Sharp X68000 - Nemesis '90 Kai

Another game that I've played recently for the Sharp X68K is Nemesis '90 Kai.  I was a little confused by this one, because I read that it was Gradius 2, except I've played Gradius II before and this was nothing like that game.  So apparently the first Gradius was called Nemesis in Japan, and Nemesis 2 was a different game altogether from the arcade game Gradius 2.  Hmmm...wha...?? Well, I guess it's sort of like how Super Mario Bros 2. in Japan is an entirely different game from SMB 2 in the US...except much more confusing! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_2_(MSX)#Nemesis_.2790_Kai)

Anyway, the Sharp version of Nemesis '90 Kai features some new levels, and sound and graphical enhancements over the original.  I've never played the original, but this game looked and sounded pretty nice to me.

Nemesis '90 Kai

(Made in 1993 for the Sharp X68K according the Title Screen Below.  And the original was released in 1987.  So how does '90 make any sense? I'm no giant brain doctor, but I think I'm missing something there... Maybe this was a re-release or some nonsense...)

Just to start off, a glance at the options menu shows that the game has 3 difficulty setting; easy, nomal, and difficult.  No, that's not my typo, the game misspells "normal," which vaguely amuses me.

Nomal Mode

There's also a sound test, which is a nice feature because Konami games in general have pretty nice music, and this one does as well.  

Anyway, there's been a ton of Gradius and Gradius spin-off games, and they're still being ported and made for newer systems, so the gameplay style should be pretty familiar to fans.  It's a horizontal scrolling spaceship shooter where you blast your way through a hellish obstacle course of space baddies. Your spaceship can be powered up by collecting red power-up points from enemies, and every 15th enemy or so (not exactly sure) has a blue power-up that destroys all minor enemies.  One interesting feature of this game is finding time-limited power-ups at certain points that give abilities like slowing down the screen, a plasma wave attack, and rotating options.  

Cool Head Enemies On Level 1

Your ship starts as a horrendous lunker, so I almost always go -speed boost- -missiles- -option- -laser- -option x3- -force field-, at which point I collect enough power-ups to be ready for another force field when necessary.  But, that's only if you last that long.  I played through this game on normal mode, and it's SOOOO HARD!!  I think the Gradius series in general is extremely difficult, and this was no exception.  I didn't even want to try for Hard Mode, and I consider myself to be a fairly skillful gamer.  

Luckily you can continue as many times as you want, but every time you lose a ship, you have to start from a progress point in the level.  I prefer the instant respawning found in Salamander (Life Force), especially because that game lets you keep your options if you're fast enough to collect them again, and I hate having to power back up from scratch EVERY TIME I DIE! Yes, you can start with ONE power-up point on your bar if you had any left when you died, but that's only enough to speed up and then die again. The progress points don't always have easy power-ups, so basically if you can keep your ship powered-up, the game is fast and easy enough, but die once and boom it's over man!

Level 1 Boss Kills Me

So the bosses in this game are pretty tricky, because every time you shoot one of their protective barriers, they release the storm of shots seen above.  Plus the whole time they're shooting different forms of lasers at you, and your shots also follow the movement of your ship, which makes dodging and aiming even more complex.  There's very little room for error, so it can be a bit of a hassle, although experienced Gradius gamers should be able to handle it well enough.

When you destroy the level bosses, they will take a few seconds before exploding, at which time there's a glowing white spot in their cores.  If you touch this spot, you can go to a bonus level, and if you make it through, you'll get a weapon upgrade.  I didn't know about this the first time I played through the game, so I tried it later, and sure enough I got a rad laser upgrade that can take out enemies above the ship.  I assume that there's a variety of weapons available, but I don't have it in me to play through the whole game again at this time to check.

Bonus Weapon

Basically every level has a theme, like plants, ice, inside a ship, etc.  There's about a million ways to die at every moment, and the enemies are relentless.  Here's a screencap of level 2, although it hardly does this fast-moving and extremely dangerous part of the level justice.

Near Death Again

Only 8 shots in the screen at the time, but probably about 15-25 right before that.  Just so much to avoid.  Also many enemies, like the plants in this pic, enemy spawning stations, and so forth can be destroyed before they unleash a torrent of shots or smaller enemies, but even if you're ship is powered-up it can be hard to attack everything in time to stop the barrage. 

One sort of glitch trick that I found was that when you power up, you're invisible for just a split second, and you can't take damage.  So if you know you're going to bite it, it could save you just to use whatever power-up you're on.  Except Double, cause freaking Double is the weakest assiest weapon ever.  Don't know why the space engineers welded garbage onto the Metalion (ship's name), but they must of been drinking the space hooch that day!  Don't ever use Double.  Just crash.  Trust me!

And Get Used To Seeing This

In any case, the game is extremely DIFFICULT, but it's also pretty fun :)  I spent a nice chunk of a day getting through this one, and had to continue over 100 times (I know because there's a counter at the end for continues used and I think ships lost).  About halfway through the game, there's a cut-scene where a whole bunch of story is explained, but I couldn't read the Japanese so I don't know what's going on with that.  Aliens are attacking stuff and you needs to kill them or they be killing you fools.  I think it's kind of like the Ghost 'N' Goblins series, where you think you won, but then you need to play the whole game again to "really" win.  In this case, the levels aren't exactly the same, but all the graphics are recycled so the last half of the game looks very similar to the first.  As I said above, there's also apparently a couple bonus levels that weren't in the original version of this game. 

Just as an afterthough, I really wonder why the HI SCORE is automatically set to a freaking MILLION points.  It's hard enough to get 100,000 in this game!!  Guess they don't want you to put those initials in on your home computer unless you earn it!

I'd give this game a 7.  It's not for everyone, and it can be pretty repetitive and super-challenging. It also has great sound, and it retains it's fun even though it's moronically hard.  The graphics are really nice, and it was cool to find a game from around the Gradius III era that I didn't know existed until a week ago.  

Unearthing A Classic: The Sharp X68000 (Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari)

Since this is my first post, I'll start off by saying that I'm a HUGE fan of old school video games, mostly from around the NES to PS1 era.  I also enjoy newer systems, but I find that the simplicity and nostalgic factors of the old games keep sucking me back for more.  So with that being said, I'll start out by taking a look at an old system that I just became acquainted with; the SHARP X68000 computer.

Rather than just rehashing the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_X68000), I'll just state that this was a computer released only in Japan that featured pretty much arcade perfect ports of games from around the late 80's to mid 90's.  Most of the better games for the Sharp X68K have been ported to other systems and are still being ported to systems today.  However, there are some games that were real gems on this system, and some different incarnations of classic games.  Despite my rampant googling, I really couldn't find a whole lot about game recommendations or info for this system, so I'd like to present some games that I've been playing recently and give a few short reviews.

For starters, I decided to check out the Sharp X68K after a random google search of River City Ransom (Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_City_Ransom), one of my favorite games for the NES.  I was intrigued that the Sharp X68K version has features not found in any other version yet released, such as more schools with new bosses, new techniques, and the ability to level-up techniques.  Thus began my journey into the world of Sharp X68K gaming!

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari

(Sharp Version Released 1990 according to game disc)

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari is the story of Cunio and Riki, two high school students who are out to save a girl kidnapped by a rival at a different high school... or something like that.  My Japanese ability is pretty awful, so I can read most of the menus, but I have no clue if the story follows the same exact plot as the English version, or if there are subtle to major differences. In any case, it's a standard plot for games of the day, albeit presented in an interesting form.  In my review, I'm going to cover the extras, because that's the whole reason I wanted to play this version.

Here's the story screen if you can understand the Japanese

The game starts off pretty much exactly like River City Ransom, although the graphics are more comparable to the version released on the GBA or the PCE.  The music is in my opinion a slight improvement over the NES verison, as the Sharp X68K in general seems to have a pretty nice sound capability.

1st Screen

In this screen, Cunio is wearing his Japanese uniform and starts the game with 2000 Yen.  Pretty similar to the start of the other versions, but with a couple HUGE differences.  First, it's actually possible to enter the High School in this picture, although there's nothing there and all the extra High Schools in the game look exactly the same and pretty much the same as the final High School in River City Ransom.  Second, it's possible to head immediately left and enter a whole new area not found in RCR.  I thought this would be really exciting; after all, more RCR would be awesome right?  

But... almost ALL of the extra areas are just the same backgrounds used in the original game. Not only does this make going through them tedious, but also extremely confusing.  There doesn't seem to be any coherent thought to the map in this game, so it always feels like you're walking in circles in some crazy maze.  The areas are almost all open-ended with multiple exits, but they also all weirdly connect and loop.  I was excited to discover that it was possible to go off the screen to the right in the park areas, where the bike racks block you in RCR, but it really just lead to more chaos.

The only thing that got me through it was just going as far in one direction as I could until I looped around, then trying another direction.  It also seems to be absolutely necessary to go through this maze-hell to beat the game, as I went through the entire game the normal RCR way and couldn't open the gates to the last High School.  After I found I think SEVEN other High Schools and beat the bosses, then the gates opened.  So what's the problem with that right?  After all, the extended play was exactly why I wanted to try this out.  Welllll....

ALL of the extra High Schools also have the same exact setup; walk up a flight of stairs, defeat four enemies, fight a sub-boss, then head outside and fight a rooftop boss.  Here's an example of what the High School looks like, taken from the second to last fight with the Double Dragon Themed Twins (Randy and Andy in RCR)

High School Interior:  They're ALL The SAME

So instead of finding a wonderful new world of RCR, I wound up with the Tedious World Of Palette Swap!  In the picture above, the reason one of the twins has no head is because there's a nasty glitch in the game.  Whenever a character walks in front of a door like the one above, the door's image appears to have been layered wrong, and the character's image disappears underneath it. It's pretty awful, although it only slightly lowered my enjoyment of the game.  

An interesting part of the game was that all of the High School boss characters would speak some phrases in Japanese.  I have no idea what they said, and the sound quality was terrible, but it was kind of a cool touch.  The voice actors were all pretty awful though.  First, they all clearly sounded like adults, which didn't fit the High School theme at all.  Second, they were reading their lines in a really dry fashion, except for maybe one or two of the characters, so it was really emotionless and strange.  For some reason there was also a couple extra graphics thrown in seemingly just because, like when Cunio meets the kidnapped girl's friend.

Meeting Hasebe

It was kind of fun to see these extras, but really pretty pointless.  All in all, I was pretty disappointed with the extra areas, the voices were kind of awful, and the added graphics didn't exactly blow my mind. 

Another extra that I was looking forward to were the added skills that Cunio could learn.... but I only found one, and it was a pointless Hand Chop to replace the Stone Hands technique.  I was way too exasperated with the game to look for anymore, although I did find the extra Dojo that's touted on the wikipedia page.  It seemed to be some sort of block-breaking shop, and my character wasn't strong enough or something (despite maxing out my normal stats) because I could only do the first couple on the list, which earned me... who knows?  I couldn't figure out what the bonus was supposed to be at all.

There were some added shops also, and one item was kind of humorous; a shop was selling the X68000 computer for 369,000 Yen, or the price a real one would have been on the time.  I didn't bother collecting enough Yen to figure out if it did anything special, like in the GBA version where an item can help change all kinds of options.  Maybe for another day...

Basically to get through this game quickly I just used the Acro-Circus technique (as named in RCR) to beat two bosses (Kamijyora and Yamamoto I think) about 50 times, which leveled the technique up to a super strong level where I could kill everyone in 2-4 hits.  It also gave me enough coins to buy all the power-ups from the secret tunnel shop and Western Boots (Cowboy Boots in RCR) so my stats were maxed.

You Die!!  Over and over and over...

A couple more features that were different from the NES were the ability to have 3 enemies on screen at a time instead of 2, which could make things a little more hectic.  The game also had save files like the GBA version, which came in pretty handy since you had to start at THE FIRST FREAKING SCHOOL every time you died, which happened often, quickly, and cheaply.  The save states would start you at the screen you left off though, and with full health, so using them became a necessity.

One more feature was a Sound Test Mode that could be accessed from the first menu.  It had all of the background music from the game, plus 5 extra unused tracks.  2 were upbeat short riffs, and would probably have been used after something like a main boss fight, while 2 were downbeat short riffs, and would probably have been for dying or something like that, while there was 1 other main theme type music that was kind of odd and upbeat, maybe for another area.  None of them would have added much to the game though in my opinion, but interesting to hear.

Dubble Dragon... Nice!!

Dubble Dragon is the main theme from Double Dragon used for the fight with the twins near the end that I have pictured in a screencap above in case you're curious.  Really wonder why so many menus for this and other Sharp X68K games use so much English when this was a Japanese only system and there were already English ports available, but makes it easier for me anyway.

Finally, it's still possible to get a FREE SMILE :) just like in RCR

SUMAIRU! 0 Yen! Totomo ii desune!

Overall, I'd give this incarnation an 8.  There were a lot of boring parts, but I got to kick a lot of ass and watch coins explode from people, and that's pretty freaking sweet!  But for the boring stuff, "I say BARF!!!"