#taxan

[found-in-retro-game-mags]

G.I. Joe

"You're not the only one waiting for G.I. Joe." (Electronic Gaming Monthly #22, May 1991)

[retrocgads]

UK 1998

[everygame]

Star Soldier (NES)

Developed/Published by: Hudson Soft Released: 13/06/1986 Completed: 10/07/2024 Completion: Beat it using all warps, saving at the start of each level (and before each boss. I’ll admit it!)

The Star Soldier series is an interesting one–or rather, its position in the pantheon is interesting. If you’re a Japanese gamer, it’s legendary–the core franchise in Hudson’s yearly “All-Japan Caravan Festival” where the company toured its games across Japan and players took part in timed score-attack challenges. For everyone else, it’s… a shooter series that is barely remembered and not especially highly rated.

Without an equivalent caravan–and the series not being released in arcades–there would have been little chance for western audiences to get exposed to Star Soldier, so unlike your Gradiuses or your R-Types, where you would be thrilled by it in arcades and then want whatever home version you could get your hands on, with Star Soldier you were taking a gamble on something that didn’t look like much of anything–especially when this wasn’t released until 1989 in North America!

And, to be honest, such a gamble would have been… ill-advised. It’s not that Star Soldier is bad as such, it’s just that in 1986–never mind 1989–it’s just a bit… underwhelming. Coming just two months after Konami’s superb port of Gradius, it already feels like a throwback to the immediate post-Xevious era as a visually simple vertical shooter with an emphasis on enemy patterns and hidden tiles that feels undoubtedly workman-like, with little variety from stage to stage.

It does have its quirks, however. The power-up system offers some risk-reward in that after a few power-ups you’re quickly given full multi-directional firing and a shield that protects you from basic enemy shots, but as soon as you take a hit you lose the multi-directional firing for a straight double shot, but you can’t get it back until you’ve lost your shield completely. Every power-up you pick-up instead works as a smart bomb, meaning that you have to either endanger yourself for later gains or rely on the occasional power ups as pressure releases (trusting, of course, that you can navigate to them on screen when they’re at their most useful.)

The secret tiles also offer more than just points and extra lives–at the cost of obscurity that is often worse than The Tower of Druaga. In fact, unless you’re playing on an actual Famicom, you can’t access one of the tiles at all (as it requires shouting into the second controller’s microphone.) That one is “Takahashi’s Expert Thumb” which allows you to get 16 shots on screen at one time, but there’s also a laser power-up that only shows up once(?) that requires you to press select at the right moment, and then of course there’s the new, post-Super Mario Bros. essential, warps, which can get you through the game skipping half the levels if you’re able to ensure your score matches digits at the hundreds and thousands, which is not easy to do.

So far, fair enough, but not every quirk is to the game’s benefit. The biggest and most baffling thing that any player of Star Soldier will immediately experience is that sometimes your ship goes under the stage. While that’s happening, you can’t shoot or be shot, which sounds like it would be good if you could control it, but as far as I could work out–and I’ve spent ages searching for information on this–it is close to random. 

It feels like it doesn’t happen if you try and cross over tiles from the side, but there are many situations where you have to approach them from the front, and it doesn’t always result in you going under. If there’s any true rhyme or reason to it it’s locked away in some ancient Japanese strategy guide that’s never been digitised–but I wouldn’t be surprised if that also threw its hands up.

All that really matters is that any time it happens, you don’t want it to. Because you can’t control it, you can never think “oh, I’ll pop under this bit of the stage and chill out while I’m being swarmed” instead it’s usually “gotta get that power up!” [goes under stage, misses power up] or popping out from under directly into enemy fire or straight into an enemy.

Additionally, the game is seriously punishing when it comes to the bosses. There are only two–which I can’t be too hard on, I mean Gradius really only has the one–but if you can’t defeat them within a harsh time limit the game throws you back quite a bit through the level and demands you try again! You’ve got just ten seconds to defeat the Star Brain, and thirty to defeat the Big Star Brain.

The sneaky trick here is that the game offers you auto-fire once you’re powered up, but in order to defeat in particular the Big Star Brain using it you have to be perfect. My own experience is ultimately anecdotal, here, but you are actually expected to do your best Takahashi Meijin impression by hammering the fire button to fire faster than the auto-fire–and even at that, defeating the bosses is probably more efficiently done with the double shot.

It feels a touch cruel and probably a reaction to the fact that the game honestly doesn’t feel that difficult outside of that. It’s not something you’d breeze through–and I definitely didn’t attempt to master its intricacies–but most of my deaths during the levels seemed to come from frustration with dipping under the stage, meaning that the bosses feel like the major issue (though if my anecdotal evidence is correct, you might be able to breeze through them with a good autofire.)

Ultimately? The fact is that nothing Star Soldier does is all that interesting–apart from the things that are annoying about it.

Will I ever play it again? The value in any shooter really is in how much you’d like to play it from the beginning and see how far you can get or how high you can score. I feel no interest in that here.

Final Thought: Not only were North American players who were unfortunate enough to buy this denied Takahashi’s Expert Thumb, Taxan’s release was so lazy that they missed that the game features an entire second, increased difficulty mode that can also only be unlocked by using a code that involves shouting into the second controller. It’s even got different graphics!

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[rickyreeves1980]

Mappy-Land is a video game console-only sequel to the 1983 Namco/Midway arcade game Mappy. The game was developed by TOSE and published by Namco in Japan and Taxan in North America for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was later released by Bandai Namco Entertainment for the Wii U Virtual Console worldwide in February 2015 and on the Nintendo Switch Online Service in March 2022.

Mappy must travel through various themed areas, collecting six target items in each one, while attempting to avoid Goro and his gang of Meowkies. The target items differ depending on the story:

Story 1: It is Mapico's birthday, and the task is to collect cheese as her present.

Story 2: Mappy wishes to marry Mapico, and must collect wedding rings.

Story 3: Mappy and Mapico are having a Christmas party, and Christmas trees must be collected.

Story 4: It is Mappy Jr.'s birthday, and the task is to collect baseballs for his present.
After completing Story 4, it loops back to the first story.

There are eight areas with various unique features, and Goro wears costumes corresponding to each theme:

Railroad Town
Western World
Tropical World
Jungle World
Pirate World
Ghost Town
Seventh Avenue
Milky Town

[periodically80s]

[kollectorsrus]

[pembrokewkorgi]

I love how goofy this boss music sounds.  To their credit it sounds like music I’d hear in a cartoon in parts... but not this cartoon.

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Mappy

The battle of “cat vs. mouse” has been told countless times, through children’s stories to cartoon to video games. Mappy is Namco’s take on the formula, a 1983 arcade game that has some vague influence from Pac-Man, combined with some unique platforming elements. The game was designed by Eiji Sato, who later worked on Dragon Buster. 

Read more...