Armagideon Time

As I mentioned during the first Blast Processed Life post, one of the deciding factors behind my acquisition of a Genesis in the June of 1990 was Sega’s limited-time offer of a free Power Base Converter peripheral and choice of launch title with the purchase of their 16-bit console.

The Power Base Converter, a clunky pass-though device which allowed one to play Master System games on the Genesis (though the actual backwards compatibility was built into the Genesis system’s chipset),  was the real draw, as I had a huge library of SMS games and an increasingly unreliable console on which to play them.  

I was a bit less enthusiastic about the choice of free games Sega offered though the promotion, consisting as they did of so-so (Space Harrier II) to terrible (Super Thunder Blade) versions of older arcade titles with a few sports games and forgettable original efforts thrown into the mix.  I eventually decided — by default — upon Last Battle…

…a side-scrolling beat ‘em up set in a harsh post-apocalyptic world where burly dudes in high fashion bikerware wage high-stakes martial arts battles over the Earth’s scarce remaining resources.

If that sounds a lot like the premise to Fist of the North Star (a.k.a. Hokuto No Ken), that’s because Last Battle was a license-scrubbed and sanitized localization of a Japanese game based on the ultra-violent anime and manga franchise.  (Nor was it the first time Sega pulled this trick, either.)

Instead of whipping up a brand new storyline and cast of characters, the folks in charge of bringing the game to the North American market went the copy and replace route, retaining the source material’s confusing backstory of dynastic betrayal but with new and laughable character names.  For example, the taciturn, organ-detonating protagonist Kenshiro…

…was stuck with the Eye of Argon-esque handle “Aarzak” (short for “Aaron Zachary Throckmorton III”). 

In addition, Last Battle dropped the (tame) gore effects associated with the Hokuto No Ken franchise…

…and indulged in a little pallete -swapping to make the bosses (destined for  grisly demises) a little less “human” in appearance…because making someone pop open and explode like an oversized zit is wrong unless said person has turquoise skin.

Weird localization decisions aside, Last Battle is a perfect example of how an innovative and potentially great good entertaining game can get hamstrung by a number of fatal flaws. 

The game’s visuals and sounds (in that Phillip-Glass-meets-Mike-Oldfield-meets-Pink-Lady way common to early Genesis titles) are great, and the punch/kick/jump configuration made possible by the Genesis’s three-button controller represented a paradgim shift in how one played console beat ‘em ups.

Last Battle also took a page from Bionic Commando, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Clash at Demonhead in terms of level design that incorporated branching paths laid out on a boardgame-styled world map…

…with diverse locations ranging from typical punch-and-run levels to obstacle-filled “dungeons” to boss-fight arenas.  Finishing an area usually results in a short and nonsensical encounter with a supporting character who grants Aarzak some form of power-up. 

In theory, Last Battle could have been a 16-bit, single player successor to the much-loved NES RPG/beat ‘em up, River City Ransom.  In practice, however, the game as a whole falls way short of the sum of its parts.

Despite the Last Battle‘s nominally branching pathways, there is a very strict linear route which must be followed to complete Aarzak’s travels, and it happens to be the most punishing and repetitive one.  Even worse, the game is of the old fashioned “finish in one sitting” school of design, having neither a save nor password system…

…which wouldn’t be an insurmountable issue if Last Battle didn’t rely so heavily on a slow process of attrition to make up the game’s challenge.  While this may have been intended to make sidetrips for a needed strength or health boost a strategic decision, it too often results in a completely disproportionate cost-to-gain ratio exacerbated by the game’s fondness for bleeding Aarzak out with frustrating juggle hits from both enemies and the environment.

As much as my brother and I (Fist of the North Star fans, the both us) tried to enjoy Last Battle, the game’s irritating flaws ended up being too much to bear. 

In fact, the only vivid memory I have of the game comes from a few years after the cartridge was consigned to the back shelf of our entertainment center and during one of the rougher patches in our fraternal relationship.  For some reason I dropped the “All is not well with the world” line from the game’s title crawl into a conversation we were having.  My brother wracked his brain to remember where it came from, and assumed it was from some lofty work of literature.

I popped Last Battle into the console and squatted down in front of the TV, revealing the source of the quote while I mocked him for being pretentious.  Not realizing how pissed off he was, I gave him a back-handed shove…which he responded to by tackling me and pummeling my head with his fists.  I came out of it with some bruises on my face and a temporary loss of hearing in my left ear. 

It was the last of our kiddie-crap physical confrontations.  He thinks it’s because he finally whomped me.  I think it’s because we finally grew the fuck up.  Whatever the case, it was certainly more entertaining and memorable than Last Battle ever was.

I was reviewing the weekly stats for the site this morning when I noticed the following entry under the list of Google search referrals:

The great Paul Weller one stated, “What the public wants, the public gets,” and who am I to argue with the former frontman of the Style Council?

And so, without futher ado, I give you “anime Andrew Weiss”:

…along with a selection of his favorite officiallyanime-centric music videos (as opposed to the amateur efforts cobbled together by fans with the insatiable need to see Clint Black’s “Nothin’ but the Taillights” dubbed over some grainy Tenchi Muyo footage):

Daft Punk – Digital Love

Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend

Ken Ishii – Extra

Today’s fans of manga and anime are spoiled for choice, with a wide variety of classic and contemporary titles available from retailers (or more dubious channels), but this wasn’t always the case.

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, fans had to make do with what was offered (at extortionate prices) by the neckbearded vendors on the local comic convention circuit or, if you were geographically lucky, stocked at one of the better comic book shops. The selection was generally limited, and centered upon a cluster of better-known properties (Gundam, Robotech, Star Blazers) — a hodgepodge of import soundtrack LPs, “Roman Album” books, older issues of Animage, toys, models….and from some of the shadier sources, bootleg videocassettes.

The fansubbing scene hadn’t gotten off the ground yet. Apart from the handful of official English manga translations or American-produced adaptations, all the material was presented for sale, as is, in the original Japanese…and yet that did little to dampen fan enthusiasm. The plot summaries published in American fanzines helped, but even when those weren’t available it wasn’t that difficult to follow the goings-on in most cases.

It was a perfect example of fan-based gnosticism; not in the trendy pseudo-mystic way the term tends to bandied about, but in the sense of an insular form of devotion where scarce fragments of gleaned knowledge take on a mythic significance outside of any objective judgements of value, where the divine logos is revealed through superficially profound strings of cross-lingual nonsense like Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross or Aura Battler Dunbine.

This was the mindset I was locked into when I came across a mention of Zillion in the “coming soon” section of a pack-in flyer of SMS games sometime in 1987. Unlike the other featured titles, which were illustrated some crude monochome sketch art, the listing for Zillion featured a small full-color anime cel…which I promptly cut out and saved in my wallet as I marked down the long weeks until the game’s release.

The game was based on the anime series Akai Koudan Zillion (English: Red Photon Zillion or Red Optical Bullet Zillion, depending on the translator). A co-production between Tatsunoko and Sega, Zillion’s story centered around a group of teens, “The White Nights” (often mistranslated as “White Nuts”) — rookie J.J., tough-but-girly Apple, and overconfident ladies’ man Champ — who use special Laser Tag pistols (upon which the Sega Master System’s light gun peripheral was modeled) to fight of the faceless Noza invaders and their equally faceless leader, Baron Ricks.

The general consensus from anime enthusiasts is that the series was pretty lousy, and based on the few dubbed/fansubbed episodes I’ve been able to see, I have to grudgingly agree…though it isn’t that much worse than most anime series from that era.

I knew nothing about the anime or its development history at the time, but I did know I had to own a copy of the game. As it turned out, Zillion ended up being one of the better titles in the Master System’s library. The game is considered to be the system’s equivalent to the NES Metroid, though that’s a broad comparion at best. Both games involve sidescrolling exploration of an underground complexes, but where Metroid is an incredibly deep action game with a vast labyrinth, Zillion is a much more compact and methodical affair in which mine-and-enemy-filled corridors separate single-screen rooms containing simple environmental and memorization puzzles.

Enter a room, negotiate the hazards (turrets, enemies, sensors, barriers) or use a terminal to shut them down, retrieve the four-symbol key code from containers, unlock the door, repeat. The ultimate goal is to locate the five floppy discs (because the Noza’s advancements in deathtrap technology are offset by their pitiful advances in data storage) hidden in the maze so that the player can enter the self-destruct sequence on the base’s master mainframe.

There are cumulative power-ups that will increase the character’s agility, endurance, and firepower, as well as allow them to spot hidden sensor beams. The player begins the game in control of J.J., but both the lithe Apple and resilient Champ can be freed from captivity and used (through the pause menu) as playable characters. Besides functioning as “extra lives,” for the player, the other team members bring their own individual strengths and weaknesses, though these effectively level out after nabbing a couple power-ups.

Zillion can still be an entertaining experience, as long as one has the right amounts of patience and nostalgia. The repetitive nature of the gameplay and in-game environments — not to mention the lack of any form of password or save system — can make for a rather tedious slog. It’s not a problem unique to Zillion, but something part and parcel of retrogaming in general. In an industry driven by technological stardust, rare indeed are the games that endure outside the cozy bubble of nostalgia.

Then again, sometimes nostalgia is enough, and a host of glaring faults can be salved over by the bittersweet recollections of a time when a hobby felt mysterious and exotic…and I would frantically scribble away in my sketchbook, trying to copy character portraits before the cutscene ended.

Recommended listening:

One of the advantages of that new-fangled 8-bit technology was that it became possible to generate background music more sophisticated than the 2600 era’s harsh beeps and boops. The Zillion SMS game featured several very respectable digitized renditions of songs from the anime series’ j-pop soundtrack.

Here’s the original version of Yuhki Risa’s “Push,” Akai Koudan Zillion‘s end theme:

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…and here’s the in-game version, redone by Sega’s resident Master system maestro, “Bo.”

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One of the more baffling aspects of fan behavior is the tendency to suspend qualitative judgement when it comes to fan’s objects of affection. Past experience, empirical evidence, and omnious portents get shoved to the margins when certain Pavlovian buttons are pushed. There will be plenty of post-situ moaning and whining about getting burned, but there is little hesitation about leaping into the fire in the first place.

So it was with Teen Andrew and TransBot. As I mentioned a few days ago, I used to be a pretty fervent fan of anime, especially the giant/real robo stuff. The popularity of the Transformers and Robotech franchises meant the toy and hobby stores of the mid-1980′s were well-stocked with all manner of shady (and shoddy) bootleg mecha-merchandise intended to siphon off a sweet slice of the market share.

The phenomenon wasn’t limited to just toys and models. Videogames also cashed in on the trend, though this was wasn’t so much cynical marketing as the simple realities of the gaming industry at the time. American game developers were either still struggling from the industry-wide crash of a few years prior or had moved into the realm of computer gaming. Arcade and console fare was dominated by Japanese imports reflecting Japanese popcult trends. That robo-jockey stuff was big in America at the time didn’t hurt, either.

That’s not to say that cynical manipulation didn’t factor into the equation, as the name “TransBot” suggests a deliberate attempt to piggy-back on the name recognition of a couple of hot properties:

In practice, the formula comes closer to this:

While the official screenshots and gameplay footage suggested epic battles against faux-Zentraedi battle pods…

…the game is actually a very dumbed-down rip-off of Konami’s Gradius. The player must blast through waves of uninspired enemies — spiked balls, tumbling cube ships, and hamburgesian flying saucers — across a horizontally-scrolling generically “sci-fi” landscape. Shooting the transport trucks that occasionally roll across the bottom of the screen gives the player access to power ups, which improve weapon strength or transform the player’s ship into an unmissable target a rather goofy-looking robot.

In order to compensate for the utter shallowness of the gameplay, the developers decided to spice things up a little by tossing in the much loved gimmick of arbitrary and artificial difficulty. Unlike Gradius (or even Action Fighter), where sequenced power ups add a strategic element to play, TransBot uses a roulette-based system of determining upgrades. Nabbing a power up sphere causes an icon to rapidly cycle through an alphabetical sequence of potential rewards, leaving it up to the player’s reflexes and blind chance to determine the end result.

If this wasn’t irritating in itself, the fact that the power ups have only a limited number of uses and the boss level can only be reached by use of a specific upgrade in a specific location makes the game a nigh-unbearable exercise in frustration.

That didn’t stop me from wasting a few score hours of my life playing and attempting to beat the game.

Why? Because it had giant robots in it!

Duh.