The Tower of Retro-Babble: A Mysterious Annex

Remember that Namco Museum mini-cabinet I hacked last year, and became worryingly obsessed with over the next couple of months? I don't play it all that much anymore, but sometimes I'll take it out for shiggles and get in a few games of some arcade obscurity I haven't played in years.

Tucked away in a dusty corner of the cabinet's system menu are the most obscure titles of all... those non-hits from tiny companies that flashed into existence in the blink of an eye, then flickered out almost as quickly. These are the orphans of the arcade scene, frequently denied greater fame on home consoles. They were destined to remain forever trapped in laundromats, 7-11s, and truck stops... or at least until pop culture vultures like Piko Interactive swooped down to pick at whatever meat was left clinging to their bones.

Most of these games are easy enough to leave in the past, but there are a small handful of titles that deserve your attention, even in 2024. Read on to find out which of these lesser known arcade games shouldn't be skipped the next time you fire up your favorite emulation box.

ANTEATER
Tago Electronics
Found: on the arcade game show Starcade

It's a long way down this
anthill, but those scrumptious
ant queens are worth the risk.

Hot on the heels of another video game about a weird mammal, Kangaroo, comes this title about the big-nosed, bushy-tailed, ant-oholic anteater. The title character sticks his considerable snout into a anthill, and pulls out anything six-legged and tasty with a tongue that the player controls. You can even eat those juicy beetles if you attack them with the tip of the tongue... just don't let them touch anything else. Hold the fire button to make a tactical retreat and slurp the tongue back into the anteater's snout, but don't dawdle! When the sun falls and night arrives, so do the poisonous spiders...

Anteater is bit like Pac-Man, and a bit like the cell phone favorite Snake, but a whole lot more like Oil's Well for the ColecoVision, along with its multimedia-flavored reboot on home computers ten years later. It's anyone's guess as to which game came first, but Anteater is a perfectly palatable take on the formula. Nothing about the graphics or sound will blow your mind, but Anteater doesn't need to make a strong first impression on the player. Like Tetris and Sokoban, Anteater is more about flexing your neurons than delighting the senses.

CHINESE HERO
Taiyo Systems
Found: at a rustic theme park near the Illinois border

I want to preface this review with a note about where I found this game. My family stumbled upon a woodsy theme park somewhere in Illinois, with log cabin buildings and that crowd-pleasin', pants-wettin' attraction, the flume ride. 

The digitized screams at least
give Chinese Heroes the
ambiance of an epic kung fu
movie. You won't find much
of the excitement, though.

The experience probably wouldn't have made much of an impact on me if it hadn't been for the arcade. Tucked away in one of the buildings was a wonderfully random assortment of lesser known titles... Road Runner, by Atari Games! Us vs. Them, by Mylstar Electronics! Bank Panic, by Sega! As a young arcade nerd eager to make new discoveries, this place was the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon, and the Klotman Diamond all rolled into one.

One game that stood out even among these oddballs was Chinese Hero, by Taiyo Systems. It looked an awful lot like an NES game I'd rented a year before, and that wasn't a coincidence... turns out Chinese Hero was the arcade antecedent of Kung Fu Heroes. It also just so happens that Taiyo Systems was the previous title of the company we now know as Culture Brain. Sorry, I could never get past that name... it sounds like an unsanitary lab experiment gone horribly wrong.

Anyway! Chinese Hero feels like a top-down take on Super Mario Bros., with your two... uh, Chinese heroes punching blocks to earn power ups and taking down wandering enemies by stomping on their heads. One could give the game credit for its forward-thinking design, but one could just as easily give Chinese Heroes an X scrawled in red pen for its nebulous collision detection and game rules that are hard to grasp. Things seem to happen at the CPU's whim, whether it's a bonus stage seemingly served up at random or a mummified monster that chases you around the playfield. The bandaged behemoth can be beaten, but it takes many "tumbling kicks" to cut it down to size, and you risk getting stomped flat every time you try. What's safe to touch on this thing? What will I touch when I finally land from this Moon Sault jump? You spins the wheel and you take your chances.

Clearly, Culture Brain was going somewhere with this game's design, but Chinese Heroes spends so much time wandering around aimlessly that it never finds its destination, or a justification for its existence. If you're looking to scratch an itch for kung fu fightin', leave this one behind and take the high road (namely, the Shaolin's Road) instead.

CRAZY KONG
Falcon
Found: in a convenience store a stone's throw from Mackinac Island
(and also your nightmares)

These days we have so much technology that the excess fills up closets, garages, and eventually landfills as e-waste. That wasn't always the case, though! In 1982, the hardware used in arcade games was expensive, and shortages would force developers to cut corners. Take Crazy Kong, for example. When Donkey Kong became a smash hit, Nintendo couldn't make enough cabinets to satisfy demand, and turned to external developer Falcon to fill in the gaps. (Falcon. A "fly by night" company if ever there was one. Heh.)

Falcon's solution was to port Donkey Kong to the older, less sophisticated Crazy Climber hardware, and the end result was one of the most deeply unsettling video games of the early 1980s. You don't notice it so much when you're a kid, banging away at a cabinet with the volume turned down in the corner of a dimly lit party store. However, with the benefit of MAME and sufficiently loud speakers, you quickly realize that Crazy Kong is the Black Mirror version of Donkey Kong... familiar, yet disturbingly wrong in so many ways.

What's wrong with this picture?
Just about everything, really, but
especially "Crazy Kong's"
head twisted in the opposite
direction.

The music in the introduction has taken on a discordant edge, and the animation of Donkey- er, Crazy Kong carrying Pauline to the top of the skyscraper feels... off. Then the game begins, and you notice the pleasantly springy "boing" of Mario's jump has been replaced with Crazy Climber's harsh, squeaky "wi'yah!" Crazy Kong doesn't grab barrels and throw them at you... they just pass through him, as if he willed them into existence. I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of them roll out of his butt. Pauline seems to float a couple pixels above where she's set (she must have learned that trick from fellow distressed damsel Princess Peach...), and starbursts that appear when barrels are struck with a hammer hang in the air long after they should have vanished.

This comedy of terrors continues as you progress, from a stitched-together cement factory to the final confrontation against a Kong drawn wrong. Loosen all the rivets holding the girders together and Crazy Kong plummets to the ground, snapping his neck on impact. As much as he would like to join him in the sweet release of death, the mutant Mario is denied his own escape from this tortured existence.

The whole experience is best described as Donkey Kong on meth... sure, it's the same guy you've known since you were kids, but he's missing a lot of teeth, he hasn't eaten for days, and he can't stop shaking, because he can feel Death's skeletal hand tightening on his shoulder. The reunion is a little nostalgic, but mostly just depressing.

DR. MICRO
Sanritsu
Found: In MAME

This is the factory where Dr. Micro
builds his robot army. Better
grab that gun on the way to the
top floor... some of these robots
have already been assembled,
and they're the kind that shoot
rocket powered fists from
their arms.

Nope, I never found this in a real-life arcade. That's a shame, as it's a flawed but refreshing take on the Donkey Kong formula, with wildly different stages and objectives. The first stage of the game has you leaping on platforms suspended over water, fighting animated beakers. The second stage lets you catch a ride on bubbles, which carry you to the top of the screen and eventually an open air vent. This leads to the third and final stage, where Dr. Micro schemes to take over the world with a militia of mass manufactured mechanical men. (Say that five times fast!) This level feels the most like Donkey Kong, with your headphone-donning hero weaving his way through fiery forges, stacks of conveyor belts, and crushing hydraulic presses on his way to face the mad scientist.

It had no hope of challenging Donkey Kong as the king of fixed screen platformers, but Dr. Micro manages to keep pace with the lesser games in the genre. It's light, breezy fun, and a lot less punishing than Donkey Kong's disappointing sequel.

DRAGON UNIT
Athena
Found: In a bowling alley somewhere in central Michigan

Huh huh. Huh huh huh. "Dragon Unit." Okay, I got that out of my system. Carry on.

Dragon Eunuch is more like.

Dragon Unit is probably better known to NES owners as Castle of Dragon, a clunky and linear action game starring an armor-clad knight. The arcade game is pretty much the same... yet also pretty different. The level designs are heavily altered, with the action sometimes taking place on two planes, and the graphics have received a 16-bit touch up, but beyond that the two games share an unmistakable family resemblance. They're brothers in jank.

The arcade version of Dragon Unit isn't an especially good game, with a constipated lead character who's got all the jumping prowess of a woolly mammoth trapped in ice. As you might imagine, this becomes a bit of a problem in the platforming heavy stages, with footholds suspended over enough spikes to give Mega Man a nervous breakdown. Your hapless hero also has a nasty habit of sponging up damage from the many monsters in his path. You don't get so much as a single frame of invulnerability after being hit, resulting in dozens of lost lives and nearly as many lost quarters. Show me someone who can beat this game on a single credit, and I'll show you a liar.  

If there's anything that can be said in Dragon Unit's favor, it's that it's a boldly tasteless video game, rivaling even the legendarily tacky Time Killers and NARC with enemies that explode into splashes of blood and the incessant wail of heavy metal guitar riffs put on infinite loop. It's almost worth sticking around just to watch the car crash. Just play Dragon Unit in an emulator with one finger perched on the 5 key... otherwise, this game will send you to the poorhouse by the time the credits roll.

EYES
Digitrex Techstar
Found: At a bowling alley in picturesque Lake Odessa
(Be sure to stop at the nearby lake to check out the swans!)

Eyes is a provincial favorite, most popular in my home state of Michigan. That's where Roogie Elliot (...Roogie?) earned the game's highest recorded score back in 1982, a score that has yet to be topped forty years later.

You might call this a vision quest.

I've played on the same Eyes cabinet Roogie used when he stopped by Lake Odessa fourteen years ago, in a publicity stunt for the local arcade. Most likely, it was also the same cabinet Elliot played when he first got that record-breaking high score in the 1980s. It ain't much, but it's as close to a brush with video game history as you're likely to get that far from Tokyo and Silicon Valley.

Anyway. Eyes is a more aggressive take on maze games like Pac-Man, with your disturbingly fleshy eyeball firing optic blasts at pulsing shapes. Clear the screen of these colorful doo-hickeys and you advance to the next stage... but be wary of rival eyes, who chase you through the maze and fire lasers the moment you wander into their field of view!

It isn't up to par with the best games in this genre, but Eyes is at least as good as some of Pac-Man's ill-advised sequels and spin-offs. The emphasis on firing gives the gameplay the urgency of a wild west shoot out... will you have the reflexes to pick off that eyeball coming around the corner, or is there too much shot-absorbing clutter in the way to take that risk? There's been worse hooks in maze games. I'd take this over a green puffball who steals all your food, or earning your energizers from the world's most barren pinball table.

THE GLOB
Epos Corporation
Found: At a bowling alley hidden somewhere in Michigan
(See a pattern?)

Oh boy, have I got a story about this one. I found The Glob at a bowling alley deep in the heart of the mitten state. It had an impressively broad selection of arcade titles, ranging from Popeye to Big Run: The Paris-Dakar Rally to Time Pilot '84. And then there was The Glob. The game wasn't working quite right, set to free play with a level skip available to players. After a few underwhelming games, I complained to the guy repairing the machines that The Glob was almost as fun as a mouth full of mucus. He must have agreed, because soon afterward, he tore the PCBs and wires out of the cabinet, like the entrails of an unlucky Mortal Kombat opponent. "Fatality," indeed.

Here's a game in desperate
need of the MST3K treatment.

My big mouth cost me free access to an arcade machine, but when the machine in question was The Glob, it's hard to get all that upset about it. Put simply, this game sucks. Put more verbosely, The Glob brings elements of Elevator Action and Pac-Man together in an awkward hybrid that looks like early IBM PC shareware. The jiggling Jello mold in the game's title presses buttons to call down elevators, then rides them up to gobble the fruit on every floor. When violently jittering creatures like pigs, frogs, and crocodiles approach you (possibly to ask for more crack), H.G. Blob sticks to the ceiling, then drops down on their heads for an acid-filled ambush. You don't want to stick a spoon into this Jello mold, no matter how much fruit it's got floating around inside it. You'll wind up with one less spoon, and possibly three less fingers.

I was going somewhere with this... oh yeah, The Glob sucks. I said that earlier, but it's a point worth belaboring. It's kind of playable, but it's also alarmingly unprofessional for an arcade game, with the most abrasive sound effects this side of a construction site. Worst of all, The Glob was the most successful of Epos Corporation's games. You should see the unholy crap they made on a bad day. 

LIZARD WIZARD
Digitrex Techstar
Found: At a mini golf place set squarely between Grand Ledge and Lansing

A wizard equipped with a
jet pack and a laser gun. Uh,
just go with it.

"Lizard Wizard" sounds like a fictional video game you might see as a plot point in a sitcom, like Bonestorm or Space Suckers or Escape from the Big Apple ("look out, Dad, it's nickel beer day!"). I assure you, though, it's quite real... whether you like it or not.

Imagine Joust, except instead of a knight astride a surprisingly aerodynamic ostrich, you're a wizard held aloft by a jet pack. (Who wrote this game, an eight year old? Might as well throw in some pirates, ninjas, and robots while you're at it.) Instead of dropping on your foes to kill them, you shoot them with a ray gun, and instead of a menacing pit of lava, there's a volcano that spews chunks of molten rock everywhere. The stage objectives are muddled, the graphics are underwhelming for its 1985 vintage, and the game struggles to find a hook that just never materializes. Unlike the previously mentioned sitcom games, Lizard Wizard exists... it's just hard to understand why.

META FOX
Jordan
Found: At a truck stop perched on the Michiana border

The soundtrack does a
lot of heavy lifting for
this otherwise ordinary
shoot 'em up.

With its screaming J-punk soundtrack, mid-shelf quality visuals, and generic yet comfortably familiar gameplay, Jordan's Meta Fox is as white trashy as a Japanese shooter can get. No wonder I found it at a truck stop on the edge of the Michigan-Indiana border.

Meta Fox strikes a middle ground between 1943 and Raiden, with your late 20th century warplane fending off tanks and swarms of enemy aircraft. Take down a bullet resistant helicopter or blast open specially marked ground targets, and you're awarded with power ups, screen-clearing bombs, and auto-fire, which saves a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on your fingers.

Eventually, you'll encounter a boss, and the already intense music switches to a performance of "Lonely Boy," with piercing vocals and guitars that could shred the hide off a rhinoceros. It's completely ridiculous, but admittedly kind of thrilling... and it must have made one hell of an impression on players in 1989, when ROM space was precious and couldn't be wasted on such frivolities as music with digitized voice and realistic instruments.

Meta Fox is completely unremarkable in most respects, but it's comfort food for less invested shoot 'em up fans who don't want to creep their way through dense bullet patterns. It's sometimes so easy that it borders on insulting... but that soundtrack is such a guilty pleasure, you won't care that this fox's bark is worse than its bite.

NEW YORK! NEW YORK!
Sigma (not the indestructible robot with the buttchin)
Found: That very same bowling alley in Lake Odessa. Have you seen the swans yet? Just don't get too close... they're swans.

New York! New York! comes from Gottlieb and perennial bunter Sigma, which gave us video game non-classics like Shadow Blasters for the Sega Genesis and R2D-Tank on the Emerson Arcadia. Yes, that's the name. R2D-Tank. There have been worse titles for games featuring armored military vehicles... how does Tanks But No Tanks grab you?

In the US version of the game,
the mothership dares you to
shoot at it, as if its pilot was
a former dunk tank clown. It's
just a dollar for three balls!
Let's see what you got, punk!

Back to New York! New York! It's as generic as a fixed screen shooter gets, with a conga line of UFOs (sometimes literally the word "UFO," in the shape of a flying saucer) swirling around an orb bristling with tentacles. Hit the mother ship and it squeaks out brief digitized taunts. Sink a dozen shots into this proto-boss before it vanishes, and it bursts into a violent explosion seemingly lifted from the film Akira. You're not likely to deliver the coup de grace to the mothership, since its fleet of UFOs coat the screen with missiles and it will make a hasty escape just as it's safe to attack it, but it's theoretically possible.

As video games go, New York! New York! is certainly... one of those. Aside from the previously mentioned explosion and the Statue of Liberty in the background, it doesn't go out of its way to dazzle the player, with tiny, mostly single-colored sprites. The gameplay is similarly uninspired, without power ups or a second button to expand the player's strategic options. Phoenix let you raise a shield to defend yourself against kamikaze attacks, and the superlative Astro Blaster gives you bullet time to deal with more aggressive fleets of enemies, but New York! New York! expects you to get by on shooting and dodging alone. Even in 1981, that wasn't enough.

RAIDEN
Seibu Kaihatsu
Found: An arcade somewhere in Illinois
(I found the sequel in a southern Michigan video store, sitting next to a Neo-Geo)

Raiden? Rayden? Let's call the whole thing off. Apparently, Acclaim had to do just that when porting Mortal Kombat to home consoles, because the name of its thunder god sounded a little too much like Seibu Kaihatsu's cash cow for comfort.

Raiden the storm out.

As was implied earlier, Raiden was far and away Seibu Kaihatsu's most popular video game. It STILL gets spin-offs and sequels some thirty years later, which is puzzling to me personally, as I never thought the original game was all that special. It's as boilerplate as a top down shooter can get, and aside from the sleek ship designs, it doesn't do anything Toaplan hadn't already done with Truxton or Fire Shark or Twin Cobra years earlier. Heck, Raiden's power up system is even more pared down than Fire Shark's, with two kinds of missiles, two kinds of beams, and a screen clearing bomb. That's it. It makes Capcom's 1943 seem like a smorgasbord of WMDs by comparison.

It may be just another bomb-bomb-bomb-die shooter, but at least Raiden gets all the fundamentals right. The futuristic enemy designs are sleeker than anything you'll find in a Toaplan game (or even worse, a UPL game. For Pete's sake, how do half of these alleged space ships FLY?), satisfying explosions ring out when you bring down an especially tough enemy, and there are little details like running rivers and cattle grazing in grassy fields that bring life and realism to the proceedings. Seibu Kaihatsu leaned hard into those details in the sequel, with the screen often filling with pyrotechnics and spinning chunks of metal from the ships you've blown to pieces. You can actually see the pieces, along with massive glowing craters where defeated bosses used to be. Add a third weapon, a serpentine beam that curls around enemy ships, and you've got a game that's more deserving of Raiden's legendary status. 

Then again, Raiden is available on practically every game console in existence (even the Lynx. Even the Jaguar!), and Raiden II is on almost none of them. Unless you've got The Raiden Project on the Playstation, you're probably going to have to settle for sloppy seconds.

THE SHANGHAI KID
Taiyo Systems
Found: A Pizza Hut in Grand Ledge

Back in the uncertain days before Street Fighter II (the BC of fighting games), neolithic tribes of fighting game designers couldn't figure out how to make a fast paced one-on-one martial arts match work in video game form. Some of these prehistoric fighting games were too limited in scope (Violence Fight, Pit Fighter), and others too counter-intuitive (Karate Champ, Budokan for the Sega Genesis). Even the original Street Fighter suffered from clumsy movement and a design that was unsure of itself. Turns out Capcom Caveman made stone wheel square at first, but then carved wheel into round shape using crude chisel and CPS1 hardware and clean, responsive control. Unga bunga! This revolutionize way we beat each other over head with club in video games.

You've got to give credit to Culture
Brain for taking a stab at this genre
before it found its footing with
Street Fighter II.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The Shanghai Kid was one of those early forays into the fighting game genre, and its solution to the intricacies of blocking and attacking in martial arts was to turn the match into Dance Dance Revolution. When a circle appears over your fighter, you point in that direction with your joystick to block incoming strikes. When a circle appears over your opponent, you target that area of their body with the joystick and press either punch or kick to attack. It's a daring approach, but it feels mechanical, and you have to completely retrain yourself from what you've already learned from Street Fighter II to play it effectively. If you can suppress thirty years of muscle memory and learn to play The Shanghai Kid on its own terms, it's a game you can at least admire from a historical perspective. Try to ignore the weird color palette and the dull character designs.

By the way, for those of you who think this sounds familiar, Shanghai Kid is indeed the forerunner to Culture Brain's Flying Dragon series on the NES and Super NES.

STAR CASTLE
Cinematronics
Found: The mini-golf course in Grand Ledge-sing again

Asteroids clones were a dime a dozen in 1981 when this game was released, but Star Castle finds its own niche in this crowded ecosystem, and is arguably the best of the titles reviewed in this feature. Heck, it inspired Howard Scott Warshaw to create Yar's Revenge for the Atari 2600... that alone is cause for celebration.

Star Castle's monochrome graphics were
enhanced by a color overlay. And also a
constellation based on a centerfold in a
nudie magazine, but the Cinematronics
people didn't like to discuss that.

Star Castle is a mano-a-mano battle against a turret in the center of the screen, sealed inside three rotating walls. Blast the segments of each wall (taking care to leave at least one piece intact so the barrier doesn't repair itself) and you'll eventually clear a path to the turret. This is good, because one clean shot is all it takes to send this menace to Space Hell. This is also bad, because once the turret has a clear shot at you, it sends fireballs your way... fireballs that are larger and faster and a great deal deadlier than your own shots. Adding to the pressure are sparks that first cling to the castle walls, then detach to seek you out. Sure, they're not that hard to evade, but they're one more distraction you'll have to worry about while lining up that golden shot that blows up the turret and brings down the castle walls.

Star Castle is frantic, nerve-wracking fun. It's just as fun to re-introduce the game to my brother every ten years or so... he'll swear he doesn't remember it, only to be spellbound once again as he pecks holes in the castle walls, darting around the playfield to dodge fireballs and keep his distance from those pesky sparks. "Damn addicting artifact," he muttered after playing the game on my Vectrex for longer than he cared to admit to friends. Yeah, Star Castle is friggin' great, and don't you forget it! If you do, I'll be there to remind you.

TURTLESHIP
Philko
Found: In the corner of a video store in Champaign, IL

Lots of game companies pretend to be Capcom (cough cough Visco cough), but few took their sincerest form of flattery as far as Korean design team Philko, which apparently reverse-engineered Capcom's early arcade technology and used it to create this very familiar sounding, looking, and feeling shooter. 

Not exactly a Doppleganger calibur boss here.
While R-Type developer Irem took its inspiration
from HR Giger, Philko seems to have taken
its ideas from old episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba.

Unfortunately for Philko, it won't take much convincing for the seasoned player to believe it's not butter. Hardware doesn't make the game... that magic is in the software, and next to legitimate Capcom shooters like 1943 and Side Arms, Turtleship comes up short. It's... okay, I guess? Drained of inspiration and thematically vague and kind of frustrating besides, but playable enough if your expectations aren't all that high. It's got a few power ups, although none of them are especially exciting. There are both vertically and horizontally scrolling stages, a'la Life Force. You can credit feed to the end if you're a content tourist with nothing better to do. There's this Korean Battlestar Galactica plot in the opening about leaving Earth for a new home in space, if you can get into that? That's the extent of the positives.

The overarching problem is that Turtleship wasn't necessary, at least in this territory. We already have Capcom games. We don't need Capcom games at home, or more accurately, weird off-brand versions of them. Really, we're good with the genuine article.