Tag: culture

Blade & Bastard, the (recent) Wizardry Manga

One recent thing I learned is that Wizardry, the CRPG series began in 1981, that hasn’t seen a new version from its creators since 2001, not only has seen Japanese sequels that faithfully follow the original style, but starting in 2022 and continuing today is a manga faithfully set in Wizardry’s world, called Blade & Bastard. It’s so faithful that it bears the Wizardry logo on its cover, looking similar to how it did on the 1981 Apple II box. Some logos get updated over the years, but classic computer CRPGs tend to keep theirs for the long haul.

Reading it legally at the moment, in English, isn’t possible. There is a version that can be found on Amazon, but don’t be fooled: despite its relatively large filesize, it turns out that’s just text, and each volume is pretty short, like, around 30 pages short. There are websites where you can find fan-made scanlations of the manga. I won’t link to them, but they’re not hard to find. My suggestion, if you’re interested in reading it, is to use them for now, and get the official translations of the manga when they arrive. Signs seem to indicate they may be coming in October.

I’ve not read enough to know where the story is heading, but currently it’s seemed to mostly cover the basics of dungeon exploration life. Iarumas was a corpse found sealed in a part of the dungeon that shouldn’t have had human visitors. Revived at the Temple of Cant, he (as seems common for fantasy anime and manga protagonists and JRPG heroes alike) has no memory of his past life. He makes a living bringing dead adventurers back to the temple and getting a portion of their revival fee, which is a nice nod to one of the unique aspects of classic Wizardry.

He soon picks up a couple of other party members. Most descriptions I’ve seen fixate on “Garbage,” a girl found being used as bait by dungeon monsters, who is a fierce and strong Fighter-type but talks and acts like a dog, but she mostly seems to be in it for comedy. The actual protagonist seems to be Raraja, a kid thief who had been paid to try to use a magic item to attack Iarumas in the dungeon, but the item in fact teleported both of them. The kid joins the party because, as a thief, he’s the only one who can meaningfully interact with treasure chests in the dungeon.

Garbage-chan enjoys meat

They also meet the “All-Stars,” the most popular adventuring group in town, a group of high-level characters who originally found Iarumas’ mummified body.

The connections to classic Wizardry are many:

  • It faithfully uses the spell names from the games and their purposes, to the extent that it adds a bit extra to a couple of scenes if you know what the spells are.
  • The Temple of Cant is in operation and just as money-grubbing as they are in the games.
  • The MURMUR CHANT PRAY INVOKE messages are alluded to when a character is revived in the early pages.
  • Dead bodies who aren’t revived turn into ash. The priest character says this means God has decided they’ve lived a good-enough life, but they take their fee all the same. In the manga story, being ashed is the end, but in the games recovery from ash is possible, but at double the cost, and if it fails too the character is gone entirely.
  • Iarumas maps out the dungeon on graph paper!
He also uses the Jeweled Amulet here, which in the games can be used to cast DUMAPIC at will
  • The characters mostly keep to their class abilities, but some are obviously multi-classed; Iarumas, for instance, seems to currently be a ninja, but he must have picked up some spells in a previous class.
  • A bishop character identifies items, because if they have them identified at the trading post there’d be no profit, because the identification fee is the same as the sale price.
  • The trading post is run by an elf named Catrob, which is a reversal of Boltac the dwarf, who owns the trading posts throughout the early Wizardry games.
  • The Ninja is named “Hawkwind,” a reference to a character in Wizardry IV. (They may also be one of the pre-mades in Wizardry I, but I haven’t managed to get it running to check.)
  • Being teleported into solid rock is mentioned at one point.
  • Characters seem to be aware of alignment, and experience levels.
  • Iarumas seems to be a character who’s a holdover from the Apple II era of Wizardry, because he sees the dungeon in wireframe!
This is a great visual joke for anyone who’s seen the originals

I hope an official translation of the manga comes out before long, because I’m rather looking forward to reading it!

It was brought up by ChurchHatesTucker on Mastodon that this isn’t even the first Wizardry manga, there was one in 2009 called, in the way of manga, Wizardry Zeo. It was considered a “shounen” manga, for a target audience of young teen boys. How many teenagers in Japan were playing Wizardry in 2009, I wonder?

And there were even one or two earlier that that, called Wizardry and/or Wizardry Gaiden. There were Wizardry Gaiden games in Japan, which were alternate scenarios using the same rules but with different mazes and story, and this/these may have been a spinoff of that/those.

Pac-Store Animations with “Pac-Marie”

If it’s generally entertaining, I try to save game-related animations and cartoons for Sundays, but this is probably interesting more for how it illustrates how the Pac-Man propery is changing. Yes, it’s another excuse to rant a bit about how Pac-Man’s lore is changing under Namco’s direction, like in the Baby Pac-Man post!

I recognize that Bally/Midway’s taking the lead on Pac-Man promotion and lore amounted to a bit of cultural chauvinism. In the early 80s, U.S. licensors of Japanese arcade games would outright put their own copyright notices on games. When I was a kid and Pac-Man fever was running at 104 degrees (Fahrenheit), I knew that Bally/Midway was a thing that existed, but nothing at all about Namco. They filled that widespread ignorance of the game’s origins with their own lore, starting with Ms. Pac-Man, and it’s surprising that now, long after their deal was dissolved and Midway games division consumer games division shut down, that their lore survived for so long.

Tengen’s first release of Pac-Man for NES, with Hanna-Barbera cartoon character designs. Image scavenged from an Ebay listing.

A lot of that has to do with the enduring popularity of Ms. Pac-Man. Other Bally contributions like Jr. Pac-Man haven’t proven nearly so enduring. Another part of the U.S. Pac-Man lore, that has ended up exerting a strong, almost unhealthy, influence over their property has been the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, yes the one almost no one remembers except for its weird Christmas special, from 1982. That thing got two seasons, alongside likewise forgotten (and less durable) properties Richie Rich and The Little Rascals. H-B’s version of the characters continues to pop up randomly in different places, like the cover art for the original version of Tengen’s release of Pac-Man for NES.

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a strong influence over the art design and music of Pac-Land, which means among other things that that weird cartoon is now echoed in Smash Bros. Ultimate. Shh! No one tell Warner Bros!

Okay, time to spiral on down to the point of this post. A “pop-up store,” it seems, is a “retail concept” that involves setting up a small store for a limited period of time, often with a strong theme or a focus on a single brand. Kind of like a micro-sized version of Spirit Halloween.

Namco experimented with a Pac-Man-themed pop-up store in Japan in 2016. They called it “Pac-Store,” and they came up with its own idiosyncratic take on the Pac-Man lore for it, and made a series of short web cartoons to promote it. They’re still on Youtube, but they’re collected into one video by The Pac-Man Archive. That’s what is embedded below. Even though it’s mostly in Japanese you should watch a few minutes of it, if just to see how Namco has retconned the history of the hungry yellow sphere.

Like gag me with a spoon, it’s Pac-Marie! I love the Pac-gloves on this style of character.
From Ghostly Adventures: Pac-Man and friends who I don’t even care enough about to learn their names. UGH. That’s a lot of detail spent on the idea of Pac-shoes. Image from Gamespot.

Pac-Man has two assistants, but they’re not Ms. Pac-Man or Baby or Jr. They don’t even have “Pac-Mom,” Namco’s more-recent recreation of Ms. Pac that isn’t burdened by AtGames’ licensing with Ms. Pac-Man creator GCC. Instead, Pac is backed by “Pac-Marie” and “Pac-Little.” Keep in mind that the horrible “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” TV show was released around 2013, and its characters got unfortunately crammed into at least one iteration of Pac-Man Museum (the one I have on Steam). It’s interesting that they didn’t use those for Pac-Store. Maybe Namco was already coming to realize that Ghostly Adventures was destined for purgatory.

I actually don’t hate Pac-Marie, she’s got a fun design, and it’s not like Pac-People have much to distinguish them anyway. She’s still a hell of a lot more appealing than anything from Ghostly Adventures.

Pac-Store – All Animated Shorts (Youtube 8 1/2 minutes)

Don’t make her angry. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

Lode Runner on the Web

Commodore 64 graphics set

This one is going back to my Metafilter posting history. In case you’re unfamiliar with Lode Runner, I really have to give a short history and primer.

Lode Runner was a game released in 1983 for the Apple II home computer, although ports for several other machines were soon developed and released. Created by the late Douglas E. Smith, it asked players to maneuver through 150 levels of caverns and structures, collecting all the gold (little boxes) on each level then ascending to the top of the screen.

Apple II graphics set

150 levels sounds like a lot, and it really was, but amazingly the game keeps finding new ways to surprise with its small number of level parts and their implications. When player were done with those (or even if they weren’t), Lode Runner included a level editor that player could use to make their own levels.

The ostensible subject of this post is a web recreation of Lode Runner that includes hundreds of levels to play and learn and enjoy. But the site largely speaks for itself in that regard, I think, so here’s some musing on Lode Runner itself, and its history.

So, here is the link. If you’ve never played it before, it’s simple to get into, but very interesting to puzzle over. Every level can be completed, even if many of them seem like they can’t possibly be. Good luck!

Design

Each Lode Runner level is composed of only a small number of parts. There’s the player and the guards that pursue them, of course. There’s normal, “diggable” blocks, solid “undiggable” ground, ladders, overhead bars, trap doors that look like diggable blocks but cause the player to fall through them, gold boxes, and hidden ladders that only appear when the last gold box has been collected.

Diggable blocks, the ones that look like bricks, can be drilled into, leaving a hole, but only when standing next to them and they have nothing above them. That means absolutely nothing: a quirk of the game is that even a set of overhead bars or an invisible ladder in the space above a block will prevent it from being dug.

The obvious use for these holes is to trap guards. When one falls into a hole, it’s stuck for a few seconds until it can climb out. Holes close back up after a short while, and a guard in a hole when it closes up around it are killed, usually to respawn randomly near the top of the screen.

Digging layers down to reach buried gold

The inobvious use is to penetrate into the very walls of a level to collect gold that would otherwise be inaccessible. By digging out a whole layer of bricks, the player can jump into the excavated space and continue digging the next level down.

The other thing about Lode Runner is the AI of the guards. They’re run by a simple program, and are easy to manipulate, but they still have a way of keeping the player guessing when they function as obstacles. When used as tools though, learning how to manipulate them becomes essential. The player can stand on their heads, and because they fall faster than the guards, can even use them as momentary platforms during a fall, to quickly step to one side on the way down.

I don’t mean to dive too deeply into the pieces, their workings and their quirks. A lot of the fun of Lode Runner comes from discovering them for yourself, and being introduced, step by step through the game’s levels, to their implications.

Culture

Back in high school we had an Apple IIc in the back room that we could play with on breaks. I’m not sure what it was there for, I don’t think any educational software was ever run on it, but the copy of Lode Runner on it (already a few years old by that point) was put into heavy rotation, and students would bring their own disks to school to save levels on.

This is an aside, but it demands to be told: one such student saved a number of levels they had labored over to a disk and left it in the room one day. A friend of his, who had thought that student had erased his disk or saved over his own levels, physically cut their disk up with scissors and left it on their desk! It was all in error, but the two’s friendship was never the same after that. The moral: do not be quick to vengeance, theatricality gratifies only one’s self, and in any case, be sure of the facts first. More times in my life I’ve seen someone take drastic steps in error than in rightness. So, back to Lode Runner!

A number of classic Western computer games got a second life, sometimes one that far outstripped their beginnings, when they got ported to Japanese computers and game consoles. Lode Runner was first ported to an arcade cabinet by Irem, then converted to the Famicom by Hudson Soft, where as a prominent early title for that system it went on to sell over a million units, and became a part of Japanese popular culture. From there it reached a number of other systems, including a version for the PC Engine, called Battle Lode Runner, that much later would make it back to the US as an early Wii Virtual Console release. A few other game series that would become cultural fixtures in Japan, adding hundreds of thousands of sales beyond that of their U.S. editions, were Spelunker, Wizardry and Ultima.

Image from MyAnimeList, still kicking after 18 years

At the time Hudson Soft licensed an adaptation of their Adventure Island game, itself deserving of a long post, as an anime production, called Bug tte Honey, which I’m still not sure how to pronounce. It was a Captain N-style setting, where video game players were transported into the game world to have various adventures. It was used as a showcase for several Hudson properties, including Lode Runner.

Lode Runner is a timeless classic, something that we didn’t realize how good it was when we had it. I mean, we knew it was good, but we didn’t yet know how difficult it was to create something so elegant.

For a history of Lode Runner, publisher Tozai Games has a short retrospective and timeline that still survives on the web.

Lode Runner Total Recall

Kimimi tGESM: For FAQs Sake

The above abbreviation stands for “the Game Eating She Monster,” but that’s a lot to put in a post title! Kimimi has a great blog, with a great post from 2021, about the construction and requirements of a game FAQ, of the type that were (and sometimes still are) posted on GameFAQs, unless/until recent buyer Fandom.com kills it. It covers the basics you need to know if you wish to help keep this ancient and revered art alive, including this:

First things first: ASCII art. Everyone knows no amount of text, helpful or otherwise, is a proper guide unless the top of the page is decorated with ASCII art. This is an unbreakable universal law, on a par with gravity and cats being whatever furry shape suits them best at the time.

Kimimi
Title art looking good! Made by Kimimi herself, as should be obvious.