There is a universe of Japanese home computer games that are largely unknown in Western territories, especially the US which never got a local MSX machine. Some of these games can be played officially with emulation via Project EGG, and some of those are even available on Switch as part of EGGCONSOLE.
But the problem remains, most of them are in Japanese, a difficult language to pick up if you didn’t grow up with it. Well the Youtube channel Beyond the Scanlines has selected a few of them that are playable without any Japanese language knowledge (14 minutes).
Guardic is a strategic exploratory shooter from Compile that’s both an interesting game in its own right and the predecessor of the NES classic The Guardian Legend (Guardic Gaiden on Famicom).
Hydlide is a game that’s available on NES and is pretty infamous there, but it does play a bit better in its original version.
Slipheed is a classic shooter with 3D graphics that still hold up pretty well today.
The Scheme is a platform that I honestly don’t know much about, except from this video!
And of course Zanac is another classic Compile shooter. I think the Famicom/NES version is mostly better, but don’t sell this version short.
Please consider enjoying, if that is something you are able to enjoy. That is to say, to you, it’s enjoyable. If it isn’t, if it’s enjoy-not-able, maybe tomorrow’s post will meet your inscrutable fancy. (That is to day, sour fancy is able to be inscruted.)
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Part of the network of the similarly venerable shmups.com, The Guardian Legend Shrine is nearly the ideal game shrine, a static site crammed full of screenshots, strategy tips, fan art and fiction, and generally just everything of interest to a fan of the NES game.
“BOO!” Who is this supposed to be though? A villain? There’s no one looking anything like this in the game.
The Guardian Legend, recently covered by Jeremy Parish within Metroidvania Works as part of his penance for coining the term in the Before Times, is a cult classic in the genre. Design by “Moo” Niitani at Compile, it combines their deadly-sharp shooters with the exploratory gameplay of The Legend of Zelda. It even has its own form of the confusion as to who the main character is supposed to be. In this case, it’s pretty obvious in play that she’s a cyborg bikini girl out to blast aliens, but you wouldn’t know it at all from the manual or US box art. She’s just “The Guardian,” because otherwise it’d be more evident that you play as a girl.
Naria’s fanart. I like this one, it’s fairly tasteful.
Last updated in 2002, the heyday of the age of the internet fan shrine, its art section is full of crudely-drawn sent-in art of its main character Miya, or Alyssa, or whatever she’s called. Most of it is chaste, thankfully-this isn’t DeviantArt we’re talking sbout here. I wonder about the people who sent those drawings now, and how they feel about work they made probably as a kid still floating around the internet. The game was already nine years old at that time, so they really couldn’t have been that young?
Okay. We’ve found the perfect fan art. The rest of you can wrap it up, you can’t defeat this.
It seems likely that no one’s worked on the site for a long long while. The hit counter and guestbook don’t work, and the link to an archive of NES manuals is broken. The newest entry on the News page says they had lost their FTP password, but then found it again, and a new update should be coming soon. That was in 2002, so you know, any day now.
That Blue Randar is, as they say, totes adorbs.
The Downloads page has links to the game’s roms, shamelessly promulgated to all passers-by, as well as a lot of other media taken-from and inspired-by the game. As just one more example of just how old this is, the suggested emulator for playing the roms is Nesticle.
The original game is 34 years old now, and not getting younger. The age of the web fan shrine is long past, and its parent site Shmups hasn’t itself been updated since 2010. Who knows how much longer it’ll be with it. SO please, take a few moments to explore this relic of a past age. Do it for me. Do it for “Moo” Niitani. Do it for Miya/Alyssa/The Guardian/whatever. And especially, do it for Blue Rendar. Look into those googly eyes, how could you say no to them?
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Lego is banning new Ideas projects based on The Legend of Zelda, according to Chris Wharfe at Brick Fanatics. The reasoning given is a bit vague. It could either be because Lego is working on their own Zelda sets (and they already have a working relationship with Nintendo, making the popular Super Mario sets), or it could be that the rights to Zelda models were sold to someone else. Either way, it may mean we get Zelda models through some company eventually.
A pretty good Link model from Lego Ideas! From its project page.
From Andy Baio’s article-the left is Hollie Mengert’s work, the right, the output of the AI model trained from it.
Rich Stanton at PC Gamer writes that EA’s been granted a patent on game controls that change based on how well the player does. Software patents are bad on principle, that is a horse that I will always flog despite this awful situation having existed for literally decades now, but getting past that, for now. This seems at first like just another version of adaptive difficulty, which is also something that seems like it’s kind of a problem when it happens without notifying the player or giving them a say in it. I know I know, “Kent Drebnar, get with the 21st Century.” Maybe I’ve been hanging out with the Gripe Monster too much lately. The article goes back into the history of these kinds of effort, going all the way back to Compile’s Zanac, although I would argue that’s not so much adaptive difficulty as a system that the player can strategize to manipulate. Zanac is terrific, by the way.
