ASOBU RAKUGAKI | ASSAULTER | BAKUDAN | BALL BLAZE |
BANJO INVADERS | BEET | BENDY
Welcome back to the third installment in our still-semi-new feature, “Yaroze a Day!” In this series, we’re attempting to cover the complete catalogue of games compiled in the unofficial “Net Yaroze Collection 2014,” and giving each of them brief explorations and reviews. While the plan was originally to updates covering seven games on a weekly basis – as if we were somehow covering a game a day – that schedule has unfortunately sort of fallen by the wayside. From here on out, I’ll be shooting for a bi-weekly update schedule, in the hopes of not burning myself out so quickly on the idea of it.
This week’s update finally sees the last games in the collection beginning with the letter “A,” as we move swiftly into some “B” titles. While you certainly don’t have to read through all the preceding articles and reviews in order to understand the games we’ll be covering today; we would at least recommend reading our primer on the subject of the Net Yaroze hardware and introduction to this series, which you can find here. With all that cleared up, please to enjoy this week’s assortment of oddities and obscurities!
Welp, I’m pretty much entirely ill-equipped to discuss this one! The Japanese title Asobu Rakugaki seems to translate to something like “Doodle Fun” in English, lending to the hand-drawn scribble aesthetic presented in the gameplay. The fact that said gameplay is sandwiched between dozens of [untranslated] lines of expository narration and in-game conversations between the player character and an off-screen narrator (?) is where I lose the plot. I can tell you that this game was submitted as part of a Net Yaroze contest held by the print publication Dengeki PlayStation; where it took home the “Gold Prize” in the proceedings, placing second to the title Little Wing (to be covered in a future entry). I can also provide the short synopsis provided on PlayStation Underground’s Issue 2.2 disc, which features a short video covering some of the entries to that aforementioned contest:
“‘Rakugaki’ means doodled or scribbled, and refers to the main character — a boy. You help the boy get free and take him in search of fun — or, ‘Asobu.’ Judges liked the fact that the boy discovers that too much freedom can be boring. They call it a very untraditional game.”[1]
“Untraditional” is a very generous way of saying that there’s really not much to do in the game; other than trigger some more text prompts by pressing the Triangle button in designated spots, and attempt to jump over a hole in the ground. In the case of that jump, you’ll find that no amount of forward momentum or timing will allow you to actually clear it. What you’re meant to figure out (presumably from exhausting all the available dialogue) is that by pressing the R1 button at the edge of the chasm, the page will tear slightly and reveal a longer ledge underneath, which will now allow you to clear the jump with room to spare. This leads to you running all the way to the right-hand side of the screen, and paging through some more lines of dialogue. Do you see what I meant when I said I’m not equipped to talk about this one?
Asobu Rakugaki does seem to stand out as being one of the few truly narrative-driven titles in the Yaroze catalogue; with the game existing as a means to tell a story, rather than a plot serving as loose pretense to gameplay. There’s certainly something admirable about the effort being made here, and there must be some merit to the writing considering its having won an award. But until such time as someone decides to translate the hundred lines of text interspersed throughout the game, I reckon that’s about all I can speak to.
For those of you who have been waiting for me to play a Yaroze title worthy of our website’s name – something truly unworthy of release, even in its effectively “freeware” capacity – I present to you, Assaulter. At first glance, it’s a basic vertical shooter with some sort of escort / defense objective attached, where you’re made to protect a convoy located center-screen from enemy attack. This being said, you can’t actually seem to destroy or intercept any of the enemy projectiles that hone in towards it, which renders your mission impossible past a certain point. You have buttons enabling you to either flip your ship around 180° and fire in the reverse direction, or to fly up into the air and attach one of two upgrades allowing for tri-directional or spread fire. If this was all there was to Assaulter, it’d be fine: Just another one of the dozens of first-time programs and rough works in progress preserved in this compilation. But two “quirks” make Assaulter stand out from the rest in decidedly unflattering fashion.
The first is a wildly variable framerate; which sees the game running at a full 60 frames per second with no enemies or bullets on-screen, before tanking into the 10s and 20s the moment any action unfolds. This gives the action an entirely uncontrollable tempo, where the game seems to toggle between running at a million miles per hour and slowing to a snail’s pace with little in the way of warning. For an especially frustrating example: In the moment between you losing a ship and respawning, the game will appear to fast-forward as any your remaining on-screen enemies fire off an inescapable full-screen volley of bullets that will kill you the moment you respawn. It’s as if the one or two seconds of elapsed time somehow translate to a full 30 second’s worth of compressed time in-game — allowing the enemies to completely dominate the screen in your seemingly brief absence. I struggle for a better way to describe this, as it’s an issue that you simply don’t see in games with even a token amount of polish applied.
The second quirk – and likely the single most damning complaint – is the fact that holding down the fire button for any longer than a fleeting millisecond will loose hundreds of bullets onto the screen. Each of these bullets fired will play an accompanying fire sound effect. When you stack those hundreds of bullets sound effects on top of one another in the span of a second, it produces a legitimately DEAFENING noise — which, when I first “discovered” this, forced me to yank my earbuds out in a violent fit of auditory pain. It’s a rare case when I get to genuinely claim that a video game caused me physical harm, but here we have it! For this offense alone, I’m content to call Assaulter the absolute worst game we’ve seen on the Net Yaroze thus far, and to condemn it as being frankly unfit for human consumption.
The illustrious ‘Kame’ strikes again, to add another puzzle game to his long list of credits! For those who don’t remember or haven’t read it; Kame debuted in our Net Yaroze retrospective back in the very first edition, with his take on Reversi titled 4 Othello. Here, he presents a conversion of / iteration on what seems to be a fairly obscure MSX puzzler, also titled Bakudan. According to GameBrew, the original game was developed by a programmer known as ‘Mr. GANE,’ and published in the final issue of an MSX enthusiast magazine — fittingly titled ‘MSX・FAN.’ It kind of figures that Kame would have some sort of affiliation with / connection to home computer homebrew.
Functioning as something like a variation on the Puzzle Bobble or Puyo Puyo formula – or probably some other even more similar puzzler that I’m simply not privy to – Bakudan sees you attempting to clear a screen being filled by an endless supply of colored objects. In this case, the objects in question are bombs, which will explode any adjacent blocks of similar color when detonated. Rather than controlling bombs as they fall from the top of the screen, however, Bakudan will have you control a match at the bottom of the screen, used to light the fuse of one bomb on the bottom row per turn. The goal, as such, is to create the largest combos you can; by strategically clearing spaces and dropping bombs into place, to where they can become part of massive chains. Flashing bombs indicate opportunities to clear the screen of every similarly-colored bomb.
For every turn you take, a full row of bombs will drop from the top of the screen, serving as your ticking clock. But seeing as there’s not actually a timer involved in any of this, and as you’re given as much time as you may need per turn, perhaps “ticking clock” isn’t the right term? This serves to make it a decidedly less hectic game compared to some of it’s puzzling peers, where time is usually constantly of the essence. In fact, it might well make for some decent practice at learning how to set up chains in other puzzle games, and figuring out how removing certain blocks from play opens up opportunities for preferable pieces to fall into place. There’s a simple bottom line here, and it’s that Bakudan makes for a pretty fun little puzzle game. Which makes Kame 2-for-2 thus far, by my count! It won’t be much longer before we see a third effort from the Yaroze’s most mysterious benefactor.
Ball Blaze plays as something like a behind-the-back platformer, wherein you control a rolling ball down a hazardous path. You can accelerate your momentum or slow to a stop, and bounce above gaps and obstacles in your way. The game consists of one level, which requires something like near-constant acceleration in order to effectively clear: A “perfect” run at full-speed will only leave you a scant 9 seconds left within your sixty second time limit. In other words, stopping to assess your next move or to more slowly negotiate around missing tiles is something like a trap, to where you simply won’t be left with enough time to complete the course. That said, managing to complete the game without having to hit the brakes is only a matter of minor challenge — especially when you come to understand the limitations of the scrolling tile-layer design. All in all, a fine little exercise in basic game design.
Of additional note: Ball Blaze was developed as part of a Middlesex University course in “Programming Interactive Graphical Systems,” and posted online alongside a handful of other titles we’ll also be reviewing in the future. According to my research, Gareth Musgrove’s career trajectory landed him a long-term gig as part of a UK telecommunications company, rather than down the road of game development — though he does list “Android Game Development” as one of his interests on an online portfolio page. Perhaps ‘Ball Blaze 2’ is due a mobile debut some time soon?
When you saw the word “Invaders” in the title, you probably already figured out what kind of game we’re looking at here. Banjo Invaders is, in fact, a Space Invaders clone with some attempt made at musical theming. To this end, your character appears to play a fiddle (?), and takes aim at enemy banjos and accordions in the sky above. It’s just as Steven Tyler once said: “Music is the weapon.” Other than the goofy presentation; the other major differences are a lack of barriers to shield you from incoming enemy fire, and a far larger quantity of enemy fire coming your way at any given moment. You’ll also have a choice of four difficulties ranging from ‘Easy’ to ‘Impossible’ — a level of difficulty which lives up to its name. What you won’t find is anything in the way of a soundtrack to fit the musical motif, opting instead for some short samples of instrument notes as sound effects.
Banjo Invaders leaves me with little else to say about it. For what it is, it’s entirely functional. If the goal was simply to reproduce the core of a fixed shooter game, it’s a job done well enough. We’ll see one more effort from Martin Keates over the course of this feature, and I can tell you now that it doesn’t really aspire to do any more than this here.
When our planet Earth is invaded by a UFO with ill-intent, they begin to terraform our surface to their liking. It’s up to our world’s elite-most defenders – a trio of catgirl gardeners (?) – to re-till our fertile soils, and repel the invaders back to whence they came. Such are the events that transpire in 農耕戦隊 ビートにゃん 甜菜娘 (‘Agriculture Squad Beet-Nyan: Sugar Beet Girl’) — or Beet, as the Net Yaroze Compilation handily shortens the title down to. Let me tell you that this little game proved to be a great big mystery; from attempting to decode it’s title, and struggling to find any existing mentions of it anywhere on either the English or Japanese web. Having turned up absolutely nothing on the subject, I’m going to claim this short blurb I’m writing for it now as the single-most definitive resource for Beet on the entire world wide web. I would be thrilled to be proven wrong on this one, as I’ve still got so many questions about it.
The objective of the gameplay seems to be to pick beets from the ground at their most opportune moment: When the size of the bulb has reached its capacity, and you can spot either a red or yellow dot marking the right-hand side of it. Pressing the Circle button while standing over such a beet will net you a couple of ‘Clear Points,’ of which you need one-hundred to proceed to the next stage. You can also cull beets and other miscellaneous weeds at your leisure – potentially as a means of clearing space for more of your preferred beets to grow and create chains – but I managed to clear all three stages by simply targeting the ripened bulbs. Occasionally, you can pick up seeds dropped from the fully-matured yellow-colored beets, and use them to plant your own crop, but once again I found this entirely unnecessary. Should you happen to find the very idea of actually playing the three contained stages unnecessary, you can simply press ‘R2’ to immediately skip to the next stage (while ‘R1’ will actually take you back to a previous stage), and even skip directly to the ending if you so please. And that’s just about all I managed to figure out from my hour spent playing.
There’s genuinely a decent amount of polish put into the game’s sprite-based presentation, complete with three selectable characters sporting unique palettes and garden equipment. The pixel art which drives the dirt and vegetation tiles is pretty well-detailed as well, and a functional minimap tracking the growth of weeds and beets can come in handy in a pinch. Clearly, some time and effort was put into this odd little title by it’s developers ‘SHIDA PROJECT’ — comprising two Japanese developers going by the handles ‘Koh’ and ‘Ray-Net.’ We’ll see a couple more odd games from this odd couple in the future, but we’ll have to wait until we get into titles beginning with the letter “S.” Maybe in the time this journey will take, we can somehow dig up more details on this obscure duo?
We close this update with a tech demo. As a matter of fact, Bendy is one of just nine Net Yaroze downloads categorized as ‘Demos’ to have made it to demo discs, while the 145 more demos available in this compilation (which we’re not covering) would remain relegated strictly to the early Internet. In order for a piece of demo software to qualify for the prestigious demo disc treatment, you’d figure it’d have to show off some cutting-edge tech or eye-candy. True to form, William Docherty’s program demonstrates a decently trippy “bending” effect — likely achieved by strategic perspective trickery from a camera placed inside a textured sphere? It’s likely a relatively simple bit of code all things considered, and the execution does leave something to be desired: The choice to cast the graphics in darkness and some noticeable seams where the colored stripes intersect can diminish from the visual appeal. But that being said, it’s still a neat little novelty for players to experience and [sort of] control, and I guess I can understand why it made the cut for publication.
“Jump: Pad Right – Button One.”
I reckon that does it for another update in the Yaroze a Day saga! Join us again soonish for more exercises in Net Yaroze zaniness and so forth. I would also tease the fact that our next article will contain one of the most well-known entries to hail from the European Yaroze community, in addition to the typical assortment of oddballs and eyesores. If that don’t sell ya’, I don’t know what else will.
Asobu Rakugaki means “Playable Doodle” or “Game Doodle”, ie a doodle that’s also a game. That Magazine article seems to have been written by someone misinterpreting a Japanese dictionary or something.