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Super neat-o Capcom and Namco B-Side Label merchandise at Yamashiroya in Ueno

B-Side Label stickers can be found in stores like Loft and Village Vanguard. When visiting Yamashiroya in Ueno, I found these great Capcom stickers by B-Side Label.

There were a lot of Namco B-Side Label stickers too!

Yeah, that’s a lot of stickers. They had some pin badges too. Check these out:

They had this other stuff, too. Brand new Famicom cartridges of Rockman, Pac-Man, and others. They looked like they’d been recently re-manufactured.

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Hacking my Nintendo Super Famicom Mini with Hakchi

My Christmas Eve was spent hacking my Super Famicom Mini console. Unlike my Megadrive Mini, I didn’t really play my SFC Mini’s default game lineup because I found them a bit boring. Not only do I prefer Sonic over Mario, but there are no shmups for the SFC Mini!

Using a program called Haxchi, the process is similar to how I hacked my MD Mini. Load the program, switch the SFC Mini on, and while pressing the reset button, plug in the USB cable and wait for it to recognize the unit.

These mini consoles are essentially Linux boxes, right? So why the hell do I have to risk contracting digital monkey pox by having to swap my hard drive out for my Win10 hard drive? I’d think that it would be very easy for them to release versions of this software for Linux, but unfortunately I am stuck having to use Win10. Gay. I read that someone had gotten Hakchi to work via Wine on Arch and Manjaro, but I couldn’t get it to work with Mint. Oh well.

So here is how you add games. When you add a game, it defaults to box covers from North America/Europe, so I had to look up Japanese SFC box scans on Gamefaqs to keep things uniform. I mostly loaded the unit with Japanese SFC games rather than English SNES games, however there are some games I was surprised that there was no Japanese port, such as Sunset Riders. There was no Japanese ROM for this game, nor could I find any SFC box art for it.

After synchronizing the additions to the unit, it’s done! As you can see, I didn’t even come close to filling up the hard drive. I didn’t think to try adding any fan-translated games, since Project Lunar on my MD Mini didn’t manage to do this for me when I tried.

The Hakchi logo now appears when booting up.

So now the game menu has this folder icon. Selecting this brings up another layer of games, the ones which I added.

Here are more games I added! Sonic Wings, Darius Twin, Tetris Battle Gaiden, and Doremi Fantasy.

With one more layer, selecting this folder icon will bring up a third set of games. Or the icon to the right will bring me back one level.

And here is the third layer, with Sailor Moon, Macross, and Assault Suits Valken among many other games.

Kiki Kaikai (Pocky & Rocky) and Hyper Iria.

Final Fight 2 and Wild Guns.

SHMUPS! R-Type, III, Gradius III, and Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie. While the MD Mini came with some great shmups, the SFC Mini came with none. Well, now mine is now full of great shmups at last.

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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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Pac-Man ghost plushies from Shimamura

A few weeks ago, I came across these 45th Pac-Man anniversary plushies of Inky and Blinky on discount at Shimamura. I hadn’t noticed these at the store until they were moved to the front of the store, in the clearance area.

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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.