Ufouria: The Saga

Your name is Freeon-Leeon and you can swim on the water and walk through snow and ice.

It's 2013, and that means it's time to give animals alcohol. This year it's the turn of the penguins, as featured in 1992's Ufouria: The Saga, otherwise known as Hebereke. It's a game for the NES - the PAL NES.

High Speed

Pinball on the NES. Think it will work? My vote is no.

Tetris: A Blog Squirrel Mini Special

Here's the situation. I killed The Obscure Research Project a few months ago. I regret nothing. But the problem is that as long as I choose not to maintain it, it will be sitting there, telling lies, and I don't like that. So I'm going to rectify this situation by covering not the one, not the two, but the three (and a half) Tetris games for the NES. And the 1988 Arcade version. And god knows what else.

It's 2012 Squirrel correcting 2008 Squirrel in what I like to call a "mini special". Much like the days when I went through tons of games, except here there's only a half dozen, and I can't be bothered to take it out of blog format.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

So I'm sure the fans were crying out for a NES port of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I mean who wouldn't be - clearly the superior graphical and sound capabilities of the Super Nintendo pale in comparison to those of the prior generation.

Well check it out, your wish has been granted in the form of this unlicensed "port" from China. It's aLttP, but with 100% more screeching home-made NES audio to ruin your day. And worse scrolling. And worse graphics. But tossing these points aside for a moment, this is a fairly accurate port of the third Zelda outing. It just needs to be played on mute.

If I were a younger man I'd dissect this game in detail but for now, this is Blog Squirrel's pathetic attempt at raising awareness of this game. Inspiration for my handful of daily visitors.

Bio Force Ape

I'm not one to monkey around with Nintendo products (yes I did just post that sentence), but check it out, it's BIO FORCE APE for that entertaining Nintendo system, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Shown to the world in 1991, hidden from the world by 1992, it's come back to the world in 2011. And this time you can actually play it. But do we want to?

Wacky Races (NES)

Out of all the Hanna Barbera shorts produced in the 60s and 70s, Wacky Races stands out as being one of the only franchises that lends itself well to video games. So as you can imagine, the bigwigs have tried to make it into a Mario Kart clone to steal cash from kids. But the franchise hasn't been damaged too much - the Dreamcast game was nice and the Game Boy Color game ended up being a fairly big deal.

But that's not to say it hasn't had its fair share of garbage. Perhaps the weirdest adaptation of the franchise is this 1992 PLATFORMER for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Though it is indeed fair to say that perhaps the NES couldn't handle a third-person perspective racer, by 1992 there was a perfectly capable SNES console that Atlus could have supported. Instead they chose to tie it to an inappropriate genre to catch the last waves built up by Super Mario Bros. 3.

Elfland

ELFLAND. Oh how the title makes your mind go wild. What could possibly lie beyond this line of text? A fun Christmas-themed game in the style of Super Mario Land? A on old DOS platformer from my childhood whose existence I forgot about until writing this sentence and will probably blog about it in the near future? Of course not... it's an unlicensed NES game from "Tip Top" in 1992.

And wouldn't you know it, it has absolutely nothing to do with elves. It's actually a strange Bubble Bobble clone, without the bubbles or bobbles. The catch this time is to eliminate your enemies by changing colour in a de Blob style manner, and if it had been presented a little better... it might have been quite nice.

ASDER 20-in-1

An update to The Obscure Research Project? Madness.

I'm not all that sure what posessed me to play through this pirate NES compilation, but I did, and and here's the page to prove it. Unlike most compilations it's not just a bunch of stolen games tied to a menu, but is, in fact, 20 completely original titles... well okay some are hacks... but still, not many people will have played these games before.

I don't know Nintendo's history as well as Sega's so chances are there might be a few more hacks included in this compilation. I spotted Crush Roller (or Make Trax) but there might be others so you might have to take this with a pinch of salt and I'll update it at a later date.

Super the Lion King 2

Donkey Kong Country (on the NES) Returns... though I almost wish it hadn't.

This was dumped... today! Another Donkey Kong Country pirate for the NES, this time featuring... Simba from the Lion King! And three levels!

Essentially it's another clone called "The Panda Prince" in new clothes. There's not much to say about it, aside from that fact it's short, difficult tat that looks and sounds terrible, but it's not difficult to describe. The game feels the need to start off with one of those poorly designed minecart levels that need save states to beat, and after completing that stage there's two very simple on-foot levels and a fight with DKC's Necky. It's clearly based on a more complete version of the game, as is the Panda Prince, but that's yet to show up.

Fantasy Zone (NES)

What am I doing

I'm a big fan of Fantasy Zone. I learned about it too late of course, but nevertheless it's a happy little shoot 'em up with a great soundtrack. It first showed up on Sega System 16 arcade hardware in 1985, got itself a few sequels on the Sega Master System and Sega Mega Drive, dropped off the face of the earth and re-appeared in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing earlier this year. It's popular among Sega fans... so what's it doing on a Nintendo system... twice? Guess we'll have to find out.

Pyramid

Time to hurt ourselves again with another unlicensed game from days gone by. Despite spewing their fare share of garbage back in the day, I haven't mentioned the pirate group "Sachen" much... probably because most of their games are centred around gambling. It doesn't even feel right to associate them with the word "pirate", because like companies such as Wisdom Tree they don't appear to be a bunch of crooks, just a group that's trying to appeal to a market Nintendo neglected... and that almost seems fair game.

So time to look at one of their better works. "Pyramid", an original title that took the formula found in Tetris and thought "it's not hip to be square", adding... TRIANGLES into gameplay. Well, it is a video game developer's favourite shape.

More garbage on its way

I suspect many people travel to this blog for the latest and greatest news on my one-man-mission to somehow document every notable obscure pirate video game on the planet. I've been in the process of swapping computers, and the new one isn't a fan of my old internet setup. It does, however, have a 23-inch 1080p monitor, so it's difficult to complain.

Of course this means I've had to ignore new dumps such as this. PANDA WORLD. Yes that's right, the way to protect an endangered species isn't to force them to mate in captivity, you just need to construct a giant robot that will hurl up a few babies every now and then.

You got your Mario in my Street Fighter II

Again

More fun for me when I inevitably update tORP. A while back I attempted to create some sort of timeline with Street Fighter II pirates but it was horrific to sort out. Lots of similar dumps splattered all over the net in various locations, undocumented and in many cases, unemulated outside of the likes of FCEU or Nestopia. As far as I'm aware nobody has made a decent stab at trying to make sense of these pieces of garbage, but this will certainly help bridge a gap.

Essentially it's Master Fighter III with Mario (and a Little Nemo background) added. It's nothing spectacular, but these sprites were all carried through to Mari Street Fighter III Turbo so there was clearly some sort of underlying relationship going on here.

Along with this dump, yet another Mortal Kombat pirate popped up, this time going under the name of "Mortal Kombat V Pro". The second outing for our good friend Zoo.

I suspect it pre-dates "Mortal Kombat V Turbo 1996" which I've already written about, though strangely this seems to run at 60 frames per second unlike its sibling, making it the better choice.

Isn't piracy just grand?

Super Aladdin

I'm having to resort to broken builds of FCEU due to a lack of updates on the Nestopia project. A shame I suppose... Nestopia is probably the best NES emulator out there... but anyway look what popped up recently

It's Aladdin on the NES... again. Back in 1992 the Mega Drive title was a phenomenal success as it was one of the first examples of pairing smooth Disney-like animations with a video game. Though DOS and Amiga ports were understandable, for some crazy reason it was ported to the NES... badly, and released only in Europe. In between then and now, two other NES ports have popped up; the hideous "Aladdin 2" which I've talked about briefly in the past, and "Super Aladdin", which has been around a while apparently but only got my attention recently.

Devil World

Urban Champion, Tennis, Baseball, Pinball, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Volleyball, Soccer... tell me when you can guess what all these games have in common. Here's a hint, they all came from the early days of the NES when small carts were common. Kirby's Adventure, one of the last NES games released a decade later, was produced on a 768kb cart - that's 32 24kb Urban Champions for the price of one. This blog post will probably be bigger than some of those games.

Why do I mention this? Because these games are terrible, and not even in a good way. They've been ported to various different consoles due to their small size, sometimes more than once, but never improved on or updated, despite the fact they should have been left to rot (or at least combined into one title rather than sold spearately). It's surely criminal to sell these games for the same price as say, the majority of the NES catalogue that were between 5 and 13 times the size of these things, but it happens. There's not even a discount due to the fact that they generally suck.

But there are a few exceptions which I'm willing to stretch for, such as Devil World.

Devil World is a reasonably early Famicom game that bypassed the US markets due to crazy religious censorships in that region at the time. It did, however, reach Europe in 1987 (after a three year delay I might add), making it one of the only first-party Nintendo games EVER to skip out the yanks in favour of us. But that's not exactly a good thing, because Europe hated the NES. Europe was Sega's fun-zone, and it took up until 2006 for Nintendo to actually start leading the pack for once (and even then "leading" could be mistaken for "positioning themselves at the front to collect all the shovelware"). Devil World, having had its references removed from Super Smash Bros. Melee for some reason, fell into a world of obscurity. And even though it's available on the Wii's virtual console, history is repeating itself simply because nobody knows what Devil World is (and at the end of the day, all NES games are very, very old).

Following in the footsteps of PacMan, the player follows a green dragon called Tamagon on his quest to erm... attack the "Devil's world". You do so by eating dots and then putting books in holes. You're hunted down by the Devil's minions who can be killed by using the POWER OF CHRIST (or just crosses/bibles) and the Devil sits at the top of the screen making two other minions scroll the screen about, trying to crush you. Unlike PacMan, there's a two player option and there's a few different maps rather than the same thing over and over. A nice time waster, and yes it was made by Shigeru Miyamoto, unlike the likes of Golf.

But it's still a shame for this to be yet another entry to my ever growing list of underdogs. It's a step above most of the games released for the NES at the time (by "the time" I mean 1984, the Famicom release... 1987 put this game at a slight disadvantage due to titles like Super Mario Bros.), and if it hadn't been filled with Devils and crosses, chances are this would be a common addition to any normal person's NES collection in the US. But from what I gather, it isn't, so give it a go at some point.

VELBT

Char sent me his recently dumped "100-in-1" Game Boy Advance pirate. As I'm not usually the first or second person to have a go at a game, I thought I'd post about it.

I mean it's nothing amazingly special, just PocketNES with a bunch of ROMs. But there's a few hacks, a couple of homebrew games and the odd pirate original included (bonus points if you can guess which ones). Gives me an excuse to review a lot of quick sprite edits on one go, so expect a tORP page soonish. One day I'll also get around to finishing that page on Hummer Team's Tiny Toon Adventures pirate (there's a lot to talk about there).

In other news, the Taxman, known for his Retro Sonic engine (Retro Sonic XG, Sonic Nexus) is developing a Sonic CD port to the iphone. It's been pitched to Sega after a "what iphone games do you want" blog post, who have promised to bring it up in one of their board meetings. A Sonic fangame adopted by Sega? Might be more likely than you think.

Nintendo World Championships 1990

One of the fabled gold Nintendo World Championships 1990 NES carts popped up not too long ago and sold for a whopping £10800, making it probably the most expensive complete NES game of all time. Why so much? Well, only 26 carts of its type exist in the whole world, (though there's a further 90 boring old "grey" carts) and only 12 of those 26 carts have ever surfaced. Since obviously these things are no longer being produced in any format, demand is very high.

Originally these carts were used in a timed contest, with some fancy DIP switches on the side to adjust the time (the default being 6 minutes 21 seconds... don't ask me why). They were released in small quantities as competitions via Nintendo Power and other events, and are now deemed "the rarest of the rare" as far as video games go (if you discount Nintendo's PowerFest '94 event in which only one sole SNES cart survived and went for thirty times that amount)

But what's a NWC game look like? Well... a bit like this

Yes that's right, some kind soul did dump one of the 116 NWC carts a few years ago. But is it honestly worth £10k? No. Well, not from a gaming perspective anyway. You could probably obtain a large amount of the NES's game catelog for that price, but if you do feel the need to invest... probably wise to hang onto the game once you've received it, because every time one pops up on ebay it sells for more than its predecessor.

So the contest was simply to "get points", but in order to do so you need to play Nintendo games. After the time is up, the points are totalled and... that'll be your overall score. There's not much use for these carts unless you're competing with someone, as you'll see, but with scheduled events such as these you have to admire Nintendo's efforts in the late 80s/early 90s. Shame they didn't continue that outside of America and Japan. "World" Championships this isn't.

First up, Super Mario Bros. Yes, a third of your money would be going into purchasing one of the most common NES games on the planet, and it's a gimped version at that, obviously lacking the two player mode and giving you 99 lives. Your task? Get 50 coins, making it the most time consuming of the three titles. As soon as you get 50 coins you'll move on, but if you don't bother, I'm assuming you can probably beat the entire game as per normal, as long as you do it within the time limit (which by the way, is never shown on screen so you better make sure you have a stopwatch if you're wanting to be strategic).

Second, Rad Racer, a game by Squaresoft from the days where they weren't afraid to make games outside the RPG genre. Simple stuff this time around - finish the track. Personally, I don't see what's so "Rad" about Rad Racer. Sure it might have been "rad" for the hardware, but it was originally released in 1987, a year after the the hugely successful OutRun, and by the time 1990 had rolled along, there were plenty of better racing alternatives. There's been some minor changes to reflect the NWC, and some modes have once again been dropped.

And finally, a forced game of Tetris's A-type mode from the gimped Nintendo version. This game goes on forever, and is just an extra way to score points. As usual, we'd have been much better of with Tengen's offering, but to give them credit, at least they had the sense to assign the rotate commands to buttons this time around. I would expect that normal kids probably wouldn't have been able to get up to this round (or at least stay here long enough to get some lines). Might have been better to have split those six minutes into three equally timed sections in which players have to score as much points as possible.

And that's it. So if you're interested do note that you're paying ten grand for what is essentially some gold coloured plastic. But to give them credit, the concept of 26 golden NES carts scattered across the world is quite fun... it's just a shame that the internals of those carts are worth nothing.

Exerion 2

Exerion 2, the unreleased NES sequel to Jaleco's 1983 Arcade game got itself a dump the other day. Unfortunately it was polluted with NintendoAGE watermarks, so this is X-CulT's version that took some of them out. As you can see it's not a perfect fix, unless you want to believe Jaleco produced this game this year, but it's here, and is playable.

What's the difference between this and its prequel? Not a lot. It changes a few graphics and alters the duel shot a bit, but aside from that its generally the same game with some very minor improvements. My problem with Exerion is just how badly the NES version has aged. Exerion's selling point, the "parallax backgrounds" look hideous by today's standards, and those backgrounds were the only thing stopping the game from being classified as a generic shoot-em up. Sure they were early games, but the NES could have been pushed to give us better than solid green grass. By the time Exerion 2 would have been released it would have been in direct competition with Konami's first Gradius game, and that's not a battle that even the Arcade version had much chance of winning. On the plus side though, at least the first game looks good on the SG-1000.

This isn't much of a sequel so it's somewhat obvious why it was scrapped, but nevertheless interesting to see it had a sibling at some point, and who can say "no" to an unreleased title?

Secret Doom Castle

I've been watching episodes of AVGN recently. Why? I'm... not sure. I suppose good home-made video reviews aren't released in healthy numbers, and certainly not that many are released that cover things such as the 1972 Magnavox Odessy. That system is just crazy.

Two things I thought I'd pick up on that I somewhat disagree with though

First, Milon's Secret Castle

A 1986 platformer game by Hudson Soft. Hudson liked it enough to give it a couple of SNES sequels that have nothing to do with a secret castle (and are henceforth better), plus a few cameos in other Hudson games (though seeing as the western world only got to see Milon in this form... it makes you wonder why). It's one of those NES games that hasn't aged well, but... it was released in 1986, which was still fairly early on in the NES's lifespan. It's aged better than things like Ice Climbers and Urban Champion.

People say it's a lot like Super Mario Bros. due to its colour scheme and looks but honestly I think it fits the role of a Metroid clone a bit better. You go back and forth looking for powerups to get... to the top I assume. The problem with MSC is that its learning curve is non-existant. You start off confused and you finish confused. That's probably the main reason it never caught on, but once you get the hang of it it's not too bad I suppose. It has a lot of nice ideas, they're just not executed properly.

Well, until you realise that the engine sucks.

Milon's acceleration is terrible and he(?) has no deceleration at all. Basically, it takes a few seconds to get up to full speed while walking, and as soon as you take your thumb off the D-Pad you'll instantly stop, no slowing down needed. And seeing as Milon's top speed isn't very fast, well... yeah. You'd have to play it to understand fully. Also the camera seems to have more fun following the large chunk of pixels behind Milon than following Milon. A slow game with a bad camera... ouch. Good job there's not masses of scrolling.

Furthermore everything's out to kill you, and with only one life... you're pretty much screwed unless you can play a perfect game somehow. Sure you have health but you don't start up with a full supply (did Hudson decide to break Milon's arms before he starts or something?). You shoot bubbles though they have limited range and don't fire in straight lines, and basically you've got to hit everything in hopes of finding a door or a key.

Now this process wouldn't be so bad if you weren't doomed to failure by the god-awful engine and hoards of enemies. Every now and then you fight a boss, and then you progress up the castle. Oh and also the music sucks. Lets not forget about that.

But it's not as terrible as people say. Fix up the engine and there's a passable game to be had here. But of course the ROM hacking community is a strange beast - it'll quite happily mess around with games that are already great, e.g. Super Mario Bros. but it won't fix the stuff that's been broken for 20 years. The icing on that cake is that apparently this game has a cult following (which is understandable since people do like those "search for x to unlock y" sorts of games.

Thing is, it's old and outdated now. Not so much in 1986. And lord knows there were much worse games on the market then. At least this shows some effort. But then again it never got to Europe so even Hudson didn't believe in it that much. If it had been released in, say, 1992, it may have been the NES's swan song, assuming Hudson learned from Super Mario Bros. 3.

Second, Doom on the 32X

People knock this one quite a bit and don't understand why.

When Doom was released in 1993 it was probably the most advanced PC game of the time. Some things to note about that sentence - 1993, a good three years after the release of the Super Nintendo and a good half decade after the MegaDrive, the two leading home consoles at the time. The 32-bit generation was coming up and both consoles were starting to show their age a bit. PCs are constantly improving and by this stage they were once again more powerful than the home consoles, so any port of Doom would have been gimped. In fact, with a 32X port in 1994 and a Super Nintendo port in 1995, these consoles were due to be replaced within a matter of months.

Arguably the Super Nintendo version is a better port but it's not without its issues. For one, the walls and floors have no textures. It's got all the enemies of the PC original but everything is a lot more pixellated (though I do prefer the HUD). And though yes, it's music is closer to the PC original... it's still far off. If you're a Doom fan, you probably wouldn't want to play either port.

Issues with the 32X port include the borders and the low quality sound... both space saving measures. Yes sadly even a 32X cartridge had problems storing this game fully. I assume any graphical problems on the SNES were down the limits of the Super FX2 chip. I mean you can only take these things so far. On the other side of things, the Atari Jaguar port, often labeled as the best official home console "port" lacks the soundtrack altogether! It seems to be a case where better graphics = worse sound and vice versa. So all three versions are probably on par with each other. The deciding factor is obvious though - the Jaguar died almost instantly and the 32X was awful. But if you were unlucky enough to buy a 32X instead of a SNES, you've still got a decent Doom.

And lets not forget, the Saturn and Playstation ports that followed dropped Bobby Prince's soundtrack in favour of ambient garbage and lighting effects, and Doom 64 is just... wrong (though it's not a terrible game). The really good ports of Doom are the fan-created ones. There's even one on the ZX Spectrum of all things.

Point is though, Doom 32X is not bad. Sure the SNES version probably has an edge but at the time it was still worth paying for. The 32X console on the other hand... probably not.

A blast from the past

So, Super Mario & Sonic 2; we meet at last.

You see, back in the days when I first discovered pirates there weren't too many known Sonic ones about. There was Somari, and Sonic 6 and Sonic Adventure 7 and... well quite a few I guess. But during my travels on the now defunct Sonicology I came across this masterpiece, then undumped. It was obvious it was a hack (a Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 hack in fact) but what remained inside was unknown. Just a mystery screenshot like the one above.

That was, until about 12 days ago when the ROM got dumped.

Needless to say it's not a very good hack. In fact, with more playable characters than levels... it's pretty broken. Not to mention the Sonic sprites are laughably poor. Mario ones are from Super Mario Bros. 3. It's just squirming with originality!

Though I had forgotten it existed, it's always good to see new dumps. Speaking of which, there's a prototype "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch" hanging about now too. It's not one of 1992's big hits, lets put it that way, and it certainly wasn't when it wound up as "Power Punch II" later on.