Tag: japan

Now, on the Sharp X68000

The SuperGrafx is a failed system that had only five games, only three of which seem to be worth playing. The Sharp X68000 series of high-end personal computers, which were only released in Japan, on the other hand, is probably the popular gaming system Westerners have heard the least about.

As I said yesterday, the X68000 cost three grand, and that was just for the base system. If you thought the NeoGeo was expensive, hah. It’s price was justified in that it was a computer, indeed a workstation, and had a variety of software other than games. But it did still have a lot of games, including some of the best arcade conversions, including excellent ports of Rygar, After Burner, Strider, Final Fight, Street Fighter II and Detana! Twinbee, and a well-remembered recreation of the original Castlevania up to then-current aural and visual ideals. The X68000 even got conversions of Atari arcade games like Marble Madness, and even KLAX, that would I would have loved to have played back then.

The X68000 also worked a lot like a MS-DOS machine from the time. It ran mostly HUMAN68K as its OS, a DOS clone made by HudsonSoft, although it also had windowing OSes. Despite how it seemed in use though, it used Motorola 680X0-family processors, like original iteration of the Macintosh. But while it has a DOS-style OS, it’s a home computer with a dedicated sprite chip!

At times it feels like this blog is a recap of my gaming-related Youtube explorations, but I have no qualms about it when they’re as excellent as the two I have this time. One is a review of the “pro” version system from four years ago, from someone who went and obtained one:

Three years later, RMC returned with a more thorough exploration of a different machine of the line:

And this one is about emulating it, which is probably the closest most of us will ever come to trying out any of its software:

The Nintendo Font

Youtuber T2norway educates us on a very commonly used font for Nintendo products from around the Gamecube era onward, especially remembered for its use in Wii Sports and other Wii software:

New Rodin

The video’s only four minutes long but the basic gist is that it’s actually two closely-related fonts, New Rodin and Shin Go, both based on a typeface created in 1975 called Gona. They have been called the Japanese version of Helvetica. They see frequent use in Japan in media, on signage, and of course in games too!

What’s the deal with this font? (Youtube, T2norway, 4 minutes)

Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko

The always excellent Nicole Express has a great post on the Japanese gambling game Pachinko, especially the imported machines that made it to the U.S. when for a brief time we liked it too. It contains the fact that we probably got video pachinko before Japan did, through the Odyssey2 game Pachinko! (The exclamation point there is part of the game’s title, as it is with all Magnavox-produced Odyssey2 games. While I enjoy that bit of trivia, I am not actually hugely excited about it.)

“Thunderbird,” one of several machines in Nicole’s post, and in her collection!

Physical slot machines were, and maybe still are, illegal in Japan, so all the ridiculous graphic and sound flourishes those demonic entities bear in North America are instead put in the service of the Tiny Silver Balls. I’ve always shied away from these forms of gaming for the same reason I never got into Magic: The Gathering: by tying profitability to gameplay, they feel to me like they’re more business model than game, really. I might not be able to earn my quarter back at Pac-Man, but at least there isn’t someone figuring out how to work those odds against me.

Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko: Going Back And Forth Across The Pacific

Yokohama has Pokemon Mailboxes

Image from Soranews24

Casey Baseel at Soranews24 reports that the city of Yokohama in Japan has Pokémon-themed mailboxes! The article tells us that, in Japan, while there is home delivery of mail, pickup is only at public locations like post offices and mailboxes. It’s those mailboxes that have the characters affixed to them. Because we can’t resist spoiling things, the Pokémon present are Pikachu (as seen above), Eevee, and Piplup. The article has more information, including detailed information on where to find them if you’re in Yokohama!

Japanese town’s Pikachu, Eevee mailboxes are awesome

Nicole Express: The Many Ways the PC Engine Saved Games

We love Nicole Express! She regularly covers the most interesting, and often obscure to U.S. audiences, gaming topics. This time out, she relates the many ways that the PC Engine saved game data. Just about every possible way the system could do saving, it did, from simple passwords to on-cart battery-backed RAM to expansion port peripherals with batteries or capacitors, even to a device that plugged into the controller port. Great information as always from Nicole Branagan!

Image from Nicole Express

Nicole Express: Tennokoe, or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Save the Game

Sundry Sunday: Crash Bandicoot In Japan

It’s Sunday! Time to electrocute your brain with more game-related video weirdness. Electrodes at the ready!

In Japan, it seems, Crash Bandicoot has a completely different, and extremely earwormy, theme song. Well in the Japanese release of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, if you hold Left, Circle, L1, and L2 when the Playstation logo appears, you get this entertainingly bizarre karaoke video showing off a long version of the theme, featuring Crash doing a signature dance move, cavorting with ladies in nightgowns and bikinis, and getting blown up by a jetpack, all right and proper activities to be had by an anthropomorphic marsupial.

The song also featured in commercials for the games in Japan. As an extra, here is a (very badly compressed) compilation:

There’s a more video weirdness concerning Japanese Crash Bandicoot, but let’s save that for later….

Gaming Alexandria’s Magazine Scans

90s Japanese game magazines look so cool! I wonder about those huge pink pauldrons and other jutty bits though. Doors may be a problem for her.

Gaming Alexandria is a treasure, and lately it’s been uploading scans of 80s/90s Japanese game magazine PC Engine Fan to the Internet Archive! Even if you can’t read a word of it, the artwork and screenshots alone make it a joy for the eyes. If you remember and love the look of the early days of Nintendo Power, when its layout and illustration were done by Tokuma Shoten publishing, you should appreciate these.

The PC Engine, a.k.a. Turbo-Grafx 16 (a much worse name really), sits at a sweet spot between old-school pixel art and 16-bit splendor. It was arguably a less capable system than Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis, but it could show more colors, and its games looked a lot more vibrant in print. To a kid in the U.S. at the time, it exuded a strong sense of anime coolness, and I can’t help but feel a bit of that old excitement.

I have to stop myself from filling this post with page after page. Here’s a few choice examples:

Gunhead, a.k.a. Blazing Lazers (August 1989):

Compile really designed some crazy powerups for this game!

Double Dungeons (July 1989):

We present the Gary Gygax weapon collection, curated by Dr. Pumpkin Boy.
I have it on good authority that this game is nowhere near as cool as this page makes it seem.

Beast King’s Chronicle, a.k.a. Altered Beast (July 1989)

The style of this page serves to make the reader forget the game is just plain ol’ Altered Beast, the lackluster pack-in for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Even in the arcade it wasn’t that great.

Music From Kirby Cafe

In the past for limited times Nintendo has authorized the setting up of Kirby Cafes, charming little representations of the affable pink blob’s world and its inhabitants. Two of them are currently open, in Tokyo and Hakata, Japan. These have really gone the extra mile to create an atmosphere of Kirbiness, from their menus to having large plush Waddle Dees to set into a chair opposite yours if you should come to one alone.

I like the use of the older style of Kirby face on this hamburger.

The embedded video is over an hour and a half of background music from these cafes. It appears to be a rip of a pair of official CDs. SiliconEra reports on some current dishes being served there as tie-ins to the new 3D Kirby game for Switch, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The cafes have an official website and Twitter feed.

“Here are your Kirburgers, and your side orders of Kirbyfries.”
(inhaling noise)

Gaming Hell: For The Frog The Bell Tolls

It’s awesome when a tile-based game uses huge letters like this.

Gaming Hell is great! It’s an obscure game investigation site with some serious Oldweb power. They recently had a look at the Japanese-only Game Boy title For The Frog The Bell Tolls, known in its home territory as Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru, the game whose engine went on to serve as the basis for Link’s Awakening. (EDIT: As the article points out and I skipped over, and discovered after I wrote the preceding, while Kaeru no Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru has a number of aesthetic and gameplay similarities to Link’s Awakening, under the hood people note that the engine does not seem to be similar!)

There is a whole world of Nintendo games that never made it out of their home country on release, and the company only acknowledges exist in other territories with reluctance. Games like Captain Rainbow, Doshin the Giant, and Nazo No Murasame Jo. Once in while one might get a Virtual Console release, or a mention in a Smash Bros. or Nintendo Land, but other that it seems like strict radio silence.

Ant Cooke of Gaming Hell speculates on why this game didn’t make it to the US, that it has to do with some difficult to localize content. There may be something to this, but if I might offer? Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru also only got one rerelease in Japan. Maybe Nintendo saw its not featuring one of their large stable of marketable characters as a weak point? Likely it’s a combination of many factors that edged the game over into possibly-unprofitable territory on some obscure spreadsheet, somewhere.

(Source) We in the US never get cool box art like this.

One could spend hours speculating on why Nintendo does or doesn’t do a thing. Ultimately they are a huge company, not a monolith but composed of hundreds of people, and many people could doom a project if they chose. It is a shame in For The Frog The Bell Toll’s case. It’s not just their loss, but all of ours.