Tag: msx

The Girl From Gunma Kai

Some days I write explanations of Kirby Air Ride City Trial netplay. Some days I write guides to new web media sites. And some days, I found a silly shooter on Youtube that I feel you have to know about. Guess which today is, boing!

I honestly never got into Touhou-style games, even though I know they’re popular and influential. Maybe I’d like them if I gave them a shot, but there’s so many other things to explore out there, I just haven’t found the time.

That Touhou style, and their tremendous Japaneseness is part of what The Girl From Gunma Kai has going for it. According to its instruction screens, it’s a spinoff from a light novel from 2014, and a sequel to a short tie-in game to that novel. It’s on Steam for $10, which may seem a bit much for a relatively short game that purposely chases the MSX aesthetic, with backgrounds that don’t move smoothly but lurch along character block grid, and with large characters that overwrite the background they appear in front of. But that’s just the kind of thing it is.

It’s certainly got tons of personality. While you control a flying anime girl who blasts animals, daruma and steam locomotives(?), a large distracting version of that girl resides in the border, dancing to the music. The “dancing” mostly means being horizontally mirrored to the beat, meaning the feathers in her hair swap sides every frame. In the upper-right corner appear descriptions (and English translations) of the various enemies the girl attacks, giving you helpful information on them, like that this one is made of two different-colored sprites, and that one happens to be delicious to eat.

It’s still an entertaining game to watch. Here’s a one-credit playthrough, although it doesn’t earn all the letters in NEPTUNE (a reference to the Neptunia games) so doesn’t get to go on to the secret end stages. It’s 31 minutes long, but if you don’t have an affection for this kind of fare you probably won’t watch it all. A few minutes will give you the idea. (I did watch the whole thing, mind you.)

At the end of the instructions, it says: The game includes a strong homage to the MSX which (creator) HUGA dearly loves, particularly aiming for the cheap rough-around-the-edges vibe of CASIO-made games. Back in the day, there were tons of these unpolished games, and we think there’s room for at least one today. We hope this game sparks a wave of cheap, carefree and delightfully crude games flooding the world—games you can play without overthinking it.

HUGA, you and me both. I love both your style and your affection for that era. May The Girl From Gunma Kai take over the world!

The Rise and Fall of the MSX

The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.

Note that, despite the friendly play button circle, this is not an embed. Clicking on the image will take you off-site.

Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.

Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!

Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:

Basement Brothers Xanatalks About Xanadu

Falcom is possibly the greatest Japanese game publisher that’s barely known in the US. Recently Ys sequels have changed this a bit, but their earlier titles are still a hole in the knowledge of even some Western RPG fanatics. At least, I never had much of a chance to learn about them, other than through Hardcore Gaming 101’s as-usual excellent descriptions of the Dragon Slayer series.

Xanadu is a Dragon Slayer game. It’s actually Dragon Slayer II, but it plays nothing like the original. Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, is one of the very few Dragon Slayer titles to get a release over the geographic and cultural divide, as Legacy of the Wizard on NES. It doesn’t play like the other games either. It was a tradition to make every Dragon Slayer game play very unlike the others. The way I see it, the series was as much about coming up with a new system to explore and master as it was about having new scenarios and locations.

Xanadu is also a ridiculously obtuse game, which is in keeping with the original. Lots of the Dragon Slayer line expected you to do obtuse things, things not explained to you, to proceed. I’ve played through Legacy of the Wizard, and can verify that it was hard, but compared to Xanadu it seems like a model of straightforward play. In Xanadu, right near the start, there is a place where you fall down a hole, walk left five steps, then double-back right to scroll a secret shop onto the screen, the only place in the entire game where you can buy and sell magic items. Its inventory system doesn’t use words, it’s just a sequence of numbers, indicating quantities, and you’re just supposed to know the order of the items they represent.

Xanadu, like some other prominent RPGs, is secretly about resource management. Each monster you find on the world map screens (which are side-view!) can only be defeated and looted a limited number of times. If you run them out, and are left without the items needed to finish the game, you’re just stuck. You can also get stuck in some areas if you just move the wrong direction. You can save and load the game, but doing so carries costs in gold pieces! The only way to escape this temporal-economic trap is to make a backup of your game disk, and restore your copy from it. I like this idea, I’ve always found the grind-until-you-win nature of many present-day RPGs a bit unappealing. I kind of wish more games now would take inspiration from some of these early efforts, where each game could have a radically different play style, and require the player apply some real strategy to win, but maybe without being quite so user-hostile.

Youtube channel Basement Brothers made a nice retrospective of Xanadu, and managed to complete the whole game, although by following a video walkthrough. It’s an essential window into a whole universe of RPGs we were denied at the time.

Xanadu (PC-88 Paradise) Falcom’s original classic, and Japan’s must-have 8-bit action RPG of 1985 (Youtube, 39 minutes)

Romhack Thursday: Final Fantasy for MSX, in English

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

There was a period during the 8-bit era where games best known for being on the NES could get ports to other machines. Most of the ports we got in the US and Europe were not that great. There were a fair number of classic NES games with lackluster home computer adaptions. Even the best of these, like Mighty Bomb Jack, Castlevania and Life Force for the Commodore 64, usually paled compared to their NES counterparts.

I put the blame for this on the cartridge format. While a much more expensive media for releasing software than disks or tapes, it had the great advantage of being enormously flexible. The whole phenomena of mapper chips and other in-cart add-on hardware on the NES had no counterpart on the C64 during its heyday, even though there was really no reason the ’64 couldn’t use the same kinds of chips that the NES used.

Things were a little different in Japan on their native microcomputer platforms. While anemic ports were certainly possible there (like the infamous Super Mario Bros. Special) a fair number of console games got pretty good computer ports. Many of the best of these were for the Sharp X68000, a system I really must cover in detail soon, but the MSX platform got a fair number, many due to the efforts of Konami.

Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for MSX ports with their own unique properties. Today’s post is about Final Fantasy, which recently got an English translation, and which in play and structure resembles its NES original to a large degree. It’s even a slight upgrade, with more colors in its characters and able to make use of an MSX sound expansion cartridge for improved music.

The game was reimplemented from the ground up, so it’s even missing many of the bugs that the Famicom original, forged out of raw bytecode as it was by consummate hacker Nasir Gebelli, is known to have. It would probably be the definitive early version of Final Fantasy if it didn’t play painfully slowly. You can’t see it in these screenshots, but instead of the world sliding smoothly across the screen as on the NES the terrain snaps by in eight pixel steps, and your party also walks more slowly than on Nintendo’s machine. And while it’s not as bad as loading times in the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy games, the game still lingers on a blank screen for several seconds when fights begin and end, which will drive you nuts before long.

The English translation patch that FCandChill put together basically just uses the NES game’s script, so no surprises there. These days games in the style of those early JRPGs are quite out of style, but if you still have a hankering to play a game that basically demands that you grind out levels to have a chance and where you will almost certainly total party wipe at least once during your run, you could do worse.

English translation patch of Final Fantasy for the MSX2 (romhacking.net)

Maze of Galious Enhanced

You want to know a great game that, statistically speaking, you’ve probably never played? Konami’s Maze of Galious for the MSX. It’s an early example of that genre we all now call Metroidvanias (Jeremy Parish, your royalty check is in the mail), and in Japan it was hugely inspirational. More recently, it was a direct inspiration for the La-Mulana games.

Well, more-recently-than-that, some romhackers have updated it to take advantage of the much more powerful MSX2 hardware. This results in much more detailed and colorful graphics and a number of other game improvements.

Playing it requires a rom of the original game (which you much seek out yourself), the patch file (here’s it’s GitHub site), and a patcher like Floating IPS. Or do you? Indie Retro News found a site that’s serving up the game and patch together, all ready to play!

Look at that murderous dungeon room. Now that’s what you call a video game.

If you’re prepared to patch the rom yourself and name it correctly (it’s explained on the project’s GitHub page), it can also be played in the online MSX emulator at webmsx.org.

So, what’s playing it like? Challenging! You have two characters, Popolon and Aphrodite, who have separate health and experience meters. Filling up your experience bar doesn’t actually improve your stats at all; it just heals that character up to full. And your characters’ jumps, while not as stiff as Simon Belmont’s, are not fully controllable in mid-air.

The two characters have subtly different abilities. Popolon’s attacks do more damage, he can jump higher, and his jump height varies according to how long the button is held. He’s also the only one who can push open doors. Aphrodite’s jumps are of constant height, but she’s also the only one who can survive in water! If one character runs out of health, the other can soldier on alone, but reviving the other is a difficult process.

Aww, they’re wearing matching armor!

In fact, the whole game is a difficult process! This is from that thankfully-brief time in the history of video gaming where developers seemed to revel in putting in secret features and hidden passages. Beating the final boss requires you find a very well-hidden item, the Cross, which is in a very secret passage. If you no longer have months to devote to finishing a game, you’re probably going to want to find at least a good FAQ for this one.

Via Indie Retro News.