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.