Tag: gaming

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Mirage Feathers on Steam is a rail shooter that’s like a cross between Afterburner and Touhou

Mirage Feathers by Oyasumi Workshop is a pleasant surprise. This neo-retro game showed up in my recommendations and after just looking at the game’s video for a few seconds, I wanted to buy it. It only cost me 600 yen, so I couldn’t resist!

There is a war at hand, and the military has decided that they need highly-sentimental, dopey-eyed young girls to shoot rockets at stuff and blow it up. The gameplay is like Afterburner (not Afterburner II since there is no throttle control). You have a main shot plus lock-on missiles. Later you can gain new weapons, like a lock-on plasma cannon you can switch to from the missiles instead. Other weapons come along later, but I haven’t gotten that far. It gets its Touhou comparisons from bullet-hell blossoms (in 3D) and cute girls. I really like how this game supports a 4:3 aspect ratio too.

Just like Afterburner, this game will unleash hell’s fury on you and you’ll take a beating without knowing what hit you. That’s just the way this kind of game is (at least for me), so maybe younger gamers wouldn’t expect this. It’ll really kick your ass.

Unlike Afterburner, this game has end bosses like Space Harrier does. The first level’s boss is this huge jet called Blue Whale. The guns on this will go crazy on you.

Level 2 features night flying. The story is kinda weird. These young girls are flying soldiers of a sort and the protagonist’s best friend from the academy turned out to be some sort of MK Ultra victim who attacks her, and the protagonist is forced to defend herself. The gameplay starts with her AI assistant helping her track down her friend, and she’s getting revenge on those who turned her friend against her. The story is rather drawn-out and you’ll get an achievement just for sitting through it. I personally don’t care for the dopey moe-style character designs, but the gameplay makes up for it. Definitely recommended!

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Senjin Aleste by M2 is classic shmup action!

I was at the Gunma Leisure Land game center north of Takasaki Station on a Saturday morning with plenty of kill since I wasn’t with the female family units and I played Senjin Aleste. I played this game last summer at a game center in Iida, Nagano Prefecture. I really love this game and I want M2 to release this on Steam, Switch, and Playstation. It’s been a few years already. What are they waiting for?

I totally love M2. They really know how to make neo-retro games. This game is 100% pixel graphics! It plays a lot like Blazing Lazers and Space Megaforce. You select a character, one of four girls. But really you end up playing them all as a team so you are just selecting the one to start with.

Each girl pilots her own ship, each with different weapons styles. There’s a Japanese girl Yuri Kunugi (Type-A), an ambiguous girl Ratna Francis (Type-B), a Slavic/Japanese girl Tanya Yaezakura (Type-C), and a Chinese girl Huang Kexin (Type-D). The Type-A is like a Dodonpachi-style fighter with orbiters that circle around the nose. Type-B has orbiters that fire in the direction you want them to. Type-C is more of a spread-shot. Type-D, the pudgy Chinese girl with glasses and big tits, has orbiters which fire ring lasers in 360 degrees. She really wrecks bosses, so I liked to try to save her for the end of the level.

A ring builds around your ship over time. Pressing a button will push back enemy bullets within that ring momentarily, hopefully enough for you to move out of the way. Destroying enemies give you P powerups, which gradually make your weapons stronger.

You have three buttons: your shot (which you can either rapid fire by mashing it or a focused attack by holding it down), the ring defense to escape incoming bullets, and a bomb that is actually weak. Picking up a Bomb powerup provides a much stronger bomb, so don’t hesitate to nab those when the screen is filled with badguys.

When you pick up a bomb icon, the bomb auto-activates. The four ships are A, B, C, D. Collecting any of these letter powerups will change you to that girl. When a girl gets shot down, she will slowly regenerate her ship. If all four are hit before any of them can repair, it’s game over. So the 4 girls are like a tag team.

Look how the fighters streak off at the end of a level! That’s exactly like Super Aleste/Space Megaforce on the SFC/SNES! It was a bit hard to play one-handed while holding my camera to take some quick pictures, so the focus isn’t the best. Sorry. If you don’t like it, you can lick me where I pee.

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Turning my old Raspberry Pi 4 into a dedicated RetroPie system

My friend Ryan built me a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16gb of RAM last year. He sent it to my dad’s home and I acquired it there when I visited in August. I had been using my Pi 4 (4gb of RAM) as a portable desktop. Once I installed Raspberry OS on my Pi 5, it blew me away how quickly it loads! It is very nice to use.

Since I no longer need to use my Pi 4 as a portable desktop, I decided to turn it into a dedicated RetroPie unit. I haven’t had a dedicated RetroPie since I sent my Pi 3 to my friend Gary.

So here it is after it booted up, before any roms were added. I had to install emulators, BIOS files, the config files, and the downloaded images of the games’ covers and such. The Saturn emulator for RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi isn’t worth using. The ARM architecture cannot handle it, while the x86 architecture of my desktop can run a RetroPie Saturn emulator just fine.

At first I figured that a 32mb SD card would be enough space to install everything I wanted, but considering that I have several CD-based games for the Turbo Duo and Mega CD, I was not able to copy over all the games I wanted to. I went to Yamada Denki and bought a 128gb SD card and started over.

It’s not enough to just install the emulators and copy the roms over to their respective folders. The Retroarch controller config files as well as the game lists and game photos from the game data scrapers should also be copied to the RasPi’s new SD card. Here’s a list of what I made sure I copied over to the SD card:

  • home/RetroPie/BIOS -> Where any necessary BIOS files go, of course.
  • home/RetroPie/roms -> The actual games, duh.
  • opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images -> When you scrape the games’ covers and such, this is where those images are stored for each console.
  • opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists -> The info you’ve scraped with the games’ descriptions. Those downloaded images don’t mean a thing without these files!
  • opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig ->This is where your controller configuration files are stored. Of course, you could just configure your controllers from scratch, but since I had to manually edit the config file for my Mayflash Sega Saturn converter, conserving this file is a must! On a Saturn pad, the LB and RB buttons become the Z and C buttons respectively, and since there is no Select button, I had to change how the menu is loaded in-game so as not to exit the game every time I pressed the Start button!

Once all those files were transferred over, it was time to test it out. I didn’t like how there was a black border on this 16:9 monitor, which made the game screens smaller. What the heck?

Here’s what I did. I set it to a resolution of 16:9 60fps and then with this “underscan” option I removed that dumb black border.

The scraped data is all there now.

Tron. I’ll have to edit the game’s input configuration. This game is always awkward to play emulated because the arcade game had both a joystick and knob.

1944: The Loop Master. Once I add a CRT shader for the screen, I’ll be all set.

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Taito’s Arkanoid II: Revenge of DoH was the very first computer game I ever bought

Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS, Taito/Nova Logic (1987)
When Dad bought the family our first computer, a 286 AT computer back in the summer of ’89, I bought a simplistic, 2-button analogue computer joystick. It came loaded with a bunch of crappy shareware games, most of which used colored ASCII characters. But the first real game I bought for that computer was Arkanoid II: The Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS. It came on a big 5.25″ floppy disk, yeah!

A:\>arkanoid.exe was the command that ran it. I’d switch to the A: floppy drive and type “arkanoid” to run the game.

I had to calibrate the joystick every time I played the game, going from the top right position, click the button, go to the bottom left position, click the button, and then center and click again. That analogue joystick provided decent control for this game, which of course used a knob in the arcades to control. Later we bought a mouse for our computer, but for some reason the paddle in the game didn’t move as fluidly as it did with the joystick for some reason.

Arkanoid II was ported to MS-DOS by Nova Logic and it let you customize your own levels. Later when I got a Thunderboard (Soundblaster clone) to upgrade the sound, I ended up playing it to death all over again to experience the game with proper sound.

Another Taito game I bought for MS-DOS was Qix. I somehow do not remember ever encountering Qix in the arcades as a kid, and I would have loved playing it since it sort of reminds me of Tron.

One year for Christmas I also got Sky Shark, the famous Toaplan shmup distributed by Taito, also ported to DOS. The cover art for this game (as well as the NES version) prominently featured Flying Tigers-inspired artwork of a P-40 Warhawk attacking battleships, and Mom knew I was really into the Flying Tigers at that time. However, that didn’t survive for long because I had once left it in the disk drive by accident. When Dad booted the computer he realized a disk was in the drive, and mindlessly he took it out while the floppy was reading the disk, which ruined the data on the game. The other Taito games I had were Operation Wolf (which worked great with a 2-button mouse) and Rambo III, which was a sort of Metal Gear-inspired stealth-focused game.

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Dragon Quest campaign at Loft 2025

Last month when we went to Keyaki Walk Mall in Maebashi, I found another big display of Dragon Quest merchandise at Loft! I showed the Dragon Quest sale at Loft last year on my blog. This time it was for the release of DQ I and II.

“Welcome to the Loft Dragon Quest I & II 2025 goods campaign!”

The first things I noticed were all the plush dolls. These retro character sprite cushions look cool.

Cups and silverware.

So much random stuff. Soap dispensers, clips, pins, stickers, and so on.

A DQ raincoat! Wild.

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Space Invaders Counter Attack

I was in a small mall in southern Maebashi City this past weekend when I noticed Space Invaders Counter Attack. I have posted before about Space Invaders Frenzy. Counter Attack is a semi-similar game, but this time you’re shooting ping pong balls from a gun at a touch-sensitive screen. I’d never played this game before, and at first I was confused because I didn’t realize that I was supposed to shoot balls at the screen. Defeat the invaders and turn your attention downwards. You then have to repel the Invaders with your shots as they get closer to your base. No matter how much I shot them, I still lost. I really couldn’t get the hang of this game on my first try. Someday I’ll give it another shot, but this is the only place I’ve ever seen this game. I like Frenzy more.

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The Mikado game center in Ikebukuro

On August 21st I returned to Japan from my trip to Arizona. I stayed a night in Tokyo before proceeding home. I looked up how to find the Mikado game center in Ikebukuro. This was my first time visiting there.

I didn’t take a whole lot of photos, actually. By then I was getting very hungry, so I went to Ueno and went to an Irish pub called The World’s End where I had fish & chips with two pints of Guinness. It was great.

That night I also went to Taito’s HEY game center in Akihabara and took these photos there.

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Dragon Quest Coffee Boss cans

Coffee Boss is doing a retro Dragon Quest campaign where entries to the contest can win limited edition prizes, as seen in the top picture. I love the pixel art on the cans. I didn’t buy the Black ones since I just cannot drink coffee black. I did buy the Cafe au Lait and Premium ones. I’ll feature this in my next Japanese Snacks video at the end of the year.