Tag: pc98

Basement Brothers Looks At PC-98 Brandish

Basement Brothers is a great Youtube channel that finds and runs classic PC-98 games on original hardware. The PC-98 is a computer platform that was only sold in Japan, and was a home platform for Nihon Falcom, the long-lived JRPG publisher. Here they talk about Brandish, a unique style of dungeon crawl created for the PC-98. (38 minutes)

The first Brandish game did get an English port, released in the US on the SNES, but in Japan it got three sequels. It used sort of mixture between first-person and overhead view, with a bit of roguelike mixed in. You viewed the action from above, but your character was fixed to the bottom center of the screen, and the view was behind his back. He could move or jump forward, or strafe to either side, but if he turned 90 degrees the screen would be suddenly redrawn to the new facing. Enemies would attack you in the field in real time, that is to say, combat was not modal but took place on the same screen as exploration.

It was a bit disorienting; you might think that the SNES’s Mode 7 effects could be used there, but no it kept the same quirk. Smoothly rotating the view wouldn’t happen until the PS Vita remake years later.

Basement Brothers digs up lots of classic Japanese computer games that are still barely known in the US. Please check them out some time!

PC-88 Versions of Nintendo Games

It was a weird time. Around the time as the Famicom was just getting started, Hudson Soft struck a deal with Nintendo to release some of their games for the PC-88 Japanese personal computer platform.

Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)

You can tell the page is old because it has a Digg social media button. (Wait, what’s that? They’re trying to revive Digg?) Please excuse the Wayback Machine banner stuck in the middle of the screenshot, it’s an artifact of Firefox’s screenshot tool.

There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)

Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.

Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.

One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!

Strange and Wonderful NEC PC-8801 Games (Wayback Machine)

News 8/23/22: Falcom, DLC, Playing Cards, Shipping

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

News posts has been light lately. I’ve been worried I’ve been starting to congeal. Even alien blob creatures get older. Well let’s go with what we have–

Kerry Brunskill at PC Gamer breaks the news about Startrader, a shmup made by Falcom for the PC 98. Falcom was mostly known for its classic and unique RPGs, while the PC 98 was mostly known for its erotic anime-styled games that could somehow make full-color pictures (yes, often of naked women) often with only 16 colors and a whole lot of dithering. Startrader went against both the RPG and eroge trends, but still managed to host some amazing artwork.

How did they do that in 16 colors?

At NintendoLife, Kate Gray suggests 3DS and Wii U DLC you should get, if you can, before their eShops shut down. Games discussed include Fantasy Life, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice and Dual Destinies, the many songs of Threatrhythm Final Fantasy and its Curtain Call sequel, and Fire Emblem Fates.

Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett brings us a sad story of a couple of packs of Nintendo playing cards from the 50s, that were bought at auction but, once opened, turned out to have been ruined by age. The arrow of time is one-way, sad to say. Ow, my nucleus!

And it’s not game related, but a friend-of-the-blog suggests, from Benj Edwards at How-To Geek, this guide for shipping fragile electronics.