Putting the EEE! in Enix

I was looking up something or other on Google Images, and this abstract figure presumed to be Enix's first mascot appeared. Is it a crudely drawn robot brought to life in a shareware paint program? A discarded drawing from Hungarian animation studio Klasky-Csupo? A random background character in a Dire Straights video? I'm still not sure, but since I had to see it, now so do you.

image from Giant Bomb

I asked around on the Talking Time forums, and one member insisted that it was part of a promotion to encourage hobbyist programmers to submit their games to Enix. Another guessed that it was a digital man inside your computer who handles all the calculations; a sort of number-crunching ghost in the machine which makes your games come to life. Finally, someone observed that whatever it was, it looked like it was caught in the middle of a bowel movement. Come to think of it, it does look like it's squatting, and that circle it's clutching in its spindly pixel arm could be an extra large roll of toilet paper...

Whatever this thing is or happens to be doing, Enix's corporate successor Square-Enix isn't eager to discuss it. Actually, there's a lot of stuff Enix did back in the 1980s that Square-Enix would like to pretend never happened, including the computer game Lolita Syndrome. I'll let the Wikipedia entry explain that one for me, but whatever you're already thinking, it's worse than that.

Only One of these Turtles is Played by Clorey Feld- Cory- Uh, Cloris Leachman

What they said.
(image from Turtlepedia)

Hey, I remembered that thing I wanted to bring up earlier! It's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, coming to every major game console in... uh, sometime this year. I can't find a solid release date, but whenever that is, I want it. It's got thirteen video games from the good old days, when both the heroes in a half-shell and Konami as a game developer were way radical and not a total bummer. That includes the Turtles arcade game, the sequel to the Turtles arcade game, the home version of the sequel of the Turtles arcade game, the NES exclusive sequel to the home version of the sequel to the Turtles arcade game, and Hyperstone Heist for the Genesis, which was almost but not quite a home version of the sequel of the Turtles arcade game. 

(Phew.)

Other highlights include all of the Tournament Fighters games (but particularly the Super NES version, which was better than the other two), all three GameBoy Turtles games, and that despicable side-scrolling platformer with the nigh impossible underwater stages. If that wasn't enough, the most popular games have online support, to reproduce that arcade experience in the comfort of your own home. You can also play the Japanese versions, a feature that was very much appreciated on the Sega Genesis Mini where some games were markedly different depending on the region you selected. You're getting a pretty comprehensive package, and it's being handled by Digital Eclipse, so you know the emulation will be good. 

The price of admission is $39.99, which is acceptable when you consider that this puts each game in the package at just over three dollars. Who am I kidding... Konami pretty much had me from "hello" with this one.

It Was Effect, The Droste Effect

Yikes. It's been just a little too long since I've posted to this blog. There was something I wanted to cover here shortly after the last post, but I forgot what that was, and I just lost interest. I'm pretty sure it was important, which is why it's so galling that it slipped my mind.

Anyway! Rolling Thunder is set to be released for the Switch- again- courtesy of Hamster's Arcade Archives. Is there any point to buying Rolling Thunder when the game was already released twice for this system, including in a collection of arcade hits that quite often costs less than Rolling Thunder on its own? Probably not, but it's there if you want it. For the third time.

image from some guy on Reddit

So, in St. Patrick's Day news, I've been playing Tunic on the Xbox One, which stars a little fox who thinks he's Link from The Legend of Zelda, trapped in an isometric world with a stubbornly immobile camera and various creatures who hunger for verdant vulpine flesh. You will get confused by the perspective, and you will die frequently, complete with an off-putting "REE REE REE" noise seemingly robbed from the old Hercules television series. No, really, I don't want to hear this a half dozen times over the span of fifteen minutes. I keep thinking Hera is sneaking up behind me with a knife.

Yet for all my frustration with the game, I keep coming back to Tunic, for both those tiny morsels of progress I make after hours of struggling (typically dropping a bridge or unfurling a rope to connect two distant areas), and for its occasional moments of genius. Take for instance the dark cavern which can only be explored with a lantern, and which is chock full of gargoyle busts with targeting lasers set in every direction. The trick is to break each sculpture in the proper order, so the lasers from the heads in the back remain blocked and you don't get blasted into Swiss cheese. Having to collect pages from an NES-style instruction manual is also a nice touch, and reminds me of importing Saturn games in the 1990s, trying to decipher each page of the included manuals in a language I could barely understand.

I CAN'T READ THIS CRAZY MOON LANGUAGE!
(image from Game Informer)

There was something else I felt like mentioning. The Sega Genesis homebrew train just keeps chuggin' along thanks to Brazilians dedicated to this thirty-four year old system, because they realistically don't have other options. (For more information, watch Stop Skeletons From Fighting's review of the Zeebo. Basically, if you live in Brazil, you either play the Sega Genesis, or shell out two months' pay for a ten year old console.)

The latest Genesis homebrew to come from the land of towering Jesus statues and green-furred feral men is Space Invaders, a port of the decades old arcade game. Is it as good as Space Invaders '91 for the same system? Ha ha! No. Is it even as good as that weird Super Game Boy cartridge that had a Super Nintendo version of Space Invaders hidden on it? Not really... the color limitations of the Genesis add unwelcome dithering to the lunar background which looked just fine on the Super NES. 

Still, it's a strong conversion in its own right, as you can see from the link above. At forty three years old, the arcade version of Space Invaders is a little crusty, but for Brazilians, retro gaming is an inescapable way of life. If you're not willing to play older video games in that country, chances are you won't be playing anything.

Do the Mar10

Good news for all you penny-pinching gamers out there... Nintendo has dropped the price of several of its most popular Switch games in anticipation of March 10th, recognized by the company as Mario Day. Usually I roll my eyes at such fabricated, corporate-sponsored holidays (don't even get me started on May the 4th...), but for twenty dollars off games that almost never see such hefty discounts, I'm willing to play along just this once. Games on sale include Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Luigi's Mansion 3, and Super Mario 3D World, the latter of which I grabbed for myself. You'll find more games right here on Nintendo's sales and deals page, and there are rumors that even more titles will see price cuts on the tenth of the month.

Speaking of recent deals, there are two different bundles on Itch.io (just say that name and try not to scratch something in response!) raising money for the war-torn country of Ukraine. One bundle is a bit more humble than the other, with fewer games, but it's also less expensive, with a five dollar minimum. Buy one or buy them both... whatever you decide, it's for a good cause.

The warmly received Genesis port of
Ghouls 'n Ghosts had a lot of detail removed to
squeeze the game into a smaller cartridge.
This WIP hack by aMaru puts a lot of it back.
Note the roots bursting through the rock
formations and the more smoothly sloping hills.

What else? Oh yes. Thanks to the Sega Genesis Development Kit, especially devoted fans of the system are fixing arcade ports that missed the mark when they were first released, either due to small cartridge sizes or publisher indifference (cough cough Acclaim cough). Of special note are Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Sunset Riders. The former is getting a facelift, with tons of details added to the foreground and background, and the latter is being redesigned from scratch, since Konami's shaky port was frankly beyond help. Is all of this necessary now that we have a half dozen ways to play the real arcade games at home? Not really. Is it fun to see what the Genesis can do without ROM constraints holding it back? Oh yes, definitely. Special thanks to the always helpful Master Linkuei for spilling the tea on these projects.