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This all sound very "problematic".

She has some what 'developed' boobies for a youngster - where would we be without artistic interpretation eh?
Well, I suppose in those medieval times people only lived to about 40 or so. Taking it as such she'd be young still but primed for motherhood for when Arthur returned - all a bit medieval

I can say with confidence that her chest measures 83cm by the time of this game, which is nice, but not exceptionally large. By the sequel she has reached a slightly more impressive 88cm.

Besides, do we know how old she is? I would doubt she is younger than 16, which should give her plenty of time to develop. I have "known" females of that age with at least an H cup, completely dwarfing poor Prin Prin.

(please keep this subject going!)

Presumably 19 in Dai, if she was 16 in the first game and Arthur's been away buffing his rod for three years.

In middle-ages standards 16 is already mid-life. :p

In my CYOA Arthur is revealed to be a time-travelling professor from the future. This explains both his chasteness and his possession of modern undergarments.

What is CYOA? A fanfic that you wrote recently?

Choose Your Own Adventure, y'know those old multi-choice books. Excerpt from BIRUFORD PRESS:

After a hard training session slaying the endless hordes of the undead, Prin-Prin offers you a tempting goblet of wine.

Do you gratefully accept? Turn to Page 11

Spoiler: show

You suddenly become drowsy. What the fuck?! The little hussy has roofied you! Your superior metabolism and muscle mass sees you wake up just in time to realise Prin-Prin has removed your armour and is rifling through your boxers - though you are powerless to move!

Do you respectfully decline? Turn to Page 12

Spoiler: show

A zombie ambushes you while your back is turned, destroying your armour. Your superior bone density and muscle mass sees you wake up just in time to realise Prin-Prin has driven away the fiend with a crucifix and is rifling through your boxers - though you are powerless to move!

COMING WINTER 2050, RIGHT AFTER THE LAST VOLUMES OF BERSERK AND ASOIAF

What I was hoping for

Ha ha, like the Fighting Fantasy books by Ian Livingstone? Those were really popular over here in the mid 90's.

Yep! Japan had at least a few based on popular videogame franchises. Here's Contra. They tended to go pretty wildly off-script, according to Jonny2x4.

Now I'm remembering the Castlevania one, where the protagonist is a descendant of Simon filming a movie adaptation of CV1, who gets roped into battle with the real DORAKYURA! I love its illustrations, cute yet intense. Here's Neo-Simon bustin' a fuckin cap:



and SHINIGAMI-SAMA:



(scans at CV Dungeon)

Actually, now that I think back, I had an English-language Super Mario Bros one. Was very dry though, just plaint text - none of the rad art you see in the JP books.

Who need shmuplations when we've got this, eh?

My sauce is Gamest No. 29 for the record. I don't personally have that issue, but I've saved a scan of the relevant page from a completed eBay auction.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=20f8hfp ... l4brHRG2k1

They made similar "art gallery" articles for other Capcom games such as Final Fight, Magic Sword and Strider Hiryu, each revealing backstory details for the games. Hell, their Street Fighter strategy guides were the original sources for a lot of the series's lore.

However, my favorite bit of trivia is actually from a Golden Axe article they had in which they reveal that...


Unfortunately, not all the games they covered got deep backstory information though. I've seen the few articles Gamest posted for the AC version of Shadow Dancer and they just use generic names for all the enemy characters, with the plot blurb copied from the Japanese flyer. It seems the whole "SON OF JOE MUSASHI" stuff was made up for the JP Mega Drive version, despite KLOV insisting otherwise. Their Double Dragon II strategy guide also used made-up nicknames (e.g. Buzzcut Man, Reggae, Iron Mask Man, Jaws) for the enemy characters, despite all of them being named in the later console ports.

Start a Patreon and start translating these bad boys!

hehe. Looks like Prin-Prin has got quite the appetite, according to the lore of the Makaimura CYOA publications from the good doctor Biruford.

Good on Arthur. He's found a real gem



I remember in 6th grade (the year before highschool here), a girl at my school had grown huge cans at that point. This effectively turned the male student body into a legion of cavemen, just like in that South Park episode. lol

I never read Fighting Fantasy but I loved the Lone Wolf series which is similar. We had a lot of standard CYOAs, and a few oddballs, like the Super Mario World gamebooks.

To be honest, I always thought about making a Video Game Backstory Database or something like that focusing mostly on older games with translated developers' commentary on the side (although, I wouldn't want to overlap with shmuplations). I've always been fascinated by the backstory differences in older videogames for as long as I remember, especially in many of the old Konami games, where they would make things silly (or sillier than they should have for the U.S. backstory). Maybe I'll get around to do it one of these days.

You'd have an audience! Look how much you've generated with just the Arthur tidbit!

[quote="BIL"]After a hard training session slaying the endless hordes of the undead, Prin-Prin offers you a tempting goblet of wine.

Do you gratefully accept? Turn to Page 11

Spoiler: show

You suddenly become drowsy. What the fuck?! The little hussy has roofied you! Your superior metabolism and muscle mass sees you wake up just in time to realise Prin-Prin has removed your armour and is rifling through your boxers - though you are powerless to move!

Do you respectfully decline? Turn to Page 12

Spoiler: show

A zombie ambushes you while your back is turned, destroying your armour. Your superior bone density and muscle mass sees you wake up just in time to realise Prin-Prin has driven away the fiend with a crucifix and is rifling through your boxers - though you are powerless to move!

These choices still have more consequence than a Quantic Dream game

Slightly let down by some of the SNES versions of some games I have on the mini. First was the aforementioned Ninja Gaiden Trilogy with its shit tacular take on the original's timeless OST.

Then I played Earthworm Jim. Had it on the MD growing up (until recently actually), and after one level I had decided I had enough. I know it is a personal preference and had I never played it before I would have thought it was really good, but the MD version curb stomps the SNES version, particularly in the music department.

I'm now comparing the music from the MD version and the Sega CD version side by side. The quality is no doubt better on the Sega CD and I can definitely appreciate what TT was going for, but what he was able to accomplish with an inferior sound chip is far more impressive. I'm looking at you Down the Tubes and Intestinal Distress.

What else?

Skyblazer - Funish, good tunes, move set that builds. Will probably go back to it.

Hagane - I know this one is well respected around these parts and I put just enough time into it to figure out why. Will find the time to properly play it at some point.

Contra 3 - Would be great, but those overhead levels can just eat a giant bag of dicks. Wasn't a fan of them in Super C and I'm not a fan of them here. Which is a shame because (I'm presuming) the rest of the scrolling levels are as dope as the first.

That said Hard Corps is now on my radar.

I think Contra : Hard Corps is a phenomenal game, but it has that one huge flaw : the Omnibot fight in the jungle stage, which is very tedious to go through becauser of all the waiting around. I mean the first few times it's allright, but it gets old real quick. The fighting segments with him are actually fun though
The presentation in that game is just off the charts. It's fucking nuts! Rivaled only by Batman & Robins on the same system (and maybe Rocket Knight Adventure and Castlevania : Bloodlines. Oh hey look : all Konami games and let's not forget the Treasure games too )

Keep in mind that I like the game more than probably everybody on here though. I'm very emotional in my reviews (I have never strived to craft "purely-objective" game reviews, I just don't like that goal to begin with)

Skyblazer, Hagane and Contra III are all in the upper tier of 16bit sidescrolling action imo, whatever the console. I actually like the latter's topdown stages but I'm an Assault fan.

The trick with Hagane is to walk before you run. It has a reputation for mean difficulty in casual circles, which seems to result from noobs trying to use the flashy finesse attacks before they've seen the game through. The basic sword slash and a little airdash/backflip/slide chicanery can handle 95% of the game without issue; bombs will take care of the rest. Survive first, then style on it.

Purely objective reviews would exist assuming the reviewer thinks himself an authority and most if everyone very solidly recognizes him so.

There's many authority wannabe's but one that cannot see the beauty over the imperfections and doesn't make an effort to share how he enjoyed a game shouldn't be called one imho.

Even if it had a entire level of running away from invincible killer hamsters HC would still be a badass game, because there's megabyteloads of goodness in it nothing can erase anyway.

very good point. and great post

love hagane, still quite highly regard contra 3 though it's no longer one of my favorite contra games, but skyblazer frankly just felt like some slightly polished chaff, to me. unnecessarily large & slightly directionless levels exacerbated by the game's multi-directional scrolling, enemies that are easily bypassable and you only stop to fight when you need MP/HP drops (which are too abundant), exploitable door transitioning respawning stuff (even 1ups), secrets hidden behind unmarked pass-through walls, a bunch of special moves that are never useful (while a couple are so useful it makes that they're all tied to a selectable wheel and MP bar a little annoying - a reusable healing spell is always bad news to me in a platformer), mobility options that the stage design often can't accommodate in interesting ways, the whole world map and bonus glider stages feeling totally unnecessary - it's often what i think of when i think of a decent action game bogged down by a whole bunch of sfc-isms.

a few of the bosses feel really poorly designed, too - you can lock the dragon in place by just attacking repeatedly and some of the others have really repetitive, exploitable patterns. i seem to recall a couple blind jumps & moving platforms having cycles that don't match up well with each other, too, during some of the gimmicky tower areas.

i'm curious why you consider this one upper-tier, bil, i just felt like it couldn't come together. i seem to recall you calling hagane a similar game with a much higher performance ceiling, and i can see that a bit, but to me, they felt leagues apart in quality. it's definitely an above-average sfc platformer, but i don't consider that a high bar.

I enjoy the handling of the main character, mostly. Stages are definitely fluffier than they needed to be, but by the same token they generally won't hold you up either. It's an easier game I enjoy cutting a straight line through now and then. The moveset is likewise a bit extraneous, but what's there is pretty satisfying, the flying kick to the head, the walljumping and the airdash in particular.

I never knock action games too hard for farmable HP, or even overly-generous HP. I aim to play well enough that neither's needed -it'd be almost like complaining about unlimited credits, to me. (if they're needed due to poor design, that's obviously another matter entirely)

It's a technically involving yet easy-going game I can fire up to relax now and then - that's its niche, and it serves me well. I've got dozens of harder, shorter, tighter sidescrollers to choose from if that's a concern.

Regarding "upper tier," that's not the unalloyed praise you might assume. What I mean is it's not lower-tier. If we're getting into painfully intense ranking mode, offhand I'd give it 3.5/5 - a solid effort with a few outstanding features. Hagane would get 4 (insane movement options, but never quite reaches the do/die intensity needed to transcend "exhibition sidescroller" status), and Contra III would get 4.5 (some inarguably bullshit gotchas in its otherwise phenomenal de facto second loop that I'd prefer ironed out).

i really wish they'd have put the airdash on its own input and maybe removed/lowered the mp consumption (and likewise rebalanced its damage and/or i-frames). that it costs 2mp makes it feel like there's only one portion of the entire game where the designers really intend for you to actually use it, and that's a shame because it's a snazzy way of getting around.

things like that make me appreciate hagane's control scheme a lot more - absolutely overwhelming at first, but it's brilliantly concise once you get over the initial (and much more gentle than made out or assumed to be) learning curve.

Fucking hell, I don't know how well Rampart holds up in the long-term, but it makes a wicked first impression. I could never quite piece together how this thing worked, from reviews/ads BITD... it's basically a two-phase arcade tower defense (I don't follow TDs either, but fuck me if this isn't a game about defending towers). Manic fortress assembly via Tetris-like interface, followed by even more manic defense via cannon-to-cannon warfare against a growing horde of hostile ships. Time's the enemy in the former, a relentless hail of cannonfire and landing siege troops in the latter.

The two halves seem to play off each other beautifully, in a classic feedback loop. Deft builder technique means more guns, for more wrecked ships and less damage to your forts, ideally until you've amassed a screen-spanning wall of death. There's an incredible sense of struggle, and far from holding back, the utilitarian graphics are entirely apropos; there's precious little time for anything but staying ahead of the build/kill/repair curve.

Tentatively joins Gain Ground and Crack Down on my MD arcade/strategy tiny army men list. Superb first impression. Sadly way too late here to roadtest the 2P mode, but it does sound scintillating if 1P is any indicator.

I can't believe how I underrated Tengen before getting into MD collecting. They're easily among the most consistent sources of no-nonsense arcade action on my shelf. Slap Fight MD, Snow Bros, Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Road Blasters, Paperboy and now this - all of 'em bring out the console's demi-arcade roots just as well as Sega's early CPS1 quartet.

And yeah Baton, I did see the Nintendo World Championships name-drop in the manual! Also a minor but distinct treat I enjoy in my JP versions of Western properties, cute little manga dudes!

Spoiler: show

God speed little SD chaps, your world is a cruel one! See Paperboy's manual too, for another deceptively cute rendering of a character who knows nothing but danger and death!

Spoiler: show

I wonder if that's the same artist behind MD Gauntlet's rather more menacing yet still decidedly playful manual art:

Spoiler: show

Also a bit of LEGO (?) funnin' in Rampart's manual which may have been original or nicked from elsewhere. Hard to tell with Tengen's history of skirting usual publisher protocols.

The coolest thing about Tengen's MD manuals were the excessive developer's commentary and they didn't take themselves too seriously. The catchphrase on the Gauntlet's manual is pretty hilarious too.

渡る世間に鬼だらけ The Demons Are Crossing Over To Our World
(ジェネレータのせいだよ) (And it's all because of the generators)

The Radiant Silvergun manual was just like that too come to think of it. It makes them feel less like play instructions and more like liner notes on a music album.

Exactly - I love that sense of camaraderie and overlap between artist and fans, in both mediums! Slap Fight MD was the first of these I picked up, and I was really surprised by the manual's photo of the hulking arcade PCB... thought it might just be due to that project's labour-of-love nature, but nope, all the ones I mentioned are like that too. Even not knowing the language I can feel the love. ^__^ (that Gauntlet tagline is hilarious btw... and man, what a story behind that particular port, and what a portentous start for M2. It's basically an X68000 fan project gone ultra-deluxe professional port)