Game 158: Pooyan

Pooyan could be seen as an early “cute’em up” – a distinctly Japanese sub-category of the shmupoid clade, to which Konami is no small contributor. It plays differently enough from Space Invaders that it would be unfair to accuse it of being a reskin, but it’s the same kind of game at its core – a sow protects her piglets from a pack of wolves by shooting them with her bow and arrows.

Frankly, I think domestic pigs are already cute enough without being infantilized, and Konami’s depictive style here unpleasantly reminds me of Peppa Pig.

In the first stage, wolves drop down from above using balloons to slow their descent, while you are raised and lowered on a winch to help aim at their balloons. They’ll throw rocks at you which block your shots and kill if they hit you dead-on, and also occasionally raise their arrow-deflecting shields. The winch-operating piglets will sometimes dispense a hunk of meat, which is thrown in a parabola in lieu of your straight-firing arrows. Contrary to expectations, the meat doesn’t satiate the wolves, but kills them - I suppose the wolves involuntarily let go of their balloons in a futile attempt to grab it. The meat passes right through shields, and can take down as many as five wolves in one toss with good timing.

Should a wolf reach the bottom, a piglet gets snatched, and the wolf permanently perches itself on a ladder segment, making your life more difficult as that segment is now denied to you unless you time your maneuvering to avoid the wolf’s jaws. This is a sort of “bad feedback loop” that I’ve criticized other games for, where missed shots increase the difficulty leading to more missed shots until you pretty much drown, which is certain to happen on later loops.

Stage two has the wolves float to the top of the screen, where if too many gather, they’ll push the boulder onto your head. Even though there’s no feedback loop – you’ll have free reign of the ladderspace no matter how much you miss – this is probably more difficult than the first stage, because the balloons often take multiple hits, and the air pumps below will also dispense empty balloons to block your shots. They'll even block meat sometimes. Then there’s the pink alpha wolf, who always appears last, absorbs an unfair number of shots, and will reinforce the pack with more wolves if he makes it to the top, including another alpha wolf.

The loop ends with one of two types of bonus round, where there’s no risk of being killed. In one type of bonus round, you have access to unlimited meat, and try to kill the entire pack of wolves in as few shots as possible. In another, they toss fruit at you, which you try to hit with your arrows. I didn’t find either one terribly difficult.

My best attempt lasted 15 minutes and scored over 190,000 points. Either I’m getting better at these games, or they’re getting easier. Replaying the first two easy stages got really boring, so I cut them out of the video to shorten the runtime.



GAB rating: Average. It works, but other games have built upon the Space Invaders formula in more interesting ways.

Game 157: Westward Ho (aka Custer's Revenge)

I’ve decided not to play the notorious Custer’s Revenge in its original form. I have private reasons, but those aside, I’m not comfortable playing out a rape fantasy, made all the worse by victimizing a historically oppressed minority. I’m sure many would see this as crude but harmless entertainment – nobody actually gets raped, it’s only pixels, etc., but I have to ask, who exactly is supposed to be entertained by this? I wouldn’t, nor can I really see any sort of potential cultural value or artistic merit that this game might have to offer. I’ve played Mystique’s other two pornographic VCS titles launched alongside it – the stupid but inoffensive Bachelor Party, and the unsavory Beat ‘em and Eat ‘em, and they certainly didn’t.

I’m no stranger to acts of cruelty and depraved violence in video games. I’ve led bands of pirates to sack and loot coastal villages for their gold, condemning hundreds to starvation, and likely turned a blind eye to whatever acts of savagery my men committed in their frenzy. I’ve committed genocide in roguelikes and 4x games alike. I’ve “farmed” gold and experience points by slaughtering countless sentient beasts in their own habitats. I’ve become a Sith Lord, and done everything expected of one. I’ve even driven recklessly in traffic.

I don’t have a clear answer for myself as to why I play these games without issue but draw the line at Custer’s Revenge, but I think what separates it from most of these counter-examples is the pointlessness of the cruelty. Last month I played and wrote about Ultima II, where it is necessary to murder guards just to have their keys, but I did it because I needed keys, and not because I wanted to murder guards. The fact that the guards are all static and identical sprites, and that they instantly repopulate when you leave and return, makes it easy to view this necessary murder as a gameplay contrivance. Of course, there are plenty of games all about violent power fantasy, but typically your victims are justifiably “bad,” or at least not defenseless.

Then again, I’ve also gleefully massacred entire colonies of lemmings. So again, I don’t have a clear answer to myself about where I draw the line. The distinction seems obvious, but I can’t put it into words that can be applied with absolute consistency, and without seeming like ad-hoc reasoning. For what it’s worth, there are other games I won’t play in certain ways, such as taking Undertale’s genocidal route.

This post was going to be nothing but a moralizing introspective on video game violence, but thanks to a circumstance that I only learned of recently, there’s video game critique too.

Details on this company called “PlayAround” are scant, but Mystique crashed and burned, leaving the rights to their catalog of VCS porn cartridges to said upstart, which re-released them as symmetrical “double ender” cartridges featuring two games. One of them, released only in PAL regions, featured General Retreat and Westward Ho, both variations on Custer’s Revenge. The former is a role reversal of the original premise, which isn’t really an improvement. But the latter makes it clear the Indian woman is willing and eager, and invalidates my objection to playing.

We’ll just pretend the protagonist is an everyday naked cowboy.

Unsurprisingly, this game is really, really bad. You move the cowboy across the screen from left to right, dodging hails of arrows falling from above, and then have clumsy upright sex by tapping the joystick button as quickly as you can, scoring 1 point for every successful thrust. After 50 points, you restart back on the left side of the screen and play speed increases.

Theme aside it’s basically a poor, horizontal version of Space Race. The falling arrows, for whatever reason, don’t fall all the way to the ground, but just sort of disappear right above the cowboy’s head. I assume this has to something to do with the Atari’s limit of two sprites per scanline, but this sort of situation is what missile graphics were meant for. In any event, this limitation, along with the arrows’ falling arc, makes predicting where you can safely stand kind of difficult.

There are four gameplay modes. Mode 2 adds pointless alternating two-player play. Mode 3 throws a cactus right into the middle of your path at random intervals, and there’s not much you can do if it happens to appear right where you’re standing, but I did chuckle a bit when one time it instantly sprouted up the cowboy’s saddle-sore perineum.

Mode 4 is, of course, just mode 3 with two players.

Difficulty switches control the starting speed – unlike most VCS games, position A actually makes things easier by starting at a slower speed, reaching the fastest at 100 points, while position B reaches the fastest speed at 50 points. Either way, the game becomes basically unplayable at that point.

GAB rating: Bad. Surely you didn’t expect anything else?

Next week I promise we’ll get right back to discussing wholesome, family-friendly entertainment, starting with a storybook-like fantasy about pigs who murder wolves with medieval weaponry.