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  • King’s Knight (Square, 1986)

    King’s Knight (Square, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Square, Workss / Square
    Released: 18/09/1986
    Completed: 20/03/26
    Completion: Finished it. Saved after every level until the final level, which was an orgy of save states, I’m afraid.

    This article is featured in Pixels and Polygons Quarterly 2026 Q2! It’s available as both physical and digital editions, available from the Pixels and Polygons webstore and Patreon respectively.

    I don’t mean to do it. I don’t mean to keep adding games to my list of games to play. But when Darren Hupke of Pixels and Polygons asked if I had any articles on lesser-known Square games to hand for inclusion in a new issue, and I realised I really didn’t, I decided I’d take a look at their earliest output because playing Ubisoft’s Zombi really woke me up to the fact that the early history of even these huge, iconic companies is poorly remembered, and it’s sort of criminal because they really can be very interesting and illuminating.

    Early Square is challenging to decode. The Japanese game companies that started in arcades–or sprung into existence with the Famicom–can be easier to parse because their games were more likely released internationally, but Square is a company that sprung from Japan’s rich homegrown personal computer market–an aspect of the growing industry that often goes completely overlooked in western games writing.

    It’s another one of those things that I think shows an unusual kinship between Japan and the UK (along with things like “small island nation with outsize cultural footprint” and “horrific colonial past”): there’s an entire world of unique, interesting computers that formed a huge part of gaming culture that just goes almost completely forgotten because it didn’t “reach” America (even though in many cases versions of these games–or their game design lessons–would.)

    Now, to be fair, Japanese game companies were quicker to transition to consoles than those in the UK (it’s interesting to think that it’s really only Rare who saw the writing on the wall, endeavouring to transition to the Famicom around about the same time as its Japanese contemporaries.) And the language barrier is uniquely high here, because you’re not just dealing with Japanese, but Japanese on an 80s personal computer. Square’s very first game was “The Death Trap” a text adventure, and while I’d love that to be the earliest Square game I play and write about, it’s untranslated and the entire game’s text is in katakana (only one of the three Japanese scripts) making it unbelievably hard to parse even if you’re a skilled reader of Japanese (of which I am not.) 

    So, ironically after all I’ve said, that means the earliest game developed by Square I can successfully play is King’s Knight, their first original game for Famicom! But it’s still a meaningful one to start with, as an important predecessor to Final Fantasy, being a fantasy-themed vertically scrolling shooter designed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and featuring music from Nobuo Uematsu.

    Previously Square had really only developed adventure games, and let me say… you can tell. It feels like Sakaguchi read about Xevious, tried to mush an RPG into it, and then at no point had anyone test the game to see if it made any sense or if it was possible for an ordinary human to complete.

    You can feel though that even with the obvious inspirations, Sakaguchi is trying to do something unique with King’s Knight–or at least, something a little more clever than just a shooter with hidden secrets. The setup of King’s Knight is very much your generic fantasy codswallop; Princess Claire has been kidnapped by a dragon, and so four heroes must quest–and ultimately work together–in order to save her. There are some pretty classic “slightly lost in translation” Japanese hero names here: we have a knight, “Ray Jack”, a wizard “Kaliva”, a lizard, “Barusa” and a thief, “Toby.” Each of these heroes gets their own vertically scrolling shooter level before the final level where you use them all at once.

    Each of the heroes is featured on the Japanese title screen. They–along with the credit for Workss–are removed for the US release.

    This is one of the things where you can feel the effort to do something different. You don’t get multiple lives in King’s Knight; if a character dies, that’s it, and you just move onto the next level(!) indeed, if you manage to complete any level, it takes you to the final level so you can attempt to complete it, though it’s impossible to complete without all four heroes1.

    King’s Knight is–at its face–a brutally unforgiving game where you can’t afford to lose a single life. The design does try to take the edge off: firstly, you don’t die in a single hit; you’ve got a life bar. Secondly, the levels are covered in power-ups. This is done in a really strange implementation of the Xevious “uncover secrets” design that kicked off so much of Japanese game design in this era: your bullets destroy raised terrain, and the levels are almost entirely raised terrain. 

    You can actually jump up onto it–which has, as far as I can tell, limited use–but really what you’re going to be doing is hammering the fire button to destroy as much of it as possible. Enemies will pop out, which is supposed to make you be a bit more careful, but as they just run straight at you–and the level is covered in enemies anyway–it’s really not that much of a deterrent. You’ll otherwise reveal power-ups to increase your strength, defence, speed or jumping ability, health arrows (up arrows restore your health, down arrows hurt you) and on each level there are four “elements” that must be collected so each character can cast their spell on the final level–one of which is in a dungeon sub-level, which you also have to reveal by destroying terrain.

    King’s Knight has an uneasy puzzle game design that visually destroys the fantasy illusion, because quickly the screen is covered in up and down arrows like you’re playing Dance Dance Revolution and failing badly. I do understand where Sakaguchi is coming from. King’s Knight is a post-The Tower of Druaga title, and I suspect on seeing that game’s implementation of light RPG mechanics he was eager to take its system of upgrades and feed it back into a shooter, but didn’t want to fall into the same “work out what you have to do to progress while autoscrolling” design that Xevious’s sequel Super Xevious: GAMP no Nazo would fall into (stunningly, released the day after this in Japan.)

    The problem is that this kind of design still takes you away from the joy of playing a shooter, replacing it with the grim memorisation of a map. You barely pay attention to the enemies. Indeed, you barely pay attention to taking hits, because the levels are flooded with symbols and you just can’t afford to miss the elements or upgrades, so you rely–as much as possible–on picking up health arrows to survive.

    The power-ups (and downs) stick out like a sore thumb.

    A single mistake can end your entire run, but thankfully they realised this was shockingly cruel because King’s Knight has a rudimentary save system. After you’ve been through all the levels at least once on the title screen you can press Select instead of Start to go to a party screen that shows the power levels of each character and choose which ones to play, skipping the levels of characters you’ve fully powered up to get to the final level quicker. This doesn’t improve things much–you still have to complete the game in one sitting–but at least you don’t have to do every level to get to the final level. This splits King’s Knight into two stages: playing it until you memorise the first four levels, and then hitting your head against the brick wall of the final level endlessly.

    A lot of games of this era I can’t believe anyone completed; King’s Knight is up there, because in the final level you’re no longer just one hero but all four on screen in formation. This functionally means that your hitbox is four times the size! Just surviving would be hard enough, but the game adds a couple of new quirks to make it harder: the level is covered in statues of lions, dragons and gargoyles that require you attack them with the correct hero to kill them quickly (they attack relentlessly) which requires you move your heroes over symbols on the floor of the level to change their formation. You also need to change formation to make sure the correct hero is at the front so they can cast their magic spell at the correct time–which isn’t going to be obviously apparent (especially as there’s no feedback if you’re trying to cast the wrong spell, or the right spell at the wrong time.)

    King’s Knight, until the final level is a strange shooter that would be pretty basic and forgettable–far less engaging than something like say Twinbee–if it wasn’t for the strange terrain mechanic, but the final level is like playing a bullet-hell shooter where your character takes up a quarter of the screen. It’s made even worse by the fact you can’t control who is leading the formation easily–if you get who you want at the front, you can get stuck in areas of the screen as the change symbols suddenly become obstacles that can automatically end your run as they force you to change to the hero that can’t cast the next spell you need.

    It’s not impossible, but it’s a grim march of memorisation and luck for very little reward.

    King’s Knight was also released on MSX shortly after the Famicom release, and while it’s slower and jerkier, it has one particular aspect that you really feel the loss of in the Famicom version: there’s a status bar that lets you know your current hero’s power levels and if they’ve collected the needed elements. 

    Square obviously had some fondness for King’s Knight: not only did they release it for more Japanese home computers (the NEC PC-8801mkII SR and Sharp X1) in 1987, they’d choose it as their inaugural release for NES as Squaresoft in the USA in 1989. This is a nice edition–coming with a map and a detailed instruction booklet–but it’s a strange release because the game would have felt so dated by 1989. Not even in just comparison to other NES shooters; Square had released more technically impressive games with other publishers and Nintendo Of America would still take over publishing duties for Final Fantasy in 1990, so it was either some sort of low-stakes way for Squaresoft to get up and running, or Square simply liked the idea of starting their independent publishing in the US with the same game they did so in Japan.

    I wish I could say King’s Knight was a noble failure, but it’s simply a naive one. Too hard, too awkward and ultimately, not fun. But it does show that Sakaguchi was thinking about how to get an epic quest with four unique heroes on Famicom, so maybe it does have its place in history.

    Will I ever play it again? I’d really rather not.

    Final Thought: Another argument that Square have a particular fondness for King’s Knight is that a remake of it was released in 2017 on mobile, King’s Knight: Wrath of the Dark Dragon, retconning the game into the Final Fantasy XV. Sadly, the game was shut down in a year and is now lost. They really gotta stop doing that!!!

    1. It might be possible to get to the very end of the level with just Toby if you are superhuman, but I don’t think so. You could definitely get to the end without Kaliva, but the final boss has to be hit by all four heroes, so you’d still be unable to finish the game. ↩︎
  • UFO 50 #4: Paint Chase (Perry, 2024)

    UFO 50 #4: Paint Chase (Perry, 2024)

    Developed/Published by: Jon Perry / Mossmouth
    Released: “October 1983” (18/09/2024)
    Completed: 21/12/2024
    Completion: Completed it.

    After the experience of Ninpek, I played Paint Chase a couple of times and realised I’d have to complete a whopping twenty-five stages in one go to finish it, and I decided that I couldn’t be arsed and put UFO 50 down completely and played a bunch of other things instead. But after finishing Indika I thought I’d load it up and, uh… I guess it’s sort of funny that I should rail against the vision of UFO 50’s creators that you should have to “git gud” in order to finish games in this collection and for me to finish this quite easily on like, my fifth go.

    Now, to be fair, Paint Chase isn’t exactly easy. A maze-painter game in the style of Crush Roller/Make Trax, as a wee race car the player is trying to paint in the majority of a level before the timer is up–while enemy vehicles spawn from spawners and paint the level in their own color unless you can destroy them. It’s a very clean, simple and rewarding design, which they evolve quite carefully across the twenty five stages via level and enemy design.

    At first, you’ve just go the spawners, some speed boosts and enemy cars that you destroy by smashing into; but quickly the game introduces wrinkles such as buttons that change the level layout, and enemies that blast paint everywhere if you don’t get to them in time.

    In fact, you can barely go a level without them introducing a new concept, which is almost certainly what is going to make you fail the game and have to–annoyingly–start the entire thing over again. While Paint Chase does feature some Pac-Man-style interstitials that help explain what enemies do, you still often find yourself on a level, see something like a red bomb, and then have to trial-and-error you way to working out that you can only destroy them easily by driving into them while boosting.

    Now, this is a pretty classic bit of game design, really. I mean, I’ve beaten The Tower of Druaga, probably the most brutal “uh, try some stuff?” video game in history, but [taps watch] I don’t have all day here, and having to restart Paint Chase because I didn’t know what an enemy would do until I did it can, frankly, fuck off. For example, there’s an enemy towards the end of the game that I genuinely think is such a clever subversion–if you boost into it, as you want to do with basically every other enemy, you will spread the enemy paint across the screen as you skid. So the game now requires you to carefully plan when to hit a boost or not, adding another layer to the play.

    Once I knew that… fun! Working that out by having to start the game again? No thanks!

    I won’t lie–I looked up an enemy guide online for this, and once I knew what everything did, Paint Chase was a lot more pleasant. There are still some frustrating levels–the enemies you have to come at from a specific direction are never easy to deal with–but when you’re playing the game on a level playing field, it’s… fun, actually. Whisper it, but I could have happily played it for longer–the enemies allow for way, way more levels to be made than there currently are. 

    I won’t lie, though–I’m unbelievably happy that I was able to polish this off so quickly, and I think for some players even with an enemy guide this one might be a nightmare. But then I’m also sure that loads of players beat Ninpek on like their third try. Horses for courses.

  • Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018)

    Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018)

    Developed/Published by: Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital
    Released: 13/12/2018
    Completed: 05/04/2026
    Completion: Finished it. Did most of the extra puzzles for the first couple of sections then lost the taste for it and only did extra ones by accident.

    Gris has sold over three million copies and been out for eight years, so I think I can get away with saying: it’s bad!

    I can be pretty hard on “artistic” games, by which I make a distinction from pure “art games” and the more commercialised form. The kind of game that may have ~themes~ but still feels like a product. Games that, often, don’t really feel like they’ve got anything to say–or at least, nothing that challenges the audience (not that all art has to be a slog.)

    I’m aware that this may be uncharitable; after all, it can be personal preference. We come to anything with the knowledge we already have; a work that might seem obvious and derivative to me might be completely mind blowing to another person who has never seen anything like it. So I shouldn’t–really–beat up on Gris too much for being trite. 

    In Gris, you play the titular character who–after waking up in the palm of a crumbling statue–travels through a 2D platformer world gaining abilities, collecting stars and facing off against a black creature who seems to want to stop her bringing colour back to the world.

    There’s no dialogue, but the game is–blatantly–about grief and the “black dog” of depression, and if you think that “binging colour back to the world” and being chased by a big inky black creature that’s trying to stop you is sort of an embarrassing way to explore those themes, well, snap. But I did intend to be charitable on this aspect, so let’s just let that slide.

    What I can’t let slide is that Gris is simply not enjoyable to play, with a catalogue of design flaws that make it–despite what should be a breezy, sub-four hour playthrough–miserable. First: the game does an absolutely horrific job in making it clear what is something you collide with or not. What’s foreground, background and so on.

    The game is very art-forward, which is understandable, but it feels like there’s no consistency. There are so many sections–especially in a later swimming section–where I repeatedly just hit myself against walls because it looked as much like background as anything else. I admit was on an Steam Deck, so you could argue the game’s reliance on zooming out a huge amount is at fault, but I don’t really think “you need a big monitor or telly” is much of an excuse, or even true.

    What do you collide with here?

    The level design is also full of the kind of decisions that should have been caught long before release. Pretty much every level begins with you being dropped somewhere so you can head either left or right… with no hint of a critical path. Indeed, sometimes the game takes you back to a hub and every time it happened I thought “oh, I’ve made a mistake here” but I hadn’t. You could argue that’s kind of a magic trick–I was always heading in the right direction–but if I’m still feeling uncertain and unclear, it’s not so much a magic trick as “something confusing that happened.”

    A lot of the problem relates to the fact that the game doesn’t make movement especially fun. Gris makes the classic error of making your movement unpleasant at first so it can get better later (rather than starting good and getting excellent; I admit I just complained about this in Promise Mascot Agency.) If I enjoyed movement, I’d be more inclined to explore when hit with a variety of directions I could possibly go.

    Gris feels like she’s moving very slowly in those massive zoom-outs (you’ll beg for a dash) and when they introduce swimming, it’s so frustratingly slow and gummy it’s just awful (and don’t think you can try and double-jump your way out of the problem–each time you get dunked, making it feel even slower.)

    And yet ironically, one of the worst things about Gris is that in key narrative moments–big chase scenes–you lose control completely1 reducing you to a mere spectator of the beats that should be thrilling. It’s not a relief to not have to move Gris; it just makes you wonder why you’re bothering to play any of it at all.

    For a game that wants to be about overcoming adversity, it’s a problem that the actual adversity that the game provides is simply a catalogue of tiny frictions that make every interaction with it low-level annoying. The puzzles–which use Gris’ growing range of abilities–are basically fine and paced acceptably. Indeed, one aspect of the level design I appreciated was how they tucked the “extra” puzzles for collectibles around the critical path puzzles so they kind of worked as a second challenge on the “same” puzzle. But after the first level, I just stopped doing them, because I wasn’t interested in struggling with the game feel any further than I really had to.

    If I’m being completely fair to Gris, even if I found the narrative at best basic and obvious, you could go over this game, get rid of all of its frictions and you’d have a solid–if maybe uninspiring–puzzle platformer. It feels very much like a problem of not getting the feedback when it could have made a difference, not listening to it, or simply not having the time to act on it. But who am I to speak? As I said, this sold millions of copies. They’re fine!

    Will I ever play it again? I’m good. The team went on to make Neva, and I suppose I have some interest if they were able to fix the problems of Gris with it, but not enough to find out.

    Final Thought: There’s an extra cutscene for getting all the collectibles, and something I suppose I do find sort of interesting is it makes the exact theme of the game explicit. Now, you might think I’d be against that, considering everything I’ve said, but in a weird way the cutscene does “cap off” the narrative in a way the normal ending doesn’t, and I think it’s kind of a shame that they hide it from most players. I contain multitudes.

    1. Pedants may wish to note that you can slightly move Gris left and right or up and down in some of these. But it’s meaningless. ↩︎
  • Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works, 2025)

    Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works
    Released: 10/04/2025
    Completed: 10/03/2026
    Completion: Finished it doing pretty much everything outside of getting all the garbage and signs.

    I was a big fan of Kaizen Game Works’ Paradise Killer, even though I came to it late, and I’ll admit to being a bit hesitant about Promise Mascot Agency, considering the risk–a UK company making a game about wacky Japanese mascots?–but I was concerned before playing Paradise Killer that it’s vaporwaveyness was going to be grating, and it more-or-less worked, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

    Well, Promise Mascot Agency is a textbook example of that “difficult second album.” There’s a lot to like here, but there’s also a kind of messiness to it. If it was literally an album, there’d be some really discordant stuff on there, the kind of album where you want to skip every third or fourth track because it doesn’t work, and on which none of the other songs are quite fully-formed enough to quite get their hooks into you. Not an album, even, where you feel ambition got the better of them, just one where they noodled too much, for too long, and ended up with something that almost–but not quite–works, and to do anything else would require throwing away all the work they’d already done, and what’s there isn’t terrible, so it doesn’t deserve that.

    In Promise Mascot Agency, you play Michi, aka “The Janitor”, a classic, Yakuza-series style honour-above-all super amazing guy, which means it makes perfect sense that he’s voiced by the literal Kazuma Kiryu, Takaya Kuroda. Michi and his yakuza brother, Toki (who doesn’t seems sus immediately at all) are ambushed on a job, leading to his family owing a truly absurd amount of debt and his death a requirement. Lucky for Michi, however, the family happens to own a failing mascot agency in Kaso-Machi, a town where Yakuza never go because… it’s cursed! The kind of curse that kills any Yakuza who goes there. Considering he’s a dead man anyway, Michi heads to Kaso-Machi in his shitey old kei truck, aiming to raise as much money with the help of a sentient finger before he croaks from whatever it is the curse does.

    Promise Mascot Agency is, in a lot of ways, a mechanical follow-up to Paradise Killer. Both games are open world genre mash-ups: if in Paradise Killer you were playing a sort of first-person Crackdown smooshed into a deduction game–leaping around to collect clues–in Promise Mascot Agency you’re (kind of) playing Burnout Paradise, but driving around to collect the mascots and other things you need for the management sim. You never control Michi outside of the truck, so if you’re not driving around, you’re either in cut-scenes or menus.

    Like Paradise Killer, going around the world collecting stuff is great! It’s a complete pleasure to explore, smash signs, pick things up and so on—well, past a certain point. Again like Paradise Killer, there’s an upgrade system, and while it’s better here–there are more upgrades–it’s got a problem which upgrade systems sometimes face: the upgrades don’t make the kei truck more fun they make it less shitty.

    I get it from a narrative standpoint–the truck isn’t really supposed to be some incredible off-road super car–but much like Paradise Killer, one of the very first things you’re going to want to do is just find most of the upgrades and be done with it. You don’t need them all immediately, but there are a couple that make exploration so much nicer (and more rewarding) and those ones do feel like they probably should have been handed out on the critical path close to immediately, leaving the others as nice to haves.1

    But really Promise Mascot Agency’s true problem is–sadly–the whole “mascot agency” bit. Game director Oli Clarke Smith has said that the original idea came from the team’s art director, Rachel Noy, and the original idea was a 2D Kairosoft-like, but that Smith and tech director Phil Crabtree “wanted to create something bigger.”

    They have certainly created something bigger, but it betrays the entire concept of the game. There’s no real management at all. You hire mascots–choosing their compensation–send said mascots on jobs, and that’s about it.

    That really wouldn’t be the worst thing–I’m fine with simplicity–but for the fact that for some reason there’s also a card game jammed in. When mascots go on a job, there’s a percentage chance–higher when they’re new and low rank–that they’ll fuck up the job somehow (getting stuck in a door because their head is too huge being the classic example.) The way you solve this problem is that you have “hero cards”–collected in-world–with which you can play a simple card game to defeat the problem. The problem has HP; you play cards of the required type to damage it.

    It’s not a difficult or in-depth game at all. It’s basically Top Trumps, though as you upgrade the cards by playing through the story or collecting more collectables, some cards will give you more actions or allow you to draw more cards, but generally you just play the cards with the highest damage. It feels like a really half-formed idea, and the problem is that you do it fucking endlessly.

    Now, the game gives you the option of sending mascots off with consumables that will make this game show up less, but that bumps up against the game’s design otherwise, where you’re really trying to make as much money as possible. The kind of player who doesn’t use health potions on bosses “because they might need them” isn’t going to buy and burn thousands of yen worth of consumables just to give themselves a 50% less chance of a mini game that’s “quick.”

    And as quick as it is, it’s unbelievably annoying to send a bunch of mascots off on jobs, think “ah, now I can do the thing I like: driving around collecting shit” and drive 30 seconds only to have a bunch of alerts meaning you have to play the card game three or four times.

    It’s really disastrous for Promise Mascot Agency. Unlike Paradise Killer, where collecting stuff really ties deeply into the conversations, and getting to do another conversation with new stuff is a pleasure to aim for, in Promise Mascot Agency the actual mascot agency is just an annoyance. If you’ll allow me to return to that album metaphor, it really feels like if you got an album and there was a car alarm that set off randomly in every song. And not in a good way (I feel like I need to say this for everyone who’s a fan of experimental, car alarm-based music.)

    It’s just really hard to get into an enjoyable flow with Promise Mascot Agency until you get to the point where you don’t need money any more, and when you don’t need money any more… you don’t need to send mascots off anyway!

    To be honest, the whole game is just quite oddly paced. You can blame my min-max brain again, but they introduce the idea that you need to send money back to the family in a certain chapter fairly early into the game, but before that chapter you don’t have to, and you can do basically everything else in the game. So… as soon as I realised that I could play it without slowing my accumulation of money by having to send cash back (and I could instead spend it all on town upgrades or other things that increased passive income) I did that for as long as I could stand, and then basically speedran the actual plot.

    And that plot is… ehhh. You obviously know why the job went wrong immediately, and the mystery of Kaso-Machi is… fine. Paradise Killer’s plot is pretty messy, but I found it came together well, but Promise Mascot Agency just doesn’t feel that rewarding. And it’s actually a problem of the mechanics.

    In Paradise Killer, the reason the ending works is because it’s building on everything you’ve done: your entire time spent building a case (or cases) is all used at the end, and you really do shape what happens by your play. In Promise Mascot Agency, the climax is a big mascot competition where the odds are unfairly stacked against you. Going into it, I thought “oh man, this is actually where the card game is going to matter. It’s going to really require me to have upgraded all my cards and play them in the right order to do enough damage to win.”

    But… it doesn’t. The entire end of the game is completely scripted. You can just not bother to try at all because you get deux ex machina cards in your deck after some forced losses.

    This sucks! It sucks so much! It makes all the effort you expended feel wasted and it hammers home that the card game isn’t really anything at all other than something to gum up your time spent playing this. 

    I got to the end of Promise Mascot Agency completely and utterly deflated. It’s a game that just works against itself. I had a jolly time driving around and collecting stuff, and while the story isn’t any great shakes, I liked the character designs and enjoyed some of the mascot story beats. But what’s portrayed as the core not only isn’t really there, the game would probably be better if it was removed.

    Ah well, third albums are usually good, aren’t they?

    Will I ever play it again? Rinsed this. Well, I didn’t do the races, or some of the other extra content, but I didn’t have much urge to do any of it.

    Final Thought: 

    Speaking of the character designs… Matriarch Shimazu. If I didn’t think everyone at Kaizen Game Works knows what they were doing with Matriarch Shimazu some of her later character poses makes it exceedingly clear they knew what they were doing. Let me simply say: 🥵.

    1. I suppose the argument could be made that the most necessary ones are pretty hard to miss, but they can still be missed… ↩︎
  • Double Dragon (Technōs Japan, 1987)

    Double Dragon (Technōs Japan, 1987)

    Developed/Published by: Technōs Japan (Published by Taito in North America.)
    Released: 22/04/1987
    Completed: 12/03/2026
    Completion: Finished it (no need for saving until that ridiculous final level.)

    This essay on Double Dragon follows last week’s on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun as a tribute to the recently departed Yoshihisa Kishimoto, even though, to be honest, I’m pretty hard on it.

    Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and if I’ve got an Egret Mini II and I’ve paid to own Double Dragon again, then I might as well play it. 

    In my write up of the NES version, I mentioned that I’d played and completed the arcade original in the form of a now long-delisted Xbox 360 release (written up for Eurogamer.) I absolutely put the boot in, but re-reading that now, I notice how it’s definitely a review of the Xbox 360 release rather than an examination of the arcade original. But there’s something I mention in the review I had completely forgotten about: Double Dragon’s astonishingly poor performance.

    I initially thought the Egret II Mini was at fault–I’d remembered someone saying that if the power supply is too low there are issues–but I’d plugged it in with a decent charger. It’s simply that the game’s original hardware wasn’t up to the game design, and the Egret II Mini stays authentic to that (it seems that people can, and do, overclock the game when emulating it through other means; it might have been nice if Taito had offered something like this, but I understand why they didn’t.)

    Ultimately, the game suffers so much slowdown it is agonising to play. The game slows down as soon as there are as few as two enemies on screen, but speeds up if (for example) you’ve knocked one of them down. The speed of the game undulates in a way that’s completely discombobulating. It makes playing the game unpleasant in a way that’s unusually unique; like trying to build a card tower in front of a rotating fan. And you’ve got jam all over your hands.

    Now… just because I feel that way doesn’t mean that the arcade audience of the late 80s felt that way, with Double Dragon “America’s highest-grossing dedicated arcade game in 1988 and 1989.” I find that baffling, because it’s nigh unplayable! 

    (The only assumption I can make–and it very much is an assumption–is that because the game was using older 8-bit chips, maybe the board was cheaper and so a lot of machines were sold, so it won by sheer numbers. But I certainly don’t have any sales numbers.)

    The thing that makes this all a bit of a shame is that, well, even if it’s stupidly hard, I sort of like Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun, and Double Dragon, as the next game from Yoshihisa Kishimoto–and the one that truly defined the side-scrolling beat-em-up by featuring proper levels that you have to progress through to complete–should be better than it is.  Kishimoto is really trying to make another leap here, and you can feel the game straining within the limitations of the obvious technical problems.

    For example: the game is clearly intended to improve on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun’s enemy AI, one of that game’s most interesting aspects. And while the enemies here do try and position themselves to take you on, the thing you’re most going to notice is that they’ll just refuse to get close to you if you’re holding a weapon (making holding weapons a complete waste of time) and then otherwise they’re really as dumb as rocks, happily walking into dynamite they’ve just thrown or off cliffs.

    And the player’s abilities are supposed to be deeper, more interesting, more situational, with new moves like a headbutt and a spinning jump kick. But it’s ruined by the fact that–I’m sure inspired by Kunio-Kun’s powerful back kick–heroes Billy and Jimmy Lee have a “elbow smash” that attacks enemies behind them. Possibly aware that the back kick was frustrating–because you couldn’t use it unless you had an enemy behind you–you can now do the elbow smash whenever you like, and because it guarantees an immediate knockdown… the entire game becomes about turning your back on enemies, performing the elbow smash, and then performing it again as soon as they get up.

    I want to be clear: I don’t think you can play this game “properly.” It’s simply too frustrating, with no sense that anything that happens is related to your own abilities because of the slowdown. So instead, the actual and I suspect only way to get through this game is to elbow smash every enemy you face–the ones you can’t make drop off edges, anyway. 

    The only reason this game isn’t an easy single credit win is because the final level is, frankly, nonsense. The first section features some blocks that spring out from the background and some spears that statues attack you with that knock off half of your health. They don’t have any tell (the blocks in particular are infuriating) and it means that you will almost certainly lose a life (and the default settings only start you with two.)

    (There’s also a jump across a bridge in the previous level that will probably take a few lives from you, but at least you can see that.)

    Once you get past all that nonsense, the main problem is just that every enemy has a ludicrous amount of health and (yet again calling back to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun) the final boss can kill you in one hit by shooting you. He goes down easily to the elbow smash like everyone else, however.

    I really, really wish I liked Double Dragon. It’s a hugely important game, but when you play it, you almost can’t understand why. The design is coming from the right place. I can see that Kishimoto is trying to move the genre forward. But it’s still a bit half-baked, and the performance is too poor for you to appreciate it anyway.1 I wasn’t that hot on the NES version–with its awkward platforming, and still including those annoying stupid blocks–but it’s a much better way to spend your time than this.

    Will I ever play it again? Right, that’s twice. That’s absolutely enough times.

    Final Thought: You know what? There’s one thing they nailed straight off with Double Dragon. The theme music. Absolutely gets the blood pumping.

    1. I’d love to read Florent Gorges’ Enter The Double Dragon to see if it has anything on Kishimoto’s experience making this, but it’s 1) in French and 2) not easily accessible. ↩︎
  • Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun (Technōs Japan, 1986)

    Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun (Technōs Japan, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Technōs Japan/Taito
    Released: 05/1986
    Completed: 08/03/2026
    Completion: Finished it (Saving after each level.)

    It was announced on April 5th that the designer of Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun, Double Dragon and more, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, had passed away. There’s a sad coincidence here, as I’d just played both Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun and Double Dragon for an unrelated reason. These weren’t Kishimoto’s first games–he started at Data East and created some well-regarded laserdisc games, Thunder Storm and Road Blaster (also known as Cobra Command and Road Avenger) but they are his best known works, so as tribute I’ll be posting my articles on them this week and next.

    image via https://x.com/FlorentGorgesFR/status/2041105532522561653
    Yoshihisa Kishimoto (1961-2026)

    I hadn’t originally planned to play this–in fact, in my write-up of the Famicom’s Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun I said I wouldn’t–but I had a research-related reason and the Egret Mini II’s most recent release, Arcade Collection Part I meant I suddenly had easy access to it, so it would have been an absolute dereliction of duty to not play it.

    Best known as Renegade, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun is a cornerstone video game the likes of The Tower of Druaga or Xevious, in that it would spawn an entire genre that would end up in an almost entirely different–arguably simpler–place. It’s the original “brawler” style beat ‘em up (or, as it’s known in Japan, “belt scrolling action”) though as it exists pre-genre convention, it will surprise any modern player with its stages, which are arena battles (rather than continuous levels) and combat that requires savvy positioning and careful timing, as there’s no way to credit feed (although your health is restored after each stage, there are no continues.)

    Renegade was created by Techōs Japan for Taito to appeal to a western audience and was directly inspired by Walter Hill’s New York-set The Warriors (despite that hardly being a contemporary reference; the film was over seven years old by that point) but Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun is remarkable for being an early example of an–at least mildly–autobiographical game. Designer Yoshihisa Kishimoto based Kunio on himself, who as a teen found himself getting into fights on a daily basis.1 The game is strongly inspired by the unique culture of delinquency in Japan: the hero, Kunio, is a high school student driven into action to defend his bullied friend: first against “banchō” (male high school delinquents) then against “bōsōzoku” (custom motorcycle biker gangs) then “sukeban” (female high school delinquents) before finally the deadly yakuza.

    The level intros, where your pal gets his beaten up and even shot(!) aren’t replaced with anything in Renegade, to its detriment, I think.

    Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun is deceptive. It can be beaten in as quickly as six minutes, but only the very best players could even attempt such a feat. The game is crushingly hard even on its easiest difficulty, with enemies that intelligently swarm you and a boss in each arena who can seem invincible. The trick is that there are three buttons: a left attack, jump, and right attack. You hit the attack in the direction you are facing, and if there is an enemy behind you, you can hit the opposite attack to do a powerful back kick to make space. This is, honestly, pretty confusing if you’re more used to later games that quickly discarded such a system, but it’s a large factor in the game’s richness. You don’t try to overwhelm enemies in Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun; you have to carefully position yourself to avoid getting stunlocked by attacks from multiple directions, and when you face bosses, you have to consider your tactics. The bōsōzoku boss can be taken down easily with jump kicks, but the sukeban boss will always duck; meaning you’ll have to take advanced tactics like keeping a lower-level enemy on screen so that you can face them and instead use your powerful back kick on the boss.

    It can be frustrating–and it certainly doesn’t feel fair–but the game is so quick that there’s a draw to trying again with a new tactic in mind. The game does push it a little too far with the yakuza level featuring enemies who all one hit kill. With the boss able to fire a gun and kill you from afar, you have to take extremely conservative hit-and-run tactics that can make a loss absolutely gutting (with a lot of luck you can just wail on the boss as soon as he appears; if the other enemies don’t surround you, they might similarly get stunlocked and you’ll survive; it’s far from a consistent tactic, however.)

    I’m a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Maybe it was the novelty of my Egret Mini II, maybe it was that I let myself save after every level, but I had fun trying to “solve” each level after getting over the initial hump of difficulty. There’s depth to the mechanics–you can throw enemies into other enemies, or off the edge of the train platform–and as your health gets restored after each level there’s a real value in trying to survive each brawl at any cost. 

    This motorbike section must have felt like such a slap in the face to those who finished the first level in arcades. You have to time your jump kicks perfectly.

    Normally I wouldn’t be so in favour of a game this hard, but my memory of the Famicom version is that– though the game was far more expansive, with multi-stage levels, a motorbike mini-game, even a maze–it was just too easy to cheese your way through. It’s better, but not as thrilling. I felt like I really had to work for my win here, and for whatever reason, that just worked for me.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but maybe this will lead to a reappraisal of Double Dragon, also on the Egret II Mini’s Arcade Collection Part 1, which I remember being straight cheeks when I played it on (of all things) Xbox 360.

    Final Thought: As much as I like the Egret II Mini (despite some issues previously mentioned) they really dropped the ball on dip switches. Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun has four difficulties, but they’re listed in the menu as A, B, C, D, and it’s set to B difficulty. Feels like that would make it easy to assume that’s “normal” difficulty, but the default on the machine was normal, which would maybe make that actually A position. I beat the game on A, which I thought was easier than B, but honestly, having switched difficulties around, I can’t really tell. The game is balls hard no matter what, I guess. I’ve played it longer than I would admit and when I start a fresh run I still can’t beat the first level consistently.

    1. This is sourced from a Polygon article in 2012, though as that article notes, there’s an entire book on Kishimoto’s career by Florent Gorges, Enter the Double Dragon, if you’re interested in learning more. ↩︎
  • Lunar Rescue (Taito, 1979)

    Lunar Rescue (Taito, 1979)

    Developed/Published by: Taito
    Released: 11/1979
    Completed: 27/03/2026
    Completion: Played it as long as I could stand, getting the high score (with a mere 5520)

    It’s been some lean times over here at exp. Towers, but FOMO is real and lives beyond the realm of the sensible, meaning that I finally treated myself to a Taito Egret II Mini because–after foolishly not picking one up previously–the system got reissued in Japan after a period where they were only available for eye-watering prices.

    That means, of course, that I can start playing all the Taito games I’ve got in chronological order! I’ve previously written about Space Invaders (exclusive to exp. 2601) and there’s not much to be said about playing that on an Egret II Mini, but the system also includes Lunar Rescue, which I hadn’t played before. So after a quick detour to play Head On, I decided to not get hung up on playing any earlier Taito games (Space Chaser is just Head On, Field Goal is a weird Break Out, etc.) even though I could easily get Taito Memories working on now after all that falderal with Sega Ages. I’m sure I’ll end up playing games that I didn’t plan to, but let’s try and put my best foot forward here.

    Lunar Rescue seems to be Taito’s most notable post Space Invaders title, and serves also as a notable post Lunar Lander game too. It’s an interesting one in this early wild west of plagiarism because it’s really not very much like Lunar Lander at all, but it does–surely intentionally–include the word “Lunar” in its title. Lunar Lander is–of course–simply a rip-off of Moonlander, which had been kicking about since 1973. So one does have to wonder if Lunar Rescue was merely inspired by the same “inspirations”, considering that Lunar Lander came out–if release dates are even close to correct, of which I admit I have no guarantees they are–mere months before, which does seem like a pretty short turnaround even for a cabinet which uses the same tech as Space Invaders.

    There’s possibly even some simultaneous discovery going on here, because Lunar Rescue is basically a two phase game: you’re trying to land and rescue astronauts while avoiding asteroids, and then get them back to your mothership while avoiding space invaders. Yet Asteroids came out in the same month (dates allowing) so there’s really no chance that they were inspired by it!

    Unlike Asteroids or Lunar Lander, however, Lunar Rescue isn’t about the physics at all. It’s all digital control in the style of Space Invaders. There’s no slow rotations or fine control over speed here. You move left, you move right, and you can slow your ship with the fire button when landing, or speed it up (and fire lasers) when taking off. The asteroids move from left to right (and vice versa) and so do the invaders.

    As someone who genuinely appreciates Space Invaders, I had high hopes for this. Indeed, I can tell there’s some fondness for this game; a near-arcade perfect port was released for ZX Spectrum just a couple of years ago(!) but it’s slow, boring and unfair.

    Landing is boring, and hard to mess up even with your limited movement. So the real issue is taking off, where because you’re flying up the screen into invaders who shoot at you, you can easily find yourself shot by bullets you couldn’t react to–and there’s the added quirk that some ascents feature comets which you generally don’t realise until you’ve died to one. 

    Despite not featuring anything physics-based, the game still manages to lose all of the lustre of Space Invaders; the rhythm, so important to this kind of game, goes from a driving march to a kind of slow waltz, but one where your toes are constantly being tread on. After a couple of goes I really just didn’t want to play it any more, but persevered till I could beat the first level without deaths–inconsistently. 

    It’s not exactly that Lunar Rescue is bad–it’s competent, but it’s just so unbelievably unexciting. Honestly that makes it one of the very worst things I’ve played in ages, which I know is unfair, but I longed for the snappy if punishing loop of Head On every second with this.

    Will I ever play it again? No thank you!

    Final Thought: Oh! You might be wondering how I feel about the Taito Egret II Mini. It’s great. Certainly the nicest example of one of these things you can imagine. My main quibble is that it doesn’t have any scanline filters, but that problem was somewhat solved for me by RetroRGB, who recently(-ish) recommended a HDMI to component downscaler that works well enough, so now I can plug my mini systems into an actual CRT. Which is good, because the scanlines on the Astro City Mini are horrific anyway, and I’ve got a game on that system on the backlog…

  • UFO 50 #3: Ninpek (Suhrke, 2024)

    UFO 50 #3: Ninpek (Suhrke, 2024)

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  • Head On (Sega/Gremlin, 1979)

    Head On (Sega/Gremlin, 1979)

    Developed/Published by: Sega/Gremlin
    Released: 04/1979
    Completed: 18/03/20206
    Completion: Finished one screen. High score of 2685. I’ll take it.

    It’s been a while since I’ve dug this far back into gaming history, but, for reasons, I decided it was time. I’ve already played–and written about–the most important dot eater of all, Pac-Man, but Head On has incredible importance as the first maze chase dot eater. That sounds like a very specific genre, and when you look at Head On, not exactly a perfect description, considering it has really no maze to speak of. But Head On is still really important, so I went to some unnecessary effort to play it. [“You may wish to skip this following waffle. I’ll let you know when you can come back.”–Ed.]

    You see, I can’t remember if I own Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 23: Sega Memorial Selection, the only home release of this game, or not. I know I don’t own a physical copy–lord knows I missed my window on that–but I’m pretty sure I own it on PS3 via the Japanese PlayStation Network.

    However.

    I’ve forgotten my login for Japanese PSN; and the PS3 I know I was logged into I don’t (currently) have access to. So that’s annoying. I could burn a copy, maybe, but why not just use it as an opportunity to finally dip my toe into the exciting world of PS2 emulation?

    I know the first think you’re going to say. “Why emulate a 1979 arcade game via a 2005 PS2 compilation on a different machine? Why have a double layer of emulation?”

    To be honest, I don’t really have a good excuse. But this Memorial Selection1 included a “updated” version of Head On, and that seemed interesting and worth the effort.

    And there my troubles began. I installed Retrodeck on my Steam Deck; easy, so far so good. But then I had to find a PS2 bios. And then I put what I thought was a working copy of the Sega Memorial Selection into the right folder but the (emulated) PS2 kept giving me the red screen of sadness instead of loading it, leading to a (far too lengthy) amount of time where I kept trying different regions in the hope that would change something (it doesn’t) until I finally hit upon the idea that even if the PS2 emulator in question claimed it read the kind of file I was trying to use (CUE and BIN, which does sound like a show about a snooker player teaming up with a binman to solve mysteries)  it… doesn’t? Or at least not this one?

    So then it was having to download an ISO tool on Linux–because most people were like “oh just use the command line” and sack that on the Steam Deck–converting it… and then it worked!

    Now, I know that wasn’t very interesting [“Do you? You still wrote it down”–Ed.] but it stood out to me a bit because it reminded me that the internet is completely fucking useless now. There are some oases; archive.org you beautiful bastard. But for the most part, you search for anything and you’re either getting scam websites, or AI garbage, and the more esoteric your problem the more useless even Reddit becomes. Just one of those evenings where you think “hmm, isn’t this hobby supposed to be fun?”

    And all to play, uh… Head On. 

    [“You can come back now.”–Ed.]

    Head On is interesting in Sega’s history because it comes from the (fairly short) window of time when they were Sega/Gremlin. Now any student of video game history knows that Sega began as Service Games and was founded by Americans (gasp… or not, I mean Taito was founded by a Ukrainian, it’s fine. People from all sorts of countries can found companies. You’ll survive). Probably fewer keep at the front of their mind that between 1969-1984 they were owned by Gulf and Western (a quirk which allowed them to put out a licensed Fonz game.) And in the late 70s, they were struggling. There’s some great context from The Golden Age Arcade Historian, a now seemingly defunct blog:

    “Sega’s plan for U.S. domination had not gone very well. In fiscal year 1977, Sega actually lost almost $800,000 overall and its American arm was responsible for almost all of it … many operators were reluctant to take a chance on a new game in the midst of an industry downturn. As a result, Sega released just two new games in the American market in fiscal year 1978. If Sega was going to compete in the U.S. market they needed to do something – and fast.”

    Gremlin was also struggling. The Golden Age Arcade Historian has even more excellent research on the inexperienced company’s disastrous entry into the arcade industry with Blockade, with companies such as Atari ripping them off with games such as Dominoes while they struggled to to get Blockade to market.

    I’m sure the decision to purchase a different American arcade manufacturer came with a lot of boring business reasons that I don’t quite understand, but one wonders if they truly understood what they were buying was Lane Hauck, the company’s star game designer who, for some reason, is poorly remembered now (the best piece of writing about him is from a 1982 article in the San Diego Reader by a Jeannette DeWyze, thankfully online.)

    Hired by Gremlin on the strength of a homebrew blackjack console(!) he was the one who eventually pushed the company from “wall games” (a kind of electromechanical game) into video games, notably designing first Blockade, the true original snake game, and Depthcharge, before creating Head On.

    Depthcharge: An Aside

    In my article about Atari’s Destroyer, I said:

    “the story here is that Destroyer definitely began as a rip-off: after ripping off Gremlin’s Blockade for Dominoes, Atari seemed like they really wanted to stick the boot in, ripping off Gremlin’s slow anti-submarine shooter Depthcharge with a far flashier game.”

    Interestingly, I probably spoke too quickly. DeWyze:

    “Frank Fogleman recalls that just a few days after Gremlin had applied for legal protection of the “Depthcharge” name. Atari showed up at the copyright office to file an application under the very same name for a game that was almost identical to Gremlin’s initial prototype. Because Atari then had to change its game’s name and refile, Fogleman says Atari suffered a slight delay in coming to the marketplace … Fogleman says the incident prompted hours of speculation within Gremlin over whether Atari had pirated the idea. ‘Finally, we decided it was just coincidence. But you always wonder.’

    Hauck agrees it was probably chance. ‘When you spend a lot of hours, as I do, sitting around and trying to think up games, you soon realize that there really is a quite limited choice of what you can do.’”

    Head On was actually designed before the Sega acquisition–with a two-player mode tried and failed–and benefited greatly from it. With Space Invaders beginning the “lives” era of arcade games–most of the games before just used a timer–a designer at the Japanese arm (Hauck: “An industry veteran there who had invented every game Sega had ever done … He was a very venerated guy on the verge of retirement”2) advised that they change the game from a timer to a lives system–resulting in a game that was so popular in Japan they’d, well, give it pride of place in a Sega Ages collection.

    Even with the change to a lives system, Head On is very much a game of its time. It’s the kind of thing that you could imagine could have got an “arcade perfect” port on the ZX Spectrum. In the game, there are five lanes full of dots, with gaps in which you can switch lanes. You drive a small car and can push a button to go faster, and there’s another car (more than one, later in the game) that’s going in the opposite direction of you that’s trying to cause a horrific accident by smashing into you as fast as possible before you collect all the dots. The trick is that you cannot turn around. Your only option for avoiding this other car is to change lanes, but they can (and will) change lanes as soon as you do to try and keep their target in their sights, meaning you have to play the game by savvily modifying your speed–you can change two lanes when you aren’t going full speed, which the opposing car cannot do, and as they can only change lanes at the same places you can, you can try and ensure they don’t have the opportunity to change before you pass them.

    To a modern player, Head On is… well, it’s not great. It’s punishing, because the entire map resets after every death, meaning that you can only move onto a future level if you do it in one go (though like Pac-Man, there aren’t different maps). It’s also really frustrating to control. You aren’t controlling the car like you’re driving it (push left or right) you’re pushing the car in the direction on screen you want it to go (so if it’s travelling across the screen, you need to push up or down to change lanes.) I found this unbelievably confusing; I feel like audiences in the 70s might have found this more understandable, but it’s such a different way of understanding your relationship to what’s happening on screen it’s almost unbearable, though I did (eventually) get comfortable with it. A bit, anyway.

    It also struggles with, surprisingly, complexity. Like Pac-Man, it seems to be a pattern game: you are trying to find the ideal path through the level because the enemy car is largely predictable. This means that you want to (for example) go full speed at first, and not change into the second outermost lane until the last second, and then change into the middle lane after two turns, and so on. The problem is unlike Pac-Man, where you are only focused on turning, in Head On you need to be extremely aware of when and how to change your speed to “juke” the enemy. I don’t hesitate to believe that with many more hours of practice I could walk my way through the first level, but it’s somehow much more taxing than performing Pac-Man’s patterns.

    If you put in the time–like I did, somewhat–it’s frustrating but moreish; I was determined to see the next screen. It’s responsive and quick to restart; the lure of collecting all the dots is irresistible and the lives system must have been a huge draw at the time even if–I suspect–the game was less attractive than just playing Space Invaders again (though that it’s so much faster has something to it.)

    Head On (2005)

    Obviously, I also played the “updated” 2005 version included in Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 23: Sega Memorial Selection; after all, I went to all that trouble. According to Sega Retro it seems to have been developed by Japan Art Media, and it makes the (strange, in my opinion) decision to change everything into lights rather than go with a car theme. There are some new collectibles that can do stupid stuff like make the map invisible based on when you pick it up, and they’ve tried to make the on ramp smoother by having more maps that start with many more ways to change lanes and enemy cars that, frankly, just don’t seem that bothered about attacking you.

    It’s just… very ugly and inessential. The text in the middle of the screen makes it look like the game is being obscured by the pause menu (it’s not–there’s not supposed to be anything there) and if the original is fast to get going, and fast to restart, this takes too long to really feel like anything. The Sega Ages 2500 remake era is not fondly remembered, and largely with good reason; it would have made far more sense to not bother to include this rubbish and instead include Head On’s sequels and derivatives. 

    Head On has a pretty huge legacy, even before Pac-Man. There’d be a sequel (Head On 2) and clones a-go-go in the arcades (such as Taito’s Space Chaser) and at home (Atari 2600’s Dodge ‘Em, which I guess you’ll be able to read about in exp. 2603). It makes it all the stranger that having basically created two of the most memorable game designs ever that Lane Hauck isn’t not just better remembered but openly celebrated. But surprisingly, after 1980 he isn’t (according to Mobygames) credited on any more video games, only following Head On with Carnival. I reached the limits of my investigative skills here, but thankfully Ethan Johnson of The History Of How We Play is working on a book about the San Diego arcade scene with a focus on Gremlin, and he was able to let me know that the last game Lane finished that was released was Tac/Scan in 1982, and that (sadly) Lane was let go from Gremlin in 1983, “after Gremlin had been sold for pieces.”

    Before that happened, though, there’s a maudlin conclusion to DeWyze’s article on him:

    “I’m really torn. Sometimes I feel like I’m a Christian Scientist pharmacist. I mean, there are super-good things to do with microcomputers, but I don’t consider this one of them. Talk to any honest speaking game designer and you find him trying to legitimize what he’s doing. I feel that way. I want to grow up and do something legitimate some day.’’

    In 2026 I hope he understands: everything he did was legitimate, and we owe him a lot.

    Will I ever play it again? I will, in the form of Dottori-kun, which was included on the Astro City Mini.

    Final Thought:  In an absolutely bizarre “it’s a small world” detail, we owe him for more than just Blockade and Head On, because he was friends with Trip Hawkins’ dad. 

    From Stanford’s Alumni magazine in 2012:

    “My father in the 1970s had worked in San Diego with a brilliant engineer named Lane Hauck who later made arcade games … Around 1971 Lane bought a PDP-8 kit and built it at home. It was a box about the size of a bureau drawer, with red lights and switches and was connected to a KSR-33 printer, the kind then used in newsrooms (like a ticker, only bigger) with the rolls of yellow paper, and it could pound out 10 characters per second. (I can hear the chugging sound even now.)

    Lane built a game called MOO, similar to what later emerged as a board game called Mastermind, where you try to guess a four-digit number. You would enter a four-digit guess on the KSR-33 keyboard and it would then tell you how many moos and cows you had. A cow was the right digit in the wrong place; a moo was the right digit in the right place. On one round of the game I got the answer in three turns and Lane was upset, he didn’t think that was possible and thought I’d only made a lucky guess. Of course I already knew I loved games and was already interested in computers and was already making board games … Playing on Lane’s PDP-8 kit was a key event on my road to determining by 1975 that I was going to make computer games and found my own company.

    Yes, I decided in the summer of 1975 that I would found EA in 1982. And as they say, the rest is history.3”

    Updated 01/04/26: Ethan Johnson caught a few errors/omissions in the original article. The date of Gulf and Western’s ownership of Sega was corrected, as was the reason for Lane’s hiring, the sourcing of Shikanosuke Ochi, and Lane’s last game with Sega/Gremlin.

    1. Annoyingly, Sega have a weird (bad) habit of re-using the name “Sega Memorial Selection” using it for two Saturn compilations and a PC compilation. And the first volume of the Saturn one includes Head On as well. So I could have emulated a Saturn to emulate it. But that would have been crazy!!! ↩︎
    2. Wikipedia has this down as Shikanosuke Ochi, seemingly unsourced source: Ethan Johnson! ↩︎
    3. I suspect some people might think we should blame Hauck for this, considering what EA has turned into. But I personally have a fondness for what Hawkins was trying to do with EA, at least at first. What the company is now really doesn’t seem like his fault. ↩︎

  • Consume Me (Hsia/Thomson, 2025)

    Consume Me (Hsia/Thomson, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken “coda” Snyder / Hexecutable
    Released: 07/08/2025
    Completed: 19/02/2026
    Completion: Finished it, A++.

    Hmm. You know, often with these essays I can tie myself in knots with structure, trying to introduce things gradually, poetically [“what are you talking about.”–Ed.] but sometimes I think it makes sense to just say things really plainly up front and then pick it apart from there. So.

    Consume Me is a solid, engaging life sim with immaculate vibes, held back by repetitive minigames, frustrating UI, ambiguous themes and an ending that is, I think, a cop out.

    Phew.

    Let’s try and work through that, eh?

    Consume Me is an autobiographical game from Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson (who actually worked together on Fortune-499, which I didn’t even realise when I played that) and it absolutely cleared house at the IGF in 2025, picking up the Nuovo Award, Wings Award and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. It’s self described as a game about feeling “stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school” which I think basically everyone reading this probably recognises (you’re reading about a video game on the internet, don’t lie to me) and explores that via classic life sim mechanics and mini-games: days progress, and on each day there will be some set things you have to do (such as eating your lunch) and then you have a set amount of free time during which you can choose some other things to do, which affect your character’s growth, generally with the idea that you’re building your character to some ideal that either you or the game has decided. So, for example, in Consume Me you can choose to read a book to improve your academic skill; or work out to increase your athletic skill (and lose some “bites”, the game’s obfuscation of calories.)

    Like in other life sims, these actions have a cost more than just using up a time unit; they can cost you happiness, energy, or even increase your hunger, which require that you perform actions that can restore them: so, for example, you can eat a protein bar to feel fuller, or read a comic book for pleasure rather than something educational.

    Of course, your choices can be constrained. Each week you’ve got a series of goals that have (generally) been set by Jenny’s own expectations (represented by herself in the mirror making demands.) So Jenny requires that she keep to a strict diet–meaning you can’t eat too much at lunch or need to waste precious time on working out. Jenny might demand that she score particularly well on a test at school that week, requiring you read books or do practice tests–which might be difficult to fit in if she also needs to do chores. You need to walk the dog, clean the bathroom and keep up on laundry or you’ll be stuck wearing dirty clothes–though those actions at least earn allowance.

    Split up into 5 chapters of a week each, this design really works. I really appreciate that the game is very open about what it is: a strict time/resource management puzzle where you’re trying to absolutely min-max everything to reach obvious goals. If you’re familiar with life sims, you probably know that even with the ones that promise a more fuzzy “play it out and see what you get” experience can quickly devolve into min-maxing and save scumming, because it’s almost impossible to stop yourself. Better just be honest and say “this is a puzzle.”

    At first, too, it’s going to seem great. The art–by Hsia and Jie En Lee–is perfect. It’s simple and incredibly evocative; cute without being cloying. Along with the music and sound design (from Ken “coda” Snyder and Violet W-P) you feel absolutely wrapped up in Consume Me’s world. And the mini-games are pretty fun to learn. Lunches start with a balancing mechanic but that (unusually) gets completely discarded for a Blokus-like game where you’re trying to fit a small range of lunch options onto your plate without eating too many bites. When doing makeup or cleaning you control Jenny’s hand and swish it around to try and get as much done before the timer runs out. When exercising you try to position Jenny’s body to match hand and head markers, trying to move slowly because otherwise she flails around wildly. Laundry involves folding clothes; reading involves trying to keep Jenny’s eye on the book and away from distractions; walking the dog is a slightly odd game that reminds me of something or other where you’re tethered to the dog, and either you or the dog rotate around the other and you have to time actions to actually move forward (while also picking up money and letting the dog relieve themselves.)

    The problem is that as a min-max focused life sim, you are going to want to nail these minigames, and if you don’t… you’re going to want to save scum. I think there’s some important stuff to say about this in terms of the game’s themes, but if we take it purely mechanically… you are going to get sick of these minigames. They don’t change in any way across the game, and some–notably the makeup mini game–you will do every single day, possibly more than once, and that they’re quick is not really an excuse, because it gets really boring once you fully grasp how to play them.

    What’s arguably worse is that I never got comfortable with the UI. The game has that traditional life-sim look–you’ve got to have a big piece of art of the main character at all times, I genuinely agree with that–but it means that everything you need to do is in this infinite scroll menu at the bottom and other information is in the large sidebar. I don’t know what it is–maybe the way the game returns you to the main screen from mini games, maybe the lack of tiny icons for categories–but I spent significantly more time than I’d like scrolling through this menu back and forth even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do; it was easily as annoying as the interface in Zombi, and that’s from 1986 and by a group of French teenagers. I eventually worked out that by pushing the right stick(!) I could quickly switch categories, but that never solved the falderal of trying to use the sidebar, where your goals often have to be scrolled in order for you to see them all. Generally meaning that there’d be this long sequence where I had to flick back and forth between the sidebar and menu repeatedly to decide what I was going to do next, but actually doing way more scrolling and pausing the game than I intended. Not fun!!!

    To be honest, I think I could have accepted these issues if as Consume Me went on I didn’t lose sight of what it’s about. When the game begins, it’s implying itself to be a life sim satire of the pressures on a teen girl, with meaningful growth replaced with an unhealthy drive to lose weight. Indeed the game opens with a sensitive warning that the game’s focus disordered eating might be stressful or upsetting, and I think most players will cede to the game’s unhealthy demands thinking they’re playing along until the other shoe drops; the one that recasts the behaviour the game forces on you. But it doesn’t really happen! After the first chapter, the diet aspect of the game recedes into the background as just one of your tasks, and the expectations of the rest of the game’s system don’t just force but reward even more extreme, unhealthy behaviour.

    Now, that Consume Me has a nice, crunchy set of systems is perhaps the main pleasure of the game, I think it even makes sense that they’re open enough to be exploitable, but it’s interesting that the game actively encourages you to give Jenny an absolutely warped existence. At one point in-game you’re given an extra goal to do 16 activities in one day (you normally get 2) and there’s an achievement to write two essays in one day, which requires something absolutely absurd like 28 actions. This means that you have to abuse energy drinks, coffee and staying up late to hit your goals, and the issue is the game’s punishments are limited (headaches) and the things you lose–energy, happiness, fullness–are restored easily by abusing other actions like changing into clothes that increase them again or spamming zero time-cost actions. 

    As I said, I kept expecting this to all come down on Jenny’s head but it just doesn’t. Now, you could argue it would be too obvious, too moralistic, but I think it would have been interesting to use the player’s urge to min-max against them. To do something like show them that they kept Jenny up till 4am after drinking 12 energy drinks and then made her do eight yoga sessions in a row, and then show how genuinely unhealthy that would be. Maybe twist it so that it turns out that the puzzle you were supposed to be solving was giving Jenny a balanced life.

    The game instead has a mechanical implication that you can do all of these things and get away with them, because Jenny’s big “I can’t do this any more” moment has nothing to do with any of that: instead it’s that her long distance boyfriend breaks up with her (like you obviously know is going to happen.)

    Now, in some respects, I shouldn’t criticise this; it appears to be one of the most autobiographical things in the game. But at the same time, it draws into focus that Consume Me’s issue is that the decision to be autobiographical works in complete cross purpose to the game’s largely mechanically-focused play. It turns out that nothing you’re doing matters. The mechanics are not actually thematically important; indeed, after the break-up the wheels come off entirely and you experience an extensive (if interactive) endgame cutscene where Jenny imagines the future that she believed she was working towards and then the real future that Hsia has.

    This segment reminded of Despelote, another game that pulls the curtain back at the end of the game in a way that I think could feel like a cop out, but which rings true because it more cleanly lampshades the game’s fictions to help push the player towards the underlying truth. Here instead the turn to full autobiography feels purely solipsistic. The Jenny you created–or thought you were creating–is secondary to the “real” one, and it ends up with (I think) a far more cliché ending: the “well, it seemed really important when I was a teenager, but I ended up who I was going to be and that’s alright. Good actually.”

    Consume Me might be a pretty decent life sim–minigames and UI issues aside–but it’s complicated by how much it implies it’s about something important but it really isn’t about it at all. I’m not sure it’s ultimately about anything, really, which makes game rewarding you for min-maxing dieting feel… well, I don’t have enough knowledge to say if it’s actively harmful (I do think the game is pretty obvious and consistent that what Jenny is doing is ridiculous) but it does feel like there’s something ill-conceived about the entire thing.

    Oh well. It is really cute though.

    Will I ever play it again? I absolutely rinsed this, because of my min-max brain problems, so I have no reason to.

    Final Thought: Something I didn’t mention–couldn’t quite find a place for it–is that more than for its potentially problematic mechanics, Consume Me has led to some controversy for featuring a religious aspect (a bit like and Roger…). I think the game’s store description is a bit disingenuous: it says of Jesus “don’t worry! He doesn’t do anything” but he actually does: he gives you a new mechanic, praying, that solves a tremendously frustrating issue you have in the game’s chapter 5 difficulty spike.

    Probably the weirdest thing about the introduction of religion is it’s introduced with an unbelievably long section where a song that I can only describe as having “Mountain Goats energy” plays (Is it supposed to be funny? I honestly couldn’t tell.) I wouldn’t have minded religion appearing (I didn’t have a big issue with it in and Roger… and it is a part of a lot of people’s lives) other than it happens at the point in the game where you think Jenny’s demands on herself are catching up to her and the game is intentionally taking you to a point where you can’t keep up, and then it just straight up fixes the problem. It’s another example of the uneasy mix of mechanics and autobiography–I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it really does feel like Consume Me might have worked better leaning more on the and Roger…/Florence design, taking the player through the minigames to tell Hsia’s story without all the potentially problematic life sim cruft. It’s even got the same teeth brushing!