The first time I visited Japan was in 1998, and at that time all I saw were sit-down cabinets like the Sega Astro City, Taito Egret, Namco Cyberlead, etc. So, I was unaware that game centers here in Japan once had standing cabinets like America did until talking with my Japanese friend. He said that he would play Atari’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the ’80s. Atari had some successes in Japan back in the ’80s, especially Gauntlet and Marble Madness. And going back further, Breakout obviously made quite an impression in Japan, giving birth to the “block kuzushi” genre with Arkanoid being the most exemplary title. Dang, if only I could travel back in time, or at least Quantum Leap into my childhood self and relive those memories…
I get a lot of comments on the buttons covering my backpack. I appreciate it when somebody has something to say about a button they’ve identified as something they know and like so that I can have a meaningful interaction with somebody, but if they are a boring person and just commenting on the amount of buttons only because they noticed that I have a lot of buttons and that most people don’t have a lot of buttons on their backpacks then they’re just wasting my time as I’m not usually interested in interacting with normies since it depletes my Energon cubes or something.
A very long time ago, my cousin Bethany gave me a button that simply says, “Everything I need to know about life I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.” I think this was back in college. It just slowly increased from there. Many of the buttons I’ve purchased on my own, but several were given to me, particularly by people who were kind enough to just want to add to the collection. Over time, I’ve lost some buttons, unfortunately. I won’t show them all, but here are some I’m particularly fond of.
This is a button for Mugen Senshi Valis by Tokuma Soft for the Nintendo Famicom. While I don’t care for this Famicom port, I do like the PC Engine a lot and the Megadrive version somewhat.
These buttons are for a game called Pac-Man. Perhaps you have heard of it.
Here is Mai and her fabulous tits from King of Fighters 2001.
A few years back, Village Vanguard stores at shopping malls had plenty of Sega Megadrive merchandise. There were these blindboxed enamel pins. Here are Puyo Puyo, Tant-R (a spin-off from Bonanza Bros), Sonic the Hedgehog, and Bare Knuckle II (aka Streets of Rage II for the NA Genesis). I’ve never played Tant-R before, so I sent this pin to my friend Brian. That’s what friends are for: pushing stuff you don’t want onto others.
Here is Reimu from Touhou Project and Lum from Urusei Yatsura. Reimu was given to me by a former coworker named Eddie several years ago. I think the color may have faded a bit? Not sure. If you don’t know who Lum is, I hate you and I’ll never be your best friend.
More King of Fighters: Here are pixelated Athena and King buttons.
My friend Lou gave me these enamel pins: the Vic Viper from Gradius and Oopa Oopa from Fantasy Zone. He found these at specialty pop-up stores in Tokyo, I do believe.
Anyhow, I have many other buttons and pins on here: Uglydolls, Peanuts, Rilakkuma, Blue Impulse, Darius Burst, Star Trek, the Flatwoods Monster, Tamiya, Hasegawa, and other pins. If you don’t know what any of these are and just want to comment that I have lots of buttons because you’re a normie and find it weird that others aren’t normal like you, then don’t talk to me by saying, “Boy, you have a lot of buttons on your backpack, bleh” because that drains my energy. So shut up.
Here’s the Solvalou fighter, your ship in the game.
The Andor Genesis, the boss ships you fight against. Sort of looks like the top part of a Cylon Base Star.
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, the Terrazi looks like a Cylon Raider.
This Jara is sort of TIE Fighter shaped.
The Kapi has a sort of Millennium Falcon shape to it.
I can’t say this Grobda tank really looks like anything, except maybe a cross from the Galileo Shuttle from Star Trek and the land rover from Battlestar Galactica.
The port of Xevious on the Atari 7800 is what I put the most time into, when I was in junior high. I remember how thrilled I was when I bombed the Andor Genesis with a one bomb kill. I’ll have to give it a try on my 7800 emulator for RetroPie again sometime to refresh my memory. IIRC, it wasn’t a bad port and it even had the hidden flags you can reveal by bombing secret areas on the screen.
In 1982, I saw the trailers for the movie on TV and wanted to see the movie so badly. My sister was 3 years older than me and had decided that since the movie was about computers, it would be too complex and I wouldn’t understand it. Yet she hadn’t seen it either, so how would she know? Older sibling syndrome, I guess.
It wasn’t until later when Tron came to the Disney Channel that I finally got to see it. It was a celebration of early ’80s video game culture. Fantastic. Recently I did a search for Tron stuff on Pinterest and wanted to post some of the cooler images I found.
I’ve never seen this poster image before. Super neat.
Jean “Moebius” Giraud did a lot of the designs for Tron. His graphic novel, The Long Tomorrow, was a visual inspiration for Blade Runner.
More Moebius art.
And speaking of Blade Runner, Syd Mead also did design work for Tron, with these black & white illustrations.
I’ve never seen this poster with Flynn, either. Perhaps this is fan art?
This poster for the “Space Paranoids” arcade game featured in the movie. It’s amusing since arcade games back then did NOT look like that, unless it was supposed to be a laserdisc game. There is no way we had FPS-style games like that back then!
But we did get an actual Tron arcade game by Bally Midway in 1984.
The design of this arcade cabinet is simply captivating, complete with the blacklights and lighted joystick. While it was cool, I really enjoyed the Discs of Tron game far better.
This was a step-in, environmental cabinet. It really blew me a way the first time I saw it.
Too bad Disney is more preoccupied with sexualizing children and wrecking Marvel and Star Wars to make anything cool anymore. At least a good sequel was made before Disney went down the crapper, although that movie and its spin-off cartoon weren’t enough to sustain interest in Tron. As for me, 40 years later, Tron remains dear to me.
Here is my DVD signed by Bruce Boxleitner. I only talked to him briefly, but I could tell he is BASED.
I’ve probably spent too much money on Steam games this past two years or more. I never liked the idea of buying games I did not have physical copies for, and I haven’t cared about gaming on the PC since the ’90s. But Steam offers a way to enjoy the console gaming experience on my computer without having to buy a new game console, so I’m happy. This past summer I wrote about how much I love Infinos Gaiden on Steam, and the same development team, Picorinne Soft, has done it again.
As far as Neo Geo shmups go, my two favorites are Blazing Star and Pulstar. I’d never actually heard of the original Andro Dunos before. So upon hearing about how great Andro Dunos II is, I played the original on RetroPie to try it out. While it isn’t a rather impressive-looking game graphically, it’s pretty solid and I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it before. It was made by a company called Visco, and that entire catalog has been purchased. Picorinne created this sequel, with improved graphics, yet keeping faithful to that 24-bit Neo Geo graphics style. I do not see any mention of Picorinne’s name in Andro Dunos II, but they are listed as being the developer in Steam, and both shmups feature great ’90s quality pixel art. (FYI, they also did a vertical shmup called Battle Crust, which feels more like a 16-bit arcade shmup.)
Just like Infinos Gaiden, this game also supports a 4:3 aspect ratio! I am so grateful for this. It irritates me when I play a vertical shmup that is formatted for 16:9 only, which makes the playing screen even smaller on my 4:3 monitor. This is of course a horizontal shmup, but nevertheless it’s good that I don’t have to bother with wasted borders to either side of the screen.
The first level starts you out inside of what seems to be an underground city, then you break out into a desert wasteland. Nothing but sand and desolation. Apparently this is what happens when we let the cows fart one too many times. If only we had listened to Bill Gates back in the 21st century and ate bugs and drank soymilk instead… we wouldn’t be pelted with sand storms and living underground, eating bugs and drinking soymilk! So anyhow, this is the first level boss, a giant mecha with a big shoulder cannon, a chest cannon, and the blue sensor weak spot to shoot at. Pretty cool.
Next you fly into outer space to look for jerks to shoot at. Oh look, a space colony.
Gameplay is improved over the original. There is now an autofire, a button to cycle the weapons, and a button for the power attack. The original only had two buttons, which required button mashing for the regular shot and to charge up for the power attack.
Like Hellfire on the PC Engine and Megadrive, each of the weapons has its purpose, and you can switch between them using the trigger buttons. You can power up the shots individually by collecting powerups, and your weapons will lose power when you take damage.
Here’s the second level boss. Shoot the core!
Now you’re on the moon.
Now you’re underwater. Games like this and Infinos Gaiden are cool because each level is distinct. People praise Eschatos, but that game is just the same thing over and over again, it seems. Very little variety.
There’s always a strong Darius vibe whenever giant, mechanical fish are involved.
Then you fly over a space city. The boss of this level was taken from the original Andro Dunos game.
So you can’t go wrong with Andro Dunos II. Very fun, retro shmup action with beautiful sprite work, and it’s an improvement on the original. For my Linux desktop, I just had to set the launch option: gamemoderun %command% and the Proton compatibility tool runs the game just fine in Linux.
It was the summer of 2002. My first stint of living in Japan was coming to a close after 2 years, and I was in the process of packing up my belongings to move back to the USA. I happened to see Magical Chase for the GBC for only 3,000 yen. At the time, I had no way of playing the game, so I passed. It was only a few years later that this game’s value skyrocketed, and now I dare not look up to see its current value. I’ve kicked myself for passing on that opportunity. I figured that although it would be nice, I did not have a GBC, nor was I sure that I’d ever buy one. If I had only known, I could have at least bought it as an investment.
Well, I still don’t have a GBA, but I am able to play it on my Gamecube. Or Retropie, which I am using here for these screenshots. In 2002, this legendary cute-em-up was already rare and expensive for the PC Engine, and I figured that this GBC version would also go up in price. I wish I could somehow go back in time to snatch some of these games as I have become priced out of the market, thanks to hipsters.
I pigged out on Korean BBQ (yakiniku) with the female spouse unit (the female offspring unit doesn’t eat much) while watching The Last Crusade (she likes Indy Jones movies, but not so much Star Wars, but that’s alright) and then Message from Space. Played some Gyruss and booze doesn’t work so well to enhance reflexes, so I gave up trying to beat my high score tonight. Still, thanks to the weekend challenge on the Retro Palace group on Gab, I finally made it to Saturn for the first time in my life today! As for the Famicom/NES version, I can’t figure out how to get past that ball & chain boss.
As a kid, playing Gyruss for the first time, I think that may have been the first time I ever had played an arcade game with an actual soundtrack. I’m talking besides Atari’s Star Wars… a game with a continuous soundtrack! Space Invaders has that great bass tune, but that only half counts. I’m talking Johann Sebastian BACH! As a kid, I was like, “DUDE, CAPTAIN NEMO MUSIC.” Before I found out he was Nadia’s father… No, I mean the Disney movie I watched over and over again on the Disney Channel whenever it was on because there was nothing else to do, which gave me a passion for sea monsters and stuff. Hearing this in the game, with a sped-up tempo, really blew my mind. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor! Classy.
I’m playing Gyruss, chasing alien starfighters in warp tunnels as they speed towards planet Earth, destroying them before they can approach my homeworld. And when I got that shot powerup for the first time, when it gave a real deeper, bass to the sound to the shots, I really felt like I had serious firepower at my fingertips. Oh man.
How many times have I told you kids to get off my lawn? I’m playing Gyruss.
This game came out last year, but I just now learned of it. Annalynn is a new game with an early ’80s arcade game appeal. It is a sort of a cross between Mario Bros. and Pac-Man.
The intro to this game introduces a miner named Annalynn, who finds herself in an underground construction zone. These four cute snakes, Randy, Candy, Handy, and Mike are down there and they don’t like this intruder and will chase you. Anna’s pick axe is broken, so now she is defenseless.
It took me a bit to figure out how to play. As you can see, it’s a side-view platformer arena, sort of like Mario Bros. The goal is to collect all of the gems, just like Pac-Man. But you can’t jump up to hit the beams to stun the snakes like Mario would. Your only button allows you to jump. The snakes cannot jump, but they can slither into the snake holes in the background to move up or down to different platforms. Also, there are some half platform sections where you can jump through.
The snakes respawn by falling from holes in the ceiling. They fall way faster than I would expect for an early ’80s game. I’m not griping, but I think I just need to get used to how this game works.
When you grab a power jem, the snakes all turn blue for a brief while and you can kick the crap out of them, so it’s just like Pac-Man in that regard.
You’ll be alerted when a bonus appears in the arena, like a cupcake in level 1. Once you’ve collected all the gems, you proceed to round 2. Each round appears unique.
After the 4th round, ropes are introduced, harkening to Donkey Kong Jr.
As expected, there is a simulated CRT mode with scanlines, but this takes it a bit further and simulates the curvature of an old monitor. Wow, that’s a neat effect, but I think I’ll leave it standard. There is also an option to give the snakes hats and sunglasses too.
The Proton utility allows this game to run perfectly in Linux. A 4:3 aspect ratio can be selected, which is always a welcome feature for me because I prefer 4:3 for my desktop. Actually, the 16:9 was enabled by default and I didn’t really notice it. All it really affects is the side art, which is very fabulously retro as well. The snakes are so cute! I think I will make iron bead versions of them.
This lamp was over half off on Yahoo Shopping Japan, with free shipping. I couldn’t resist. It arrived last night. It now sits on top of my CD rack, next to my Diamond Select TWOK Enterprise, under my fabulous Nadia poster. This is on my side of the bedroom.
