject upsets you.]

Video games seldom take a responsible tone when addressing rape. It’s rare to see a title acknowledge sexual assault as anything more than an exploitative dash, a cheap, nasty surprise for a vulnerable and usually female character. It’s a brilliant package deal for the careless writer beleaguered with demands for maturity. What better way to paint a villain as instantly loathsome, stoke the player’s righteous fury, and elevate your game above the childish superficialities of past eras! After all, trashy films, sleazy anime, and execrable comics with titles like Stormfang Saga do it, so why shouldn't video games?

The latest such attempt is in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. It drops the elder of the saga’s two Snake operatives into a secret American military compound, from which he must rescue operatives Paz and Chico. Along the way, the player can uncover recordings of the game’s villain, Skullface, torturing the prisoners. Both Paz and Chico are raped. Chico is forced to rape Paz. The audio log concludes with Skullface and his surgeon planting two explosive devices in Paz—the second one apparently hidden in her vagina. Should you doubt this, the scene provides the squelching, visceral sounds of a bomb going somewhere it probably shouldn’t.

This may be the most horrifying of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima’s uses of rape, but it sure isn’t the first. The original Metal Gear Solid strongly implies that Meryl is sexually assaulted during Revolver Ocelot’s torture sequence, the second game finds once-laughable nerd Otacon confessing that his stepmother raped him, the third has some disturbing notes about undercover agent Eva, and Metal Gear Solid 4 luridly mixes sexuality and trauma into The Beauty and the Beast Corps. The entire Metal Gear Solid web weaves together grim realities and goofy fourth-wall assaults, and Kojima’s infusion of radio-drama rape and vagina disploda is both, entwining the absurd and the horrific.

Kojima is no lone provocateur. Numerous other games trot out rape scenes with all the care of a backhandedly misogynistic romance novel, a torture-porn flick, or the Raveonettes’ “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed).” You can find it callously applied in Heavy Rain’s TV-movie interludes, F.E.A.R. 2’s finale, and just about any game where a female character’s backstory boils down to “she was raped” and little else.

Is that all video games can do? Do any of them treat the subject with a modicum of respect?

Introducing Rygarfield

You know what’s wrong with webcomics? They just don't have broad appeal. Name any webcomic, and you can find a great mass of people who hate it or, worse yet, ignore it.

Fortunately, I have devised a new project to scale magnificent heights in online comedy and profit. It is a webcomic that no one could shun, a webcomic that fuses the Internet’s boundless affection for old video games with the proven success of one of the past century’s most marketable characters. I call it Rygarfield.


Rygarfield is available for syndication, merchandising, and whatever funding you might care to send me. Feel free to make ROM hacks and memes about Rygarfield, so long as you credit me and pay me royalties. And if anyone points out that Rygarfield is a blatant arrogation of copyrighted material, tell them it’s OK under the doctrine of fair use. Just don’t tell them to look up what the doctrine of fair use actually means.

Be sure to check back for regular Rygarfield comics about sarcasm, dog abuse, and that weird, unreachable door in the water just above Dorago's lair!

Off-Kilter Instinct

I’d like to talk about Killer Instinct and B. Orchid. Really.

I admire Killer Instinct in a strange historical capacity. It’s not the reluctant fondness I have for the considerably trashier BloodStorm. It’s more of a distant appreciation for the way the original Killer Instinct summarizes all of the trends that video games toyed with in the mid-1990s. It’s a fighting game, of course, and it has plastic-looking computer-rendered graphics, profuse guitar licks, comical violence, preposterous sexism, an announcer squawking excitedly about BLASTER COMBOS, and a lineup of stereotypes exploiting everything from the Predator to Jurassic Park. And all of this came from Nintendo, who by then was sick and tired of Sega pretending to be the more daring game-industry titan.

If you want to experience a good game from 1995, play Chrono Trigger, Full Throttle, Panzer Dragoon, or Metal Warriors. If you want to experience what most games were really like in 1995, play Killer Instinct.

B. Orchid is part of that, of course. Her design is an amalgamation of every unfortunate stereotype inflicted on women by that decade’s video games. She gallivants around in a skin-tight suit with “HOT” on the side, moans provocatively during her post-fight footage, and, for a “No Mercy” move, whips open her top and shocks her male opponents into cardiac arrest. Yet there was a time when people were hopeful about B. Orchid.


The above profile comes from a 1994 issue of Nintendo Power. I can sympathize with the writer who had to find good things to say about Orchid, looking as she does like some hideous 1960s Eastern European knockoff of a Barbie doll. In a bout of vague optimism, Nintendo Power suggests that Orchid will change the way female characters are portrayed in video games. In hindsight, the kindest view of Orchid is that she didn’t influence such depictions one way or the other, that she was a symptom and not a catalyst.

Little Things: Kid Kool

Some mysteries are compelling not because they’re important, but because they’re so weirdly insignificant. For one example, consider the king’s butler in the awkward and rampantly detested Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs. He's a miniscule oddity in a lousy old NES game, and that makes the enigma itch all the more.

Kid Kool’s interminable story sequences introduce only four characters: the ailing king, his butler, the titular Kid Kool, and, in the best endings, a princess. The butler doesn’t serve much of a purpose beyond rattling off the details of Kool’s herb-gathering mission and announcing the hero’s demise. The latter happens a lot in Kid Kool, because Kid Kool despises everyone who plays it.

But it isn't the butler's dialogue that's puzzling. It’s his appearance. His haircut, glasses, and snaggletoothed nerd visage clash with the King’s Garfield-like appearance and the mundane anime-kid design of Kool and the princess. And why do his shorts clearly say “T YAN”?

It all suggests that the butler is a caricature of someone, possibly this T. Yan individual. But who could that be?

The most obvious explanation would be that the butler is a leftover joke from Kid Kool’s original Japanese version, Kakefu-Kun no Jump Tengoku: Speed Tengoku. It was a vehicle for Kenji “Kakefu-kun” Sagara, a popular child actor in Japan during the late 1980s. Vic Tokai’s Americanization of the game replaced his Hanshin Tigers baseball cap with a spiky coiffure and changed his name to the less expensive Kid Kool, but the other characters were left alone. One clue crops up in the Japanese credits: the butler’s name is listed as “Dirty Echigoya.” It also lists the king’s name as Nioccory V of Poconioccory and his daughter as Josephine Nioccory, and I have no idea what that might mean.

Yet I think I know who T.Yan is.