VIDEO SYSTEM
Ah, Video System! Who
could forget the creators of Aero Fighters and, uh, the sequels to Aero
Fighters? I kid, I kid… Video System
made other games, too. There just
weren’t many good ones. The lone standout is Rabbit Punch, a
side-scrolling shooter starring cute robotic bunnies in a surprisingly
threatening futuristic setting. The game
was brought to the United States by Nolan Bushnell’s Sente, and later found its
way to the Japanese TurboGrafx-16 as Rabio Lepus Special.
Video System went on to create many, many Aero Fighters
games for many, many formats. Most of
these were for the Neo-Geo, but there was a Super NES conversion of the first
game published by Video System’s Mc O’River label. Why the company thought it would be a good
idea to name its US branch after a fast food menu item is anyone’s guess, but
that lapse in judgment could explain why Video System got super downsized in
2001, closing its Japanese headquarters along with its ridiculously named
American division. Many of Video
System’s programmers saw the signs of impending doom early and fled the company
to start Psikyo in the early 1990s.
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| Dammit, stop gawking and get me to a hospital! |
Here’s the rub for Genesis owners… they didn’t get an Aero Fighters game, or even a
port of Rabbit Punch. Video System’s one
and only Genesis release was the charitably titled Super Volleyball, designed
by the masters of horror at Micronics.
You’ll probably recognize Micronics as the programmers of every crappy
NES game you ever hated, and that tradition of (negligible) quality lives on in
this hugely frustrating sports game, where you’re always offscreen when the
ball is served and have no reasonable hope of returning it. Even if you can intercept the computer opponent’s bionic spikes, there’s a good
chance they’ll knock you over, leaving you curled up on the floor as the other
team moves in for the kill. As a final
insult, there are numerous advertisements in the background for Rabio Lepus, a
game that doesn’t even exist on the Genesis.
Yes kids, Video System hates you thiiiiiiis much!
DREAMWORKS
It’s important to state for the record that this DreamWorks,
a Minnesota-based company that was briefly in the video game business, has
nothing to do with the film studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey
Katzenberg, and David Geffen. Evidently,
the DreamWorks that made Genesis games was a division of Toy Soldiers, Inc.,
making you wonder if they also made those little green army men your brother
used to stick up his nose.
Precious little is known about DreamWorks, but one thing
that’s clear from looking at their slim collection of games is that they were
pretty tight with Nippon Computer Systems.
Also known as Masaya, this studio made a name for itself with eccentric,
distinctly Japanese titles like Langrisser, Assault Suits Leynos, Schibibunman,
and Cho Aniki, the preferred target of ridicule for internet humorists for over
fifteen years. Only two of DreamWorks’
games, the delightful if derivative Fire Shark and the just plain derivative
Mystical Fighter, were designed by other studios.
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| Seven years later, I finally beat the first stage. |
The game shown in Sega’s ad is Target Earth, part of the
Assault Suits Leynos series along with Cybernator for the Super NES. If you love heavily armed mechs, starships so
large you expect to see “We Brake for Nobody” bumper stickers hanging over their
thrusters, and merciless missions guaranteed to make you cry, this is your
game. In fact, if that’s your thing, you
might want to skip Target Earth and head straight for its sequel, Assault Suits
Leynos 2 for the Sega Saturn. It’s just
as vicious, but a lot prettier!
RAZOR SOFT
This company made a lot of noise in the early days of the Sega
Genesis, toeing the line of good taste and frustrating parents’ groups with
obscenely violent games like Technocop (shown here) and Death Duel. However, in its rush to offend everyone on
the face of the planet, Razor Soft made an enemy of Sega, the only console
manufacturer willing to publish its games.
After an ugly fight over some bare boobs in Stormlord, Razor Soft fell
on its own blade, and was quickly forgotten after Mortal Kombat became the last
word in video game violence.
Finding information about Razor Soft twenty years after its
demise has proven exceedingly difficult.
The company doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, and Giant Bomb offers only
an address to their long shuttered office and the helpful tip, “Razor Soft is a
company that makes video games.” Yeah,
thanks for that news flash, putzes.
However, research on their games
reveals that many were originally developed by European studios for the Amiga
computer, suggesting that Razor Soft was a fly by night operation that
purchased the licenses in the hopes of riding a wave of controversy all the way
to the bank.
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| This can't end well... |
One of these games was Technocop, developed by N2O creators Gremlin Graphics. I was actually pretty excited about this game when I first read a review
of the computer version in Video Games & Computer Entertainment. I can only presume that teenaged me was
suckered in by the promise of blood and guts, because as a game, it’s charmless
and wholly unremarkable. As the titular
(heh heh, “titular”) cop, you first drive to a crime scene on a hauntingly
empty highway. There’s no scenery and no
forks in the road… just a green void on either side of the asphalt,
occasionally broken up with trees and signs.
Eventually, you’ll step out of your car and into a maze-like slum, where
children kick you in the shins and punks beg to be blasted into hamburger. You’ve got five hyper-accelerated minutes to
take down your target… fail and you’ll have to hop in your car to find the
criminal’s next hideout. Or you could
rip the cartridge out of your Genesis and throw it at the wall… that works,
too.
TECHNOSOFT
Technosoft was, to quote our vice president, kind of a big f’n
deal to Genesis owners. Their first game
for the system, Thunder Force II, was a fusion of two wildly different shoot ‘em
ups. Players hunted down targets from an
overhead perspective in the odd-numbered stages, and clawed their way through
side-scrolling gauntlets in the even-numbered ones. Critics of the time hated the seek and
destroy missions but saw promise in the side-scrolling stages, hoping that
Technosoft would sharpen its focus on them in the sequel.
Technosoft’s response to the criticism was to split Thunder
Force II cleanly down the middle and make new games out of the two halves. The overhead stages evolved into Herzog Zwei,
an early real-time strategy game most keenly appreciated by fans of the genre,
and celebrated in a nerdy rap opus by Del the Funky Homosapien. The side view stages blossomed into Thunder
Force III, which dazzled players with its special effects and screen-filling
firepower. Technosoft didn't get much mileage out of Herzog Zwei, but Thunder Force III was given two sequels, as well as a couple of
collections on the Sega Saturn.
Where is Technosoft now? The word on
Wikipedia is that the company was purchased by a pachinko manufacturer after
punching out a handful of Saturn and Playstation games. However, Technosoft does have its own web site,
which claims that its back catalog is available on the Playstation Network in
Japan. There’s also mention of a Thunder
Force VI for the Playstation 2, but it’s not likely the game was ever finished.
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| If this jungle was to scale with the ships, its trees would probably be 500 feet tall. |
Well, that went on a little long! Let’s talk briefly about Thunder Force
III. It’s one of those games that must
have seemed incredible for the time but comes off as a little flavorless
now. There’s a whole lot of tiling going
on in the background, the gameplay is frustratingly cheap, and the enemies are
largely forgettable; certainly not on par with R-Type’s tail-flailing alien
monstrosity or the gleaming metal fish in Sagaia. There are a whole lot of shooters on the
Genesis, and Thunder Force III isn’t one of the best ones.
MICRONET
Many of the publishers on this list that vanished along with
the Sega Genesis met an expected end… either they went bankrupt, or were
devoured by a more successful rival. However,
Micronet went an entirely different direction, releasing a trickle of games
through the end of the century. After
the death of the Dreamcast in 2001, the company abandoned the increasingly
aggressive video game industry, and found sanctuary in publishing computer
animation software. You can get a trial
of its rendering tool 3D Atelier from the Micronet web site… although the fact
that it “now supports DirectX8” suggests that the software might be due for an
update.
Before doing its best Pixar imitation, Micronet lived up to
its puny name as a software publisher of little consequence. The company first got its feet wet on the
Japanese MSX computer, releasing titles like Helicoid and Outlaw Suikoden,
before diving into the deeper waters of the Genesis and Sega CD. Micronet tried to compensate for its well-deserved
inferiority complex by distributing games under the Bignet label in the United States.
When savvy players didn’t take the bait, Micronet upped the ante by
teaming up with fellow underachiever Absolute Entertainment and changing the
brand’s name to Extreme Entertainment Group.
That too fell flat, with both Absolute and Extreme disappearing after a
couple of years. Micronet’s last
desperate grasp for glory in America was Robotica, a grungy first-person
shooter released by Acclaim for the Sega Saturn. Was there any part of that last sentence that
sounds like it would translate to a fun game?
Most reviewers didn’t think so, either.
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| Junction has a slow down button... not that it needs one. |
Micronet has the distinction of creating TWO of the games in
Sega’s advertisement. Curse was already
given the curbstomping it deserved, so I’ll put my blood-stained heel on the
throat of Micronet’s next Genesis release, Junction. The Konami branding suggests that good times
could be had from this puzzle game, but the sluggish action and confusing
three-quarters perspective will have you reaching for another cartridge long
before you’ve run out of lives. It’s a
shame too, because I really loved Loco-Motion, the tile-sliding, track-building
arcade oldie that inspired this. The
best explanation I can offer for Junction’s sketchy design is that it was only based on Konami’s past work, and that
Micronet pasted the company’s name on the box to ward off lawsuits and move
copies of a game that otherwise would have been glued to store shelves.
BONUS!
TAITO
Taito is curiously absent from this list of early developers,
which is puzzling as it was not only one of the first licensees on the Sega
Genesis, but also the one with the most star power. These guys gave the world Space Invaders and
Bubble Bobble! How do you not brag about
this?!
Anyway, Taito has a deep history… deep enough to have been
in business before video games existed.
The company sold vending machines and music jukeboxes in Japan until it
took a chance on Pong in the early 1970s.
Encouraged by its success, Taito released the influential Gunfight and
the record-smashing Space Invaders years later.
When the latter game caused coin shortages throughout Japan, Taito
jumped into the video game industry with both feet and never looked back.
Taito’s first Genesis game, Final Blow, was distributed in
America by Sega. Sega changed the title
to James “Buster” Douglas’ Knockout Boxing, thinking that it could one up
Nintendo by giving a game to the man who dropped the mighty Mike Tyson. However, it didn’t count on Douglas losing
his next boxing match, and every match since, shortly after the game was
released.
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| Well, that's one way to fry a fish... |
Taito’s later games were published by Taito itself, and
varied wildly in quality. When Taito was
at the top of its game, it gave Genesis owners top-shelf titles like Space
Invaders ’91, Sagaia, and Ultimate Qix.
When the company was under the weather, abominations like Chase HQ II,
Growl, and a badly botched conversion of Cadash were the result. It became clear after a couple of years and a half dozen crappy Genesis releases that Taito’s true love was the Super NES. The company released just one Genesis game in 1993
(Flintstones! Oh joy!), then abandoned the system completely a year later.
If a Taito game had been in Sega’s advertisement, I’d like
to believe it would have been Sagaia. It
takes a lot to stand out in a library packed with side-scrolling shooters, but
Sagaia delivers the goods, with sleek metallic visuals, creative aquatic-themed
enemy designs, and branching paths that make each playthrough a fresh experience. The critics loved this one- EGM gave it
straight eights-and you’re sure to agree.
Special thanks to Wikipedia, Moby Games, GameFAQs, and Replacement Docs for their assistance in researching and fact-checking this feature.
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