The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
(grumble grumble… stupid WordPress…)
PES is an acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop motion animator. They’ve done terrific work. One of their videos is game-related, and additionally references classic-era arcade games. Have a look (1½ minutes):
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.
Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.
This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):
Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:
I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.
It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.
I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.
I’ve lamented how Atari Games shut down lots of interesting prototypes over their operation because they didn’t perform well on test, or maybe other reasons.
Well other game companies did it too, and one was Mylstar, a.k.a. Gottlieb, the makers of Q*Bert and a number of other classics. I found out about a very interesting little game called Wiz Warz that I’d have loved to have found in a classic arcade (if I had been able to visit many classic arcades back then). Insert Coin has a nice demonstration of it (9½ minutes). It’s kind of like Tempest, but you can fire at any direction into the playfield, and there’s lots of other unique elements too. We’re still in a low effort mode this weekend, so have a look, and speculate about a game that could have been.
What a weird game Nicole Express has dug up, an excellent example of how interconnected video gaming can be, in unexpected ways.
The Legend of Makai is a 1988 arcade game from Jaleco, developed by NMK. NMK made a variety of games around that time, but one especially notable thing they did was publish a Famicom game in Japan called Densetsu no Kishi Elrond, which is a slightly modified version of Rare’s Wizards & Warriors. It’s no bootleg: it was licensed from them for release.
This is getting off the track a bit, but Elrond is one of those games where the changes are minimal, but what was changed is extremely interesting, since rarely will you have so a clear an example of what the publisher’s priorities are. In the Japanese version the level order has been rearranged, and your knight hero has only one life, but does have a numeric counter for their health, and by collecting health-granting meat you can increase your life total above its initial maximum.
Wizards & Warriors is one of those games that’s fallen into the classic gaming netherworld. Its publisher Acclaim no longer exists, and Rare has little connection with Nintendo these days, so while it’s possible to play it officially these days (as part of Rare Replay), it’s missing from most of the prominent avenues in which classic NES games have been kept playable, like the Wii and Wii-U Virtual Consoles, the NES Mini and Nintendo Switch Online. Back on the NES W&W was rather popular; its hero Kuros actually got a cartoon rendition as part of the cartoon segments of the game show Video Power (there he’s a generic barbarian who speaks in thees and thous forsooth, and has no armor). His second and third adventures were developed for Rare by the legendary Pickford Bros. But now, the series is gone, and probably will never be revived.
So why do I bring up Wizards & Warriors, a British game, in an article about The Legend of Makai? Because as Nicole points out, The Legend of Makai is a arcade game made by W&W’s Japanese publisher, and it has many things in common with Wizards & Warriors that can’t be coincidental.
Hardcore Gaming 101 also noticed the similarities. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what went on there (maybe someone who can read Japanese can look through old magazines from the time?), but in one of those twists of fate, it’s easier to legally play The Legend of Makai now than Wizards & Warriors, for it’s been released through Arcade Archives (Switch, PS4), while W&W has to be sought out through Rare Replay, or else on the original cartridge.
Finding this one was a real treat for me. I’m so pleased that there are still people who care deeply about these weird arcade/console hack & slash games from a twice-defunct publisher. While in its final years it got renamed to “Midway Games West,” it’ll always be Atari Games in my mind, and that’s what it rightfully should be called, it having had a direct lineage to the first successful arcade video game manufacturer of all.
Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the last of the “real” Gauntlet games (it’s best not to talk about Seven Sorrows), and is especially notable to have received something of a redesign when it came out on consoles. I don’t think the changes were all for the better; the make work of collecting crystals and stuff does not substantively add to the game, but there are some nice additions, like extra class magic effects, poisonable food and destructable items (they’re nice in game design terms, that doesn’t have to mean nice to the player).
The Youtube account Jess & Zac arguably likes the Gauntlet games even more than I do. In a 27-minute video, they give 100 little-known facts about G:DL. Just knowing someone else cares so deeply about the games was enough for me; the information that fans have made updates for the game to fix bugs is even better. I should seek that patch out! I’m entitled, or should be: I own a copy of the game on Gamecube! Also, the N64 and Dreamcast versions of Legends! Me and friends in college played so much of N64 Gauntlet Legends….
That video’s pretty short. They also have a much longer video (1 hour 27 minutes) that rates all 60 maps of Gauntlet Dark Legacy. That one’s rather more obsessive, but it’s not like I’m any strange to video game obsession (Rampart), and it’s a game that isn’t talked about nearly enough these days, at least within my hearing. They’re in order from worst to best, so maybe skip through to the end? Up to you.
I personally think Dark Legacy is a little too long. Gauntlet Legends, its predecessor, is thematically tighter, DL’s extra characters aren’t differentiated enough from the originals, and in the arcade it took many more quarters to get through DL. But I’ve played through both games, and I’d do it again. They’re a little mindless, but less mindless than they seem at first.
I wish Atari Games had stayed in business and allowed to keep iterating and improving on the Gauntlet games, and not closed by stupid corporate cost-cutting. The United States relies on corporations for so much of its creative presence, but regularly destroys huge portions of its culture due to being judged by clueless moneypeople who are way to sure of themselves. It’s a problem that other countries suffer from too, but no where else is it so bad. The US just decided that the skill and thought that all of Atari’s people, who had worked much of their lives making games, didn’t matter. It’s a damn crying shame, and it’s far from the only time it’s happened.
LordBBH has a most excellent website, of the style that those/old of us remember fondly, made out of plain hand-coded HTML scrolling down the finite-length page, with images and writing. Like |tsr’s classic NES site, and Gaming Hell’s current one. (A lot of the pages from our list of great gaming sites are like that!) Some days I fantasize about remaking Set Side B in that style, but we’re daily, I’m not the only one who posts here, and I don’t think Josh Bycer would appreciate it if I suddenly decreed that he write posts in raw HTML. Maybe some other time, or for some other site….
LordBBH is on Bluesky, but is taking a break from all social media right now, which proves his great wisdom and power. His site is still online, and hosts descriptions and information on several old arcade games, which as we all know are the best descriptions and information. One of them is on an SNK arcade game from the early days of the NeoGeo, The Super Spy.
The Super Sky is of a small field of three arcade games, NeoGeo first-person brawlers. It wasn’t too popular when released, but its two followups, Crossed Swords and Crossed Swords II, did considerably better. You can think of them as like Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! series, but less pattern-basis, more scaling, and fighting more opponents at once.
In The Super Spy, you’re the titular uber-agent. You know karate, and can also box, and you take your lethal hands and feet (and a knife and a pistol too) against enemy terrorists in a series of three settings. It’s behind-the-back first-person yes, but you can’t rotate your perspective; you’re always facing north. An array of icons at the upper-right corner of the screen show which directions you can move in, and it’s the only indication if you can go south, or “down.” There’s at least one secret passage in the game that’s hidden that way.
You have an array of moves that would make Little Mac proud, including multiple kinds of punchse, but also kicks and slashes and shots. Each building you explore is swarming with enemies, fist guys, ninjas, mini-bosses, bosses, and exactly one woman, who you know SNK’s team of graphics creators were very normal about.
It’s easy to make fun of The Super Spy, but LoadBBH asks us to take it seriously, and while it’s quite unfair in places he makes a strong case that it’s worth your time. He’s written one of my favorite kinds of web pages about it, and I recommend you taking a look of you like weird arcade games. Go, go! And hover the mouse over images on the site to read entertaining alt text about each one!
The title of the video makes it sound like feds crashing an illegal gaming establishment or something, but instead, it’s a number of people who discovered an abandoned house with a bunch of arcade games in it! And they didn’t crash it uninvited, but instead, once they figured out it existed, they contacted the Mayor’s office of the nearby town, discovered that the property had fallen into the town’s ownership, and arranged to purchase the machines from them. So, a happy ending! (34 minutes)
Well, mostly happy. Some of the machines had been stolen in the meantime, and some of them weren’t in great shape. The Centipede they tried to rescue fell apart. But they did manage to obtain a real classic, an Atari Food Fight, one of the arcade games designed by GCC, who also hacked together Ms. Pac-Man for Bally/Midway, and Quantum, also for Atari. It’s overall a nice story, as these machines aren’t getting any younger.
The video concludes with gameplay of the two rescuers competing against each other at Food Fight, and one of them managed to trigger a full-length Instant Replay, playing the complete (I believe) Instant Replay music, which is rarely heard since it gets trimmed to the length of the play, and requires waiting out nearly the entire timer to hear it!
Lots of arcade machines have boring manuals, full of schematics, operator settings and assembly instructions, and nothing else. The manual for Bally/Midway’s Wizard of Wor machine has some other information, including a fairly complete play description including inner details of how the monsters are generated and how levels get harder, and a listing of all the phrases the game’s voice synth uses during play.
There was recently an upload of 2,000 arcade manuals to the Internet Archive (as reported by Jason Scott on his Bluesky account, although he’s also on Mastodon, twice apparently), and that’s where I found the manual for Wizard of Wor.
Some quotes (italics are mine):
“When you have reached dungeons eight and above, you have become a Worlord. Now you have the honor of testing your skill in the Worlord dungeons. These dungeons are much tougher, there are fewer walls and more open spaces. If even one shot misses, and travels the long distance down to the opposite wall, a monster wiii very likely come up and gobble you down. Finding and establishing yourself in solid strategic positions is very difficult. It is easy to have several worriors chomped up in a row. Sometimes the monsters will line up along one edge of the maze — a lovely parade. However, if just one monster starts approaching from the top, watch out!” (page 11)
“The Wizard of Wor loves to hear the patter of little feet running through his dungeons. So he created some lovely beasties, known as Worlings. Burwor is beautiful, bouncing blue. Six of them exist on each dungeon level. They always remain visible. This is because the Wizards favorite color is blue. As each Burwor is shot, a Garwor may come to take his place. Garwor is kind of overfed, and waddles a bit, but he has yellow scales that are just delicate. As Garwors are shot, Thorwors are teleported in to take their place. Thorwor is sleek and dangerous red.” (page 11)
“The Wizard of Wor: Even at a young age, the Wizard showed promise in the mystic arts. But it took many dangerous encounters and many years of research and study to sharpen his skills to his current high level. Over the centuries, the Wizard has retained his chaotic sense of humor, much to the chagrin of worriors entering his dungeons (see the list of phrases).” (page 12)
And some of the phrases spoken by the Wizard during the game, spoken by the synth:
Blaster Master, Sunsoft’s English localization of Japan’s Metafight, turns out to have an unreleased arcade version for the Vs. Unisystem. The Unisystem was substantially Famicom/NES hardware with some changes, so it makes sense that there were once plans to make an arcade version.
No known public copies exist, and I don’t think any ROM dumps have been released. The sole record of its existence may be a video (8 minutes) on the Youtube channel of higenekodo:
They have more videos on their channel than this one, including one of another possibly-unreleased Unisystem adaption of a Sunsoft Famicom game, the Wing of Madoola (16 minutes):
Both games have added scoring systems and other changes to adapt them for arcade play. Without ROM dumps though, we can’t know the full extent of the changes. Wing of Madoola seems to have been given an English localization, and had Gauntlet-ish timed health loss added to prevent player stalling, but it’s not known what changes were made to Blaster Master’s play to keep them moving. Blaster Master was also made less free-roaming: once you defeat the boss of an area and collect the powerup, the player is taken directly to the entrance of the next area, and each area begins with a map screen giving an overview of the area. And collected vehicle weapons appear in the corner of the screen, which suggests that the pause screen was removed.
I love hearing about games being adapted in design to meet different needs, like arcade play, and I’d love to try these modified versions some day to see what other changes were planned. Maybe they’ll come to light, eventually. I can only hope.
(EDIT: I’m reminded that AOC is a representative, not a Senator. Which is like, lol, if you care about facts or something. Still I’ve corrected it.)
We don’t post about politics much here. This is entirely not because it might drive people away, but it is because much of the rest of the internet is full of it, and we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, and the terrible consequences if the wrong person (you know who he is) wins in the US in just a week. Anyway, many of our readers aren’t even in the US, and to all of you, I say, I envy you.
But a weird bit of news came out involving Kamala Harris’* VP** candidate Tim Walz that both edges into our lane and is an excuse to talk about something I’ve long been wanting to remark upon, about Sega’s classic arcade racing-game-but-not Crazy Taxi.
(* For non US-people: Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President in 2024. **”VP” stands for Vice President, a largely ceremonial role, but should something happen to the President, the Vice President becomes the new President.)
I’ve played a lot of Crazy Taxi. I played a lot of Crazy Taxi 2 as well. I had a Dreamcast, for the brief period it existed, and they were unquestionably great games for that system, with amazing (if Youtube-unfriendly) soundtracks. Well as it turns out Tim Walz has great taste in games, because back then he had a Dreamcast too, and he had Crazy Taxi for it. And he streamed a few minutes of it, with terrific Democratic*** House Representative**** Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
(***”Democratic” refers to the Democratic Party, the US’s left-ish party that currently serves as our feeble bulwark against the hooting forces of awfulness that beset our entire world. ****”House Representative” means a member of the House of Repesentatives, one of the US’s two Legislative Houses. That concludes the US civics portion of our post.)
Most of the stream was taken up with playing Madden, which isn’t in one of our more favored categories, but the five minutes of Crazy Taxi were posted to Walz’s Youtube channel:
I am conflicted about this video. Walz is one of the most personable people ever to be nominated for high office, a genuinely friendly individual. But he isn’t a great Crazy Taxi player. And it might be because he doesn’t know how to do a maneuver called a “Crazy Dash.”
(Let me say now: I don’t even appreciate making jokes that sound like “he’s bad at gaemz lol im voting for other guy,” the stakes are way too high for me to be able to laugh at that. Just, keep it in your hat/purse/gender neutral container, please.)
But this reminded me of something I’ve thought about for a long time, and was driven (heh) home to me over DragonCon this year. There was a Crazy Taxi machine there, at stand-up model, I think with a slightly flaky gas pedal, that made it unreliable to perform Crazy Dashes.
A Crazy Dash is simple to perform once you know how. From a halt, with the gear shift in Reverse, in quick succession shift to Drive and slam the gas pedal. If the timing is right, your car will lurch forward with a burst of speed. And if you do this while driving, shifting to Reverse with foot off the gas, then shifting to Drive and flooring it with the same timing as a Dash, it’s called a “Limiter Cut,” and you get an even greater burst of speed!
Crazy Dashes and Limiter Cuts are essential to even slightly good games of Crazy Taxi, which is why the sit down version of the game puts instructions for how to do them on the control panel, why the Dreamcast version’s manual explains precisely how to do them, and why at least one of the squares in the “Crazy Box” challenge mode is all about teaching you how to perform them. It’s what I’ve come to think of as gatekeeper knowledge: it guards the way to good scores and long games. If you don’t know it, you’re doomed to fail.
Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. Even on the Dreamcast, it’s just a direct port of the arcade version with added modes. Arcade games want your money, and they don’t want to give you very long games in exchange for it, so the next player can step up and put in their doomed quarters as well. But the catch is, if good players can’t have decently-playing games, then people won’t play. I heard it said that the average target game length was 90 seconds, and average means a substantial number of games will come in under that mark.
Yet, I can play Crazy Taxi for substantially longer than 90 seconds. I can go for 30 minutes. And it’s thanks in part to the Crazy Dash and the Limiter Cut, essential knowledge for the reckless cabbies of Faux San Francisco.
Because of the DragonCon Crazy Taxi machine’s flaky gas pedal, I didn’t have any 30 minute games there. But I did manage to make the scoreboard, barely, at 20th place, with a score of just over $5,000, getting (by the inflated metrics of its scoring system) a Class S license. Thing is, I must have watched a dozen other people play the game at DragonCon this year (the arcades there are always super packed), and none of them came close even to my meager score. Because none of them knew how to do a Crazy Dash. It was a stand-up cabinet, which didn’t have that sticker explaining how to do one.
That’s what I mean by gatekeeper information: it’s literally One Weird Trick to stellar Crazy Taxi scores and game times. Once you know how to do it your journey isn’t over, in fact I think that’s where the game starts to get really interesting, and my highest scores on the easiest difficulty are nearly $70K. But if you don’t know how to at least do a Crazy Dash, you will never get a good game of Crazy Taxi, you just have no chance. You’ll just waste too much time accelerating from a stop, and you’ll have to stop frequently to let off customers and pick up new ones. Its just how it’s designed.
What amazes me is that Crazy Taxi was a hit, it did very well in arcades and on Dreamcast, and yet still most players never learn this information. And in a way, and understand that I’m uncomfortable with this conclusion, that’s for the best? Like how a crane game set to reflex towards a target winning percentage will be more likely not to drop a piece of plush if a lot of players have recently lost, so too are all those players losing quickly at CT allowing the designers to guard half-hour games behind a simple maneuver that, still, few players will ever bother learning. The alternative is to make the trick harder, or even not to have one, dooming everyone, the casual and the dedicated, to those pitiful 90-second games. That’s capitalism for you.
Which shows, I guess, that the illusion of being able to do better is more important to arcade game success than reality? I don’t know, I’m uncomfortable talking about illusions in a post that started out mentioning politics. But hey, Tim Walz! If you read this and want some Crazy Taxi tips, reach out! And good luck in November, please help Kamala Harris to send That Other Person as far away from public office as possible.
Once you start thinking of it in terms of gatekeeper knowledge, you start seeing it everywhere. One-hit kill action games are full of it, since the first time you encounter any enemy, it’s likely to behave in some way that will kill you. The best action games will try to have an enemy demonstrate unexpected behavior at least once before it’s likely to be fatal. And any time a game kills your character out of basic unfairness, like from a sudden unavoidable death trap, that’s gatekeeper info.
UFO 50, for all its greatness, does this a lot. The very first game in the collection, Barbuta, has an instant death laughably close to the start. Some of its games feel like a sequence of deaths you have to experience, each at least once, before you’re allowed to win. But it’s far from unique in this, and in presenting itself as the history of a fictional 80s developer, it could be argued that it’s mirroring the development of game design at the time.