Games 425-426: TX-1 and Buggy Boy

Coming straight from Hang-On, a motorbike game that plays well with a modern steering wheel setup despite looking nothing like the original controls, we have two motorcar racing games that absolutely do not play well with a modern steering wheel setup despite looking very much like the original controls. Like Pole Position, these games use a free-spinning, non-centering wheel, and MAME simply does not provide a good way of mapping this to a standard racing wheel.

It's too bad, because otherwise I have the perfect setup for these games - uniquely for the time, they employed triple monitors for a panoramic view, and I have a curved ultrawidescreen, which still needs letterboxing to fit the 4:1 aspect ratio, but nevertheless affords me a much bigger field of view than I'd get on a 16:9, or the downright tiny one I'd get on a 4:3 screen. And my spinner equipped control panel, which I had used to an decent effect in Pole Position, wasn't so great here - in Pole Position you can do without analog throttle, but in TX-1, you definitely need it.

The way I wound up playing will sound odd when I describe it, but it kind of works - I set up my racing pedals and stick shift in front of my ultrawide monitor, but not the wheel - I used my mouse to steer instead!

 

Game 425: TX-1

A direct evolution of Namco's Pole Position, on paper, TX-1 seems like it should be even better - you have that triple-monitor setup, higher resolution graphics, more varied scenery, a more realistic driving model, and a longer, more complex course with branching checkpoints and eight possible endpoints all over the world, which I'm certain influenced OutRun's design.

Unfortunately, some of these points work against it. The "more realistic driving model" isn't realistic at all - just punishing. I never made it past three checkpoints.

 

Part of the problem is that while the graphics engine does some fancy pants stuff like tunnels, banked roads, and parallax backgrounds, it, like Pole Position (and Hang-On) relies on scanline trickery to distort the road into curves and bends, and just isn't equipped to render the sort of hairpin turns that it wants to.

 

And so the turns are visually confusing as they twist and warp. Going too fast through a track segment will cause you to lose grip and get tossed to the side and likely wipe out, and I had a consistently difficult time reckoning just how fast I could get away with, so I'd drive on the side of caution, which is a luxury that the strict time limit does not afford you.

But then there's the traffic, which can begin to downright clog the roads after the first checkpoint. The slightest touch means a spinout or fatal collision, their hitboxes are always bigger than they look, and your car just doesn't have the finesse to weave around your opponents during a turn, so I'd drive even more timidly and run out the clock waiting for an opening to speed up and pass.

I've played this game at ACAM too, in all its triple-monitor glory, but never did well there either. I should go back now that I've had some practice.

GAB rating: Average. Certainly a more ambitious game than Pole Position, but technical jank and weird handling keep it from being a better game. Perhaps it gets better if you can overcome the skill hurdle, but I didn't feel terribly motivated to keep trying.

Game 426: Buggy Boy

This one's more famous for its Commodore 64 port than the arcade original, which like TX-1 utilizes a three-screen panoramic view, and has the same PCB and pseudo-3D perspective. I kept my mouse-and-pedal steering setup.

Employing a cartoony visual style and outlandish animations that evoke Hanna-Barbera's Wacky Races, Buggy Boy's builds on TX-1's pseudo-3D wizardry, employing effects that in ways are more impressive than Sega's Super Scaler titles of the same year. Terrain that crests and dips, a camera that tilts up and down with appropriate perspective shift, weather effects, slanted side embankments, ridges, bridges, and so many pseudo-3D sprites, all of them smoothly-scaling with very little artifacting and no sprite flicker or z-fighting whatsoever. There's still some of TX-1's perspective weirdness, especially with sprites that jitter around in the distance before snapping into their proper place on the road as they come into range, and the overall look is a bit plain and unpolished compared to Hang-On, but the graphics engine is doing a whole lot more. If nothing else, Buggy Boy's clean visual style stands out among its pixelated sprite-scaling racing game peers to this day.

Befitting the cartoon aesthetic, Buggy Boy loses some of the harsh pseudo-realism of TX-1's driving model - your off-road vehicle's maximum speed is a lot lower, hairpin turns aren't a thing, and you no longer lose control when you turn too hard - the driving model simply won't allow you to turn more sharply than what your throttle allows.

But don't think Buggy Boy is easier than TX-1. Oh, no. If anything, it's harder, because these off-road tracks are cluttered with stationary obstacles arranged in ways that the Battletoads would struggle to swerve around. And that's before rival buggy drivers enter the scene!

Just... how are you supposed to hit that checkpoint?

In the above video, I tour all five of Buggy Boy's courses in a single sitting, and do not come anywhere close to completing any of them, though I do manage to snag a high score in the first and easiest off-road circuit. There's some sort of flag-based scoring mechanic that I never really took the time to try to understand; collect five in a certain color order and a jingle plays for a little while which probably signals a bonus or a multiplier. Score optimization is a distraction from the main goal of beating the clock, which is plenty harsh already.

GAB rating: Average. Buggy Boy has a good amount of novelty, but I enjoyed slightly less than TX-1, which I didn't enjoy that much to begin with.

Games 423-424: Champion Boxing & Hang-On

Sega's legendary designer Yu Suzuki's wrote his first game for Sega's not-so-legendary SG-1000 console, a contemporary of the Famicom with the graphical prowess of the ColecoVision. Retrospectives tend to consider the later Master System as Sega's true answer to the Famicom, and reduce the SG-1000's role to its forebear if it is even acknowledged at all, and truth be told, I don't see myself exploring the SG-1000 library much either. No whales originated on it, but this ancestor is a rare opportunity to emulate it.

Game 423: Champion Boxing

"B" and I played a few matches in MAME and recorded our last and probably most exciting one, in which he plays the taller boxer and wins by decision.

 

The game is a bit simplistic, but overall it's not bad! The controls have a strange design choice where button 1 punches and button 2 cycles between punch types (jab, straight, uppercut), but they're fast and responsive, and the animations are fluid and readable. Action tends to oscillate between attack and defense; land a hit and you're in a good position to follow up with another, but you've got to mix up your punches with high and low blows to keep him guessing how to block. Block successfully and your next blow will come out faster than his, making the ideal opportunity for a counter-offensive. Or, if you just can't seem to block your opponent's string of punches, you can back off and leave him swinging at air, forcing him to come to you while you take a breather. The strategy isn't by any means deep, but it's something.

GAB rating: Above average. Like Urban Champion but better, I enjoyed this sparring match more than I expected to.

Game 424: Hang-On

Sega's arcade ventures are well known for being early adopters of pseudo-3D and eventually 3D technologies, often relying on bespoke, pricey hardware, but some of their earliest attempts don't hold up terribly well. Turbo, for instance, powered by the sprite-scaling VCO Object board, plays awkwardly and looks primitive compared to Namco's Pole Position from just a few months later, and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom looks flashy but is otherwise a chaotic mess.

Enter the famous Super Scaler board, or at least a progenitor to it - a 16-chip, dual-CPU beast designed for one purpose - to one-up Pole Position (itself a monster of a PCB). Truth be told, considering Hang-On is three years younger, the improvement is almost underwhelming, but it goes to show how much arcade technology stagnated in the interim years between 1982 and 1985. But make no mistake, it succeeds at this goal; Hang-On's 3D perspective is just as convincing as Pole Position's, but runs smoother, speedier, and is much more colorful than anything before it, and the technology would only get better.

Photo by SegaRetro

Nearly as important to the graphics technology are the cabinet externals, which feature analog bike handlebars for steering, a twist throttle, and braking lever. The deluxe ride-on model, shaped like one of the ingame motorcycles, goes even further for immersion and is controlled by tilting the assembly with your whole body weight - an impressive feature all but impractical to emulate! ACAM of New Hampshire has such a model, but it remains inoperable, sadly.

To emulate this as best as I could, I brought out my Logitech steering wheel and pedals, which probably allows easier control than the real thing did. My wheel would steer, my gas pedal would throttle, but I mapped one of the paddle shifters to the brakes. You need analog throttle, but you don't really need analog braking.

And, it works! It works quite well - this is easily the nicest-feeling arcade racing game I've covered yet - much is because unlike Turbo and Pole Position which use free-spinning, centerless wheels, I can comfortably map Hang-On's steering to a standard wheel, but the action feels responsive, sufficiently weighty, and fast. Sliding through a hairpin turn at just the right speed so that you don't understeer and drive off the road feels great, and even better if you pass another biker or two mid-turn.

Granted, this is still the Turbo-mode of gameplay and pseudo-3D physics, where the road is flat, turning is an illusion, and rival bikers are mere obstacles to be passed rather than true opponents. But a good illusion goes a long way in an arcade racer, and this is the best illusion of turning yet.

Hang-On is intensely unforgiving - you cannot afford a single accident if you hope to get through to the end, and even if you never crash or bump into another rider and spend most of your ride at maximum throttle, you can still lose because you took turns too cautiously, or even because a road segment was congested with bikers and forced you to wait for an opportunity to pass. Luck, in the form of the bikers and when you encounter them, plays a role - they can be easy to pass, risky to pass, or impossible depending on when you reach them, how many there are, and whether they're off to the sides or actively changing lanes at the time. Many of my attempts were doomed by a rival bumping me off the road and into a rose bush or a signpost as I futilely tried to pass him.

I'd say it took me at least 30 tries to get through the entire course for the first time, and I made it twice - the second time is shown in the recording. A crash flings you from the bike which dramatically explodes in the background and effectively costs you eleven seconds - five to recover, and six to get back up to speed - and both of my successful runs were accident-free and finished with fewer than ten seconds remaining.

Both runs also involved a hidden secret; one that requires me to describe the runs as "accident-free" rather than "crash-free." During the fourth leg of the race, you'll eventually see a Sega logo on the left curb, followed by H-A-N-G-O-N letters. Crash into the 'G,' which is rather easy to accidentally swerve around instead of into, and you'll put twenty seconds back on the clock. Without exploiting this secret, both of my successes would have been failures.

GAB rating: Good. Hang-On is a Sega milestone, marking the start of their long-reigning position at the forefront of the coin-op scene's cutting edge. While the driving isn't obviously more advanced than Turbo, or even Atari's Night Driver, presentation and feel makes it fun.

Game 422: Summer Games II

 

Epyx's VIC-pushing, Olympics license-dodging killer app returns with another set of eight events.

The formula is still the same. Practice individual events as much as you like, then compete in one, all of them in sequence, or a selection. You can even add events from the first Summer Games disk into the lineup, for a total of 16 events!

It took a while to organize a session, but I got "D" and "B" to join me for a repeat - once again we sampled all of Summer Games II's events through practice, and then played our favorite events in competition, but didn't bother replaying the old ones from the first game.

Unfortunately, only three of the eight events made the cut, and one of them just barely. At least the recording worked fine this time.

 

Loading seemed to be much faster than in the first Summer Games, anyway, taking just a few seconds per event. I have no idea if this is due to improved code or a difference in emulation settings.

The first event, and one that made it to competition, is the triple jump.

Conceptually it's hard to imagine this being much simpler. There is no button bashing - you automatically sprint to the fault line, and then you press RIGHT on the joystick to jump. Press RIGHT a second time as soon as you land from the first jump to spring into the second jump, and press LEFT upon landing from that to push off into the third and final jump, and press UP to maximize your airtime. The more precisely you time your inputs in sync with the optimal timing, the farther you'll jump.

Competition mode gives everyone three chances and only the longest jump counts. Unfortunately, "B" and "D" both choked here despite practicing earlier and couldn't stick a single jump, consistently tripping themselves on the third one.

Event 2 is rowing. I was once an okay rower in real life!

 

Alternate pushing left and right on the stick to row - it's not about waggling at maximum speed, but about maintaining rhythm, as seen in the animating sprites. You want your oar strokes to be complete, not rapid.

In competition two players will race each other, and a third races the computer, but the final rankings are determined only by time, much to the irritation of "D" who beat the computer by over three seconds but still came in last.

The third and final event that we played in competition was the javelin throw, which was easily "D"'s favorite event.

 

We've seen this one before in Activision Decathlon, Microsoft Decathlon, and Track & Field, and it's the same formula; tap the button to build speed, hold LEFT before reaching the fault line to begin the throw, and release at the optimal angle to launch. Angle matters more than speed here.

From here on out, the games get worse, with one exception.

The equestrian event is baffling. It helps somewhat to think of the joystick as controlling the rider, not the horse, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when the horse refuses jumps and all you can do is wonder why. Pressing RIGHT at a precise time will make the horse jump over obstacles, but the correct timing is difficult to read, and an incorrect one gets you a refusal, forcing you to back up. Though occasionally it would instantly launch itself from a standstill over the obstacle at horse warp speed instead.

Also, the monochromatic horse is crudely drawn and animated compared to the humans. Not only does it look out of place here, like it belongs in an Atari VCS game, but better animation could have improved gameplay by giving more visual feedback on the horse's gait, cues for the jump timing, etc.

I got okay with solo practice, but it takes rote memorization to know where the obstacles are, how far apart they are, and how wide they are, which informs when to speed up, slow down, and the jump timing, which never felt intuitive.

Event #5 is the high jump.

It's another baffler! We've seen this one in Activision and Microsoft Decathlon, but in those two, you ran toward the launch head-on, while here you run perpendicular to it and sort of push off at a sharp 90 degree angle. Real high jumpers run in a J-shaped pattern to let them lift off with one foot, which seems to be what Epyx is trying to simulate, but it just comes across as awkward.

Controls are badly explained in the manual, and technique isn't explained at all. You move up and down the track widthwise by pushing the joystick up and down, but it's hard to do that while also tapping it right to build speed, and it's not clear at all what the purpose is.

The actual jump seems like it has to be initiated way before you reach the mat, otherwise you don't even jump and just run past it. And most of the time we just crashed into the bar no matter how low it was set. Pressing UP is supposed to perform a mid-jump hip lift so that your feet don't hit the bar while your back sails over it, but the game won't tell you if you're doing this correctly or not unless there's some subtle animation cue that I'm just not seeing.

 

Event #6 is fencing.

 

Once again, this one was just too complicated for the one-button controls, which are at least adequately explained by the manual, but fencing technique isn't and we pretty much got by on practice flailing our foils around.

When the button isn't pressed, you are in a defensive posture - up and down angle your foil up and down, and a parry is performed by matching your opponent's angle and sweeping left to right as they strike.

When the button is pressed, you are in an attack posture - up and down execute strikes, left and right move you across the piste.

None of us really got a grasp on how to fence properly. Parrying, in particular, seems way too complicated to be worth the risk; mistime it, or guess wrong about whether your opponent is going to strike high or low, and you take a hit. I don't think any of us managed to do this successfully once.

I did some solo practice afterward, and beat the computer on its highest difficulty doing nothing but repeating lunge strikes. Most of the time this resulted in a score-nullifying mutual hit, but a few of them landed, and the computer opponent didn't land a single point on me. So eventually I won.

Competition mode has you face other players instead of the computer, but we didn't bother. "B" thought this had the potential to be one of the better games with enough practice, but the learning curve still seems too steep to be worth it.

Event #7 is cycling.

 

Rotate the joystick clockwise to pedal. I very quickly had traumatic flashbacks to Mario Party.

This one is pure finger pain on a d-pad, which is the only option on D's preferred controller. Note, though, that you aren't trying to spin as fast as possible, but are trying to match the pace shown on-screen by a rotating arrow. With an analog stick, it's easy to spin too fast, which brings your pace to a screeching halt.

The analog stick definitely feels better overall, but it isn't great. So we skipped this in competition too.

The final event, kayaking, is easily my personal favorite, but "B" and "D" both found it frustrating.

It's a downstream slalom event with 15 buoy pairs, two of which must be paddled through in reverse, and one upstream.

Keeping control over the kayak is already a challenge, even before you have to fight the currents and the rocks, but it doesn't feel obtuse or unresponsive. Granted, having the kayak shift into random directions when you inevitably bump into things can be pretty annoying, but I took it as a challenge to do better.

 

Overall, I rank the events like so:

1. Kayaking. One of the more substantial games, with a good balance between responsive and challenging controls.
2. Javelin. Simple, but polished and satisfying.
3. Rowing. Shallower than the javelin event.
   
4. Equestrian. Doable with practice, but pretty confusing.
5. Triple jump. A bit lame, to be honest.
6. Cycling. Please don't make me spin the joystick in circles. Ever.
7. Fencing. I don't get it.
8. High jump. I really don't get it.
    

GAB rating: Below average. Summer Games II is more of the same, and the variety of events is better, but the ratio of good events to bad is worse. The javelin event was the only one enjoyed by all, and it's not even my favorite version of it.

Game 421: Wheeler Dealer$

 

I tried. I really tried. Wheeler Dealer$, Dan/Danielle Bunten Berry's first commercial game (and thorough commercial flop) is actually playable now after years of being presumed lost, having reportedly sold only 50 copies and never been preserved through pirate compilation disks like so many other first-generation Apple II games.

In a way, the game anticipates future Bunten titles. The bidding and economics of M.U.L.E. The business management of Cartels and Cutthroats. The minimalist control schemes of Computer Quarterback and Cytron Masters. The complex behind-the-scenes mathematical modeling and competitive multiplayer focus of them all. All of these aspects had been alluded to based on sparse descriptions of the game, and having played it a bit I can appreciate it all the better.

If only it weren't so impenetrable!

Despite reducing the controls down to a single button per player, this game is far more Cartels and Cutthroats than M.U.L.E., and no copies of the manual exist that I know of.

At least the custom peripheral can be simulated without too much difficulty. You'll want to emulate an Apple II+ via MAME, make sure that a file "apple2p.ini" has been generated, and insert this text into it:

#
# SLOT DEVICES
#
gameio paddles


 

After that, map your gamepad buttons (you only need one button per pad) to the "Paddle Analog Dec" inputs.

 

You also need each paddles' "auto-centering speed" to be set to about 100. And then you can play! The button serves three purposes - raising bids, confirming prompts, and answering questions (press to cycle between answers, keep up to lock-in your selection).

I played a bit with "B" and "D," first a practice run to grasp the controls, and then a real one recorded below, but we collectively gave up after two rounds.

 

The first phase of the round is bidding.

Four companies - Datacope, Kirke Electric, Mann-Made Inc, and Medfac Industry have their IPO's and stocks begin at the low price of $4 per share, sold in blocks of 2,000 shares. The industry sectors are unimportant here - all companies begin with the same assets and can be presumed to be in mutual non-competition, though the companies' fortunes can drastically change with time and chance, and director decisions.

If two players run out of cash before the bidding ends, the third can scoop up whatever they want from what's left on the floor for peanuts, knowing they cannot be outbid.

Next, you have business decisions to make.

For each of the four companies, the director - typically the player with the largest share - gets to play. Decisions include borrowing cash, buying/selling factories, and investing in marketing to increase product demand. Remember - it's the company borrowing and spending cash, not you! The one-button interface works surprisingly well here; though it means all investment decisions go in one direction - once you've told the computer you want to borrow $10,000, you can make it go higher by pressing the button more, but there's no way to make it lower!

Without a manual, it's dang near impossible to determine whether your decisions are good or not. Presumably you want to get production and demand levels to be about the same - after all, if the company's worth goes up, your shares do too, and if it goes bankrupt, then your shares become more valuable as toilet paper. But then, maybe you want to prop up its value and then squeeze it all out before unloading your depleted shares onto a hapless investor. Business is war!

An end-of-year summary follows, with random events a la M.U.L.E., but with no clear indication of who's ahead.

 

A lot can happen here. During our unrecorded test round, B's company went bankrupt for unexplained reasons, gaining me some liquidation funds as an investor and him a fine from the FTC. And two of my brand new factories got firebombed by union activists! This time, though, all that happened is that me and 'B' got opportunities for a bit of insider trading, but I am not sure how you capitalize on this.

Round 2 begins with the option to sell stocks.

 

We don't, but we do all borrow cash at the new prime lending rate, which we then spend on more stock shares, and then manage our respective companies some more.

End of turn 2.

I don't understand much of this. At least tell me who's winning!

After turn 2, we decided this wasn't getting anywhere and quit.

No GAB rating - it's impossible to rate without any inkling of what we're doing, which is unlikely to ever happen without a manual. As it stands, this is a neat little glimpse at the beginning of Bunten's career, but none of us had any fun playing it at face value.

Personally, I don't hate the concept. On the face of it, this could be sort of a step between the dry and dense Cartels and Cutthroats and the subliminal design of M.U.L.E., even though it predates both of them. The control design is indeed clever - perhaps too reductive; I think it could have used two buttons instead of one - but what's here makes this game about stock speculation almost accessible, and certainly more so than C&C did with its spreadsheet-like approach.

But the problem, apart from no manual (which is a massive problem!) is that the information I want isn't readily available, and much of the information that is available is confusingly terse. How am I supposed to judge whether a company is worth $4 per share or $400? The bidding screen doesn't even tell you how much money you have left, or things like how many stocks you own or how many are left.

I'm still glad that we tried, and that we had a chance to try. This obscure and obtuse computer game is an important part of Bunten Berry's legacy.

Game 420: VS. Wrecking Crew

Commenter Alexey Romanov alerted me to that the original version of Nintendo's Wrecking Crew was likely not the 1985 Famicom game that I spent the better part of five weeks covering, but rather an arcade release for Nintendo's VS. System series, which may have been released in Japan as early as August 1984, though not in North America until 1986. I generally assume that, regardless of release dates, which are often unreliable, the VS. System games are enhanced conversions of games designed for the Famicom. But this time, the arcade game probably came out first. It plays substantially differently, being less of a puzzle game and more of a Mario Bros-style competitive action game, but feels more cohesively designed and provides context for some of Wrecking Crew '85's stranger design choices.

I played a few rounds with my friend "B," as this version is designed for simultaneous two-player action. Even in solo mode, you'll have an AI partner controlling Luigi (or Mario). There was some difficulty in configuring the controls, as MAME has mappings for four players, not two, and is inconsistent about how player 2 gets mapped to them.

 

Photo by Game Machine

 

The horizontal split-screen view in the video above is an emulation anachronism; an authentic cabinet features dueling consoles. This kind of setup is very difficult to emulate in MAME, and impossible to capture in a Youtube video, but has a spatial purpose - it creates the appearance that Mario and Luigi are working on opposite sides of the demolition zone.

Your rival's view of the level is mirrored left-to-right, and you'll see him working in the background, just as he'll see you in his background, unable to directly interact but capable of "accidentally" smacking you with his hammer or wrecking ladders out from underneath you, just as Spike could in the NES version. The doors, an underutilized feature in the NES version, are present in every stage here, and don't just send enemy wrenches to the other side of the arena - they send enemy wrenches to Luigi's side of the arena, where they become his problem to deal with. Even the constant nuisance of fireballs make more sense here, where the additional pressure is necessary to keep your feet moving and the coinage flowing, and the arena-style single-screen level design makes it far less likely that you'll get unfairly fireballed into a dead-end.

And, well, it's pretty familiar territory. You run around the level, avoiding wrenches, hatchets, and fireballs, using ladders to ascend stories. The action is always confined to a single screen, and floors are always contiguous, eliminating much of the puzzle aspect, but this isn't to say gameplay is bereft of strategy; you have to destroy all of the gray ladders, and each one you wreck is a possible escape opportunity denied to the future you, so think before kicking out your own ladders too soon. Dynamite appears in some stages, and unlike in the NES game, you have to set it off, which can score you big bonus points from chain reactions if done right, but also opens up all the doors at once which can screw you up, or turn the tables on Luigi.

Vs. Wrecking Crew offers unlimited continues in two-player mode and we both used several, but got bored and quit around level 13.

GAB rating: Average. Neither version of Wrecking Crew is fantastic, but this arcade version is more consistent and has the appeal of two-player co-op / competition. Still, I got bored of it much quicker than I got bored of the NES version. At least I stopped playing this one when I got bored rather than trying to press on and finish 100 levels.

Game 419: City Connection

Here's a bit of personal trivia - the Nintendo version of City Connection was the first video game I ever rented! I can remember the 8-bit chiptune rendition of Der Flohwalzer as if I heard it yesterday, even though I haven't since the first and only time I rented it nearly 35 years ago. But today I'm sticking with the arcade original.

 

You play a blue-haired teen "Clarice," shown beaming a ^_^💗v expression between rounds, taking her Honda City subcompact out for a joy ride on the highways of the world. You have to paint every inch of the highways while avoiding cops, cats, and occasionally road spikes, and I do mean every inch. The edges of each platform quickly prove bothersome, as the only way to reliably edge is to drive off and fall or to have incredibly good timing jumping or reversing direction on the very last pixel where this is possible. Usually I'd just drive off, but opportunities to get back to the upper lanes can be sparse, especially after the first round.

Even though Clarice is a vandal, a reckless driver, underage, and possibly on multiple controlled substances, the cops aren't actively trying to get you - they mainly just drive in a straight line and tend to congregate on the stage floor, where they are easily shaken by reversing direction. What makes them dangerous is that nearly everything you do is a momentum commitment - jump and you can't change your trajectory until you land, not even if your trajectory sends you sailing right into an obstacle coming from off-screen. Reverse direction and Clarice pops a wheelie, which you can't jump or reverse out of until the front wheels are touching tarmac again. Pretty much the only thing you can do without commitment is throwing cans of oil, which send whatever they hit into a spinout which you can then ram off the road for points. Sometimes this is the only way you can survive a jump or drop that would otherwise launch you into a car, but trailing behind and slicking rows of them and causing big pileups by ramming one spunout car into another is by far the best way to score points. And later stages replace the cop cars with ambulances and taxis that are worth even more points to wreck. Who's the real bad guy here, Clarice?

I played for a good couple of hours, but I never found a good strategy that ensured survival in the second stage and beyond. In fact, I couldn't beat the third stage, though I think I did get a respectable score just from playing the first two.

It's hard to think of more to say about the game. The visuals and animation are fairly decent for the time, with colorful scrolling backdrops depicting the city you're in. The FM-style music isn't half bad, though the sound effects aren't half good. Hitting a cat on the road triggers this hilarious scene where the cat slooowly flies off into the sky to Ferdinand Loh's Flea Waltz ("I Stepped on the Cat" in Japan), and I can't even be mad about losing a life. Yeah, I'm done here.

GAB rating: Average. City Connection looks nice enough and offers a somewhat novel gameplay concept that isn't quite like anything before it, but the only challenge here comes from rigid controls that don't feel substantial enough to be worth the effort to master.

Games 417-418: Jump Bug & Crush Roller

Alpha Denshi, a pretty minor developer whose best-known properties were made in partnership with SNK (and often assumed to belong to them) wouldn't be noteworthy to this blog except for that two of their early works appear to have informed the minor whale City Connection.

Their earliest known title, Dora-chan, is a stupid little game with imagery lifted from the Doraemon manga and without permission, and not really worth my time to cover beyond this acknowledgement.

"PLEASE ATTACK ME," states the attract mode.

Around 1981, they released a game that is sometimes listed as the world's first sidescrolling platformer.

 

Game 417: Jump Bug

 

I'm almost positive that Konami's Scramble influenced this, both being multistage autoscrolling action games that ran on Galaxian hardware. The difference being that Jump Bug puts you in control of a hopping car instead of a jet fighter, though this car still has front-firing guns.

Controlling the jumps takes some getting used to; instead of having a dedicated jump button, the bug automatically jumps whenever it touches ground, and you can control its altitude to some extent with the joystick; up gives it a mid-air boost (or slows its descent), and down speeds the descent.

Stages are enumerated in the attract mode

 

Jump Bug anticipates many aspects of the side-scrolling platform game formula, though I'm not sure it was directly influential. You've got your seven thematic stages seamlessly transitioning from one to the next, each with a unique (apart from the two volcano stages) sets of tiles, hazards, and gimmicks to bounce through. The opening city stage has you jumping across skyscrapers, collecting bags of cash and shooting down space invaders. This opens up to a plains stage with boulders on the ground and cloud platforms to assist in jumping over them, sometimes occupied (hey you, get off of my cloud!). Boulders give way to mountains and volcanoes to test your sense of timing - hop over the mouth at the right time or you'll learn a new meaning of burning rubber. The pyramid is perhaps the most unique stage of all, as the autoscrolling gives way to a 4-way scrolling maze of bats, treasures, and deathtraps, though the vertical screen orientation isn't the best suited mode for it. Then, after more volcanoes, a tricky undersea section with deadly homing jellyfish and nuclear submarines to contend with - this part gave me the most trouble. Finally, a trampoline bounces you to a sky road section full of clouds and various aerial hazard - land on a skyscraper at the end to loop back to stage 1 and do it all over again.

It didn't take me too many tries to make it through the first loop, but I didn't feel like attempting another.

GAB rating: Above average. Jump Bug is ugly, clunky, and weird, but also surreal and imaginative, and easy enough (once you get a grip on its controls) that its weirdness isn't offensive. Playing it through once was fun. Playing through once was also enough.

Game 418: Crush Roller

 

The link between Crush Roller and City Connection seems shaky to me, and the sole source on this is a review from a Japanese media site. Crush Roller (originally localized as Make Trax by Williams Electronics) closely follows the Pac-Man formula and replaces the goal of eating all of the dots in the maze with the nearly equivalent task of covering every inch of it with paint. City Connection came out several years later and also involves covering the entire level with paint but otherwise has little here in common.

But I played Crush Roller, you're reading about it as an ancestor apparent, and good grief, this is deceptively hard. First you take in its pastel colors, childishly simple visuals, and cheesy music. Then you notice that your only opposition are two pink fish swimming around the maze. Pac-Man had four ghosts, and these fish are stupid and erratic. And then, just as you round a corner, they split up, box you in from both sides, and kill you.

They may be stupid and erratic, but the erratic part makes them dangerous! And unlike Pac-Man's ghosts, they can and will reverse 180 degrees at intersections, so don't count on them not being able to - that got me killed frequently. The invulnerability pills of Pac-Man, which have no equivalent here, become sorely missed.

Your only weapon here is a pair of paint rollers which you can ride across their respective segments of the maze and crush these fish, but they'll respawn quickly, and the more you do this, the smarter they get about avoiding you. Pretty soon it gets nearly impossible, and the main value of riding the rollers is the brief speed boost it gets you, but even this is risky, as the long corridor it zips you down can easily become a deathtrap if one fish swims to the other side of it.

And to make things worse, a mouse will eventually start roaming the maze and "make trax" for you to clean up. You'll have to catch it - often an infuriating task - and paint over everywhere it's been before you finish the level.

On my best run I made it to level 3 and almost finished it, scoring just over 10,000 points, which is probably not that impressive, but lasting even this long felt more like luck than skill.

GAB rating: Average. I appreciate a challenge, but Crush Roller does little to excite or innovate, and its subtractive design just feels unfair. Play Ms. Pac-Man or Lady Bug instead.

Game 416: Formation Z

After the surprisingly decent ivory deck inductee Exerion, we go right back to mediocrity with scrolling shooter Formation Z.

 

I suppose the game is fine on a technical level. Multiple levels of parallax scrolling gives Formation Z's stages a convincing sense of depth, though these visuals are pretty drab and plain looking. Your Macross-inspired transforming robot moves slowly but responsively, and none of my deaths ever felt like it was the fault of poor controls or bad collision detection. In fact, the game is rather easy, apart from two things - some obscure stuff toward the end of a loop, and that my trigger finger got really tired from the nonstop repetitive shooting.

Fact of the matter is, in the first few seconds of gameplay, you've already seen 80% of what the game has to offer, and the next nine minutes is mainly spent shooting the same waves of the same enemies over and over again. Most of them don't even threaten you as long as you're on the ground, which is where you should be as much as possible - flying costs fuel, leaves you vulnerable during the transformation animation, and makes it impossible to aim up and down without pitching, which is a much more useful defensive ability than the any of jet mode's maneuverability. Jumping is best avoided as much as possible too, as you completely lack air control and might find yourself floating right into an enemy - it's better to blow up obstacles than to try to jump over them.

Eventually, you'll have to transform, which costs fuel - all the more reason to stay on foot when you can.

 

Don't get too excited. It doesn't last long, and the action doesn't get any less repetitive. You'll land in the desert and fight more robots.

 

After a few minutes of this, you'll take off again and fight the miniboss.

The first time I reached this, I died to its spread-shot attack, but never again; I learned to hang back and dodge while firing rockets.

After destroying it, you have to dock with a shuttle, but the game doesn't explain how. You must fly in front of it and slowly back in - take too long, as it did my first few times when I futilely tried to dock with its underside and then with its hood, and you have to repeat the boss fight.

And now you're on the moon!

I wasted a lot of time here. On my penultimate run, I must have spent over twenty minutes endlessly scrolling forward, mindlessly fighting wave after wave of the same robots with no change in tactics or scenery, and I wondered if this part even ends.

Turns out it does. I'm not quite sure what triggers it, but you have to be in jet mode - make sure you have ample fuel first - for the next scene to start.

Pretty soon you'll face the boss. I beat him on my first try. And then I stopped playing.

It loops after this but I didn't even bother.

I didn't even bother sticking around for the second loop.

GAB rating: Below average. Borderline bad, honestly. Formation Z is functional, but holy space mackerel is it boring. I've never played it before and I can't see myself ever playing it again.

Games 413-415: Early Jaleco

 

Jaleco - a contraction of Japanese Leisure Company, was a prolific publisher in the 80's through early 90's that never quite landed any major hits, but if you owned an NES in the day then you've almost certainly played a Jaleco game or two. In Japan, arcade amusements were their main business operation, with more than a hundred boards printed, developed in-house, or imported from foreign publishers for local distribution.

1985's City Connection is their first game to make whale status, thanks much to its NES port, and in my usual fashion I've selected a number of earlier Jaleco titles as ancestors to cover. In addition, I'm covering two apparently influential games by Alpha Denshi, an otherwise unremarkable studio whose best-known works tend to get lumped in with the library of collaborator SNK.

Pile Break is Jaleco's earliest game credited on Mobygames, and is unsurprisingly described as a Breakout clone, but it is unemulated and seemingly lost to history. Their next few titles are foreign imports - Cosmos, Blueprint, and Check Man. Precise records on who developed what are spotty, but the earliest playable Jaleco exclusive appears to be 1982's Naughty Boy, one of two Jaleco games credited to associate "Kawa Denshi Giken."

 

Game 413: Naughty Boy

This is exactly the sort of weird and janky mess of a game that could only exist in the early 80's when everyone was trying to be the next Pac-Man but few could nail the vision and cohesion that made it work. Naughty Boy is yet another disjointed mess of ideas - I suppose that if I had to summarize it, it's a maze action game where you play a bomb-chucking delinquent who has to hack through a maze of destructible walls and infinitely respawning enemies and destroy a castle at the end by blowing up its flags.

Haha, I'm such a rapscallion.

If you're trying to get a high score, though, then it seems you're better off ignoring this goal and just hanging back on the first level, killing as many enemies as you can before they overwhelm you. They'll go up and up in value until you are getting thousands of points per kill. 56,000 points was my highest score playing normally, but I got over 300,000 on my second attempt of using said technique, which is shown in the above video - at about nine minutes in I make my last stand, lose my last life, and then I restart and play the four levels normally, which takes three minutes and scores about 31,000 points.

Some notes:

• Bomb throwing takes some practice but feels pretty good. The longer you hold the button, the farther it goes, and it descends when you release the button (or when it reaches maximum distance), creating a blast zone that can destroy anything in a small radius.
• Movement, on the other hand, feels stiff and awkward. The controls lag a bit, especially with turning, and this can cause Naughty Boy to be facing the wrong direction when you really need to quickly turn about face and toss a bomb, which has been my number one cause of death.
• Blowing up an enemy cripples it, leaving half of its body to painfully flail around. Bombing it a second time kills it and scores more points.
  
• '?' icons spawn from time to time, and blowing them up renders Naughty Boy invulnerable to most enemies for a few seconds. This is often the ideal time to destroy the castle.
• '?' icons also cause objects like watermelons and pipes to appear, and the demo loop suggests these are worth points, but I couldn't figure out how to cash in on any of them.
  
• Firebreathing dragons pop up every now and then. They don't move from their positions, but they can kill you even while invulnerable.
• Each stage has a gazebo where you can safely hide for a little while, and even toss bombs from within, but if you stay in too long the doors will open permanently. This is an ideal place to make a last stand in when the monsters get too quick to deal with in the open, and if you're lucky, you can survive long enough to spawn an invulnerability '?'.
• Every two levels you get a bonus round where you drop stuff on a big enemy's head from a zeppelin. It's dumb.

 

GAB rating: Below average.  It's simple, it's repetitive, it's buggy, and it's nonsense, but not enough nonsense to be amusing.

Game 414: Pop Flamer

 

You're a mouse with a flamethrower and an attitude, running around a maze, popping balloons and torching your enemies. Sounds awesome, right?

Well, not really. The flamethrower looks cool and surprisingly nasty, shooting out a long stream of liquid napalm, but you'll be lucky to hit anything with it thanks to sluggish, laggy controls, the flame's thin spread, and enemies' tendencies to back up from your line of fire. Sometimes the hit detection flat-out doesn't work. And to make things worse, it quickly loses potency, each burst of flame losing pressure, reach, and power from the last - you've got four blasts before the jet barely goes past your ears, though each balloon you pop refuels it a bit. Even when you manage to burn a foe, they respawn in the center of the stage in a hurry.

Each stage also has two bottles of juice at the north and south ends, which you slowly, slowly sip from, when the lousy controls aren't trying to automatically make you move around it. Finish the bottle before anything wanders into your space and you'll transform into Super Mouse, and the enemies will make a mad dash right for your gaping maw, but it's pure luck whether they actually get eaten by you and score you big points or just sort of hang out nearby. Either way, you'll also get a few seconds of invulnerability and better speed.

There are four looping stages, and something odd happened to me the first (and only) time I cleared the first loop - my stock of extra lives shot up! I don't even know how many I had, but it wasn't depleting when I got killed. This is captured in the video above. But eventually, after getting killed on round 8 with only one balloon to go and some lives left, the game bounced me back to the title screen and didn't even record my high score.

GAB rating: Bad. Even with an unlimited lives glitch that I seem to have accidentally triggered, Pop Flamer is ruined by bad controls and stupid enemies that overwhelm you with numbers and unfair moves like walking through walls and not getting burned by your weapon. Surviving always feels like a matter of luck, with the odds largely dependent on whether the enemies mob you or just waddle aimlessly around the stage.

 

Game 415: Exerion

Super, another Galaxian clone... oh wait, this one's pretty good!

The first thing you're almost certain to notice is the pseudo-3D perspective, which is somewhat reminiscent of Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom with its rolling landscape featuring a horizon and multiple layers of parallax. But you won't have much chance to marvel at this technical feat for long - the enemies come at you fast and furious, and without much delay between waves.

Thankfully, controls are pleasantly smooth for once. You can fly in eight directions, an unusual feature for the genre, and there's even a bit of Newtonian inertia affecting movement - enough to add some challenge, but not enough to be annoying. Exerion is the second game credited to Kawa Denshi Giken, making it a marked technical improvement over Naughty Boy's jankfest.

Your ship has two weapons - a slowly firing twin cannon with unlimited ammo, and a rapid-fire central gun that consumes it. My performance improved massively once I realized that you can use both at the same time, which not only improves your firepower but also helps conserve your limited ammo.

Interestingly, some of the enemies are dead ringers for Centuri's Phoenix, particularly, appropriately enough, in their death animations. This lends some credence to a theory I've seen that Kawa Denshi Giken was the true developer of Phoenix, but then, why should their Naughty Boy, which came out a year later on similar hardware, be so much technically poorer?

The game is a bit repetitive and even a bit easy, but that's hardly the worst thing in the world. In my best game, shown above, I start losing lives on the second wave principally out of losing focus from boredom. Nevertheless,

GAB rating: Good. It's not going to replace Galaga, but it's still the best game in that family that I've played in awhile, and certainly the best Jaleco game so far.