Hudson: Donkey Kong 3 Dai Gyakushou

In my post about old games yesterday, I briefly mentioned the home computer days of Hudson Soft. Of all the home computer publishers in Japan, Hudson is under a watchful eye more than most thanks to the bizarre Super Mario Bros. Special. But I also mentioned that the company was responsible for a handful of Nintendo games on the home computer scene, and today I’m going to look at one that you hardly ever see mentioned: Donkey Kong 3 Dai Gyakushou (Donkey Kong 3: Great Counterstrike).

Donkey Kong 3 Dai Gyakushou title screen

Released in 1984 on the PC6001, PC8801, FM-7 and Sharp X1, this game is an adaption of Nintendo’s 1984 arcade game Donkey Kong 3. The adaption is written by “ITA”, which is unhelpful, but during 1984 Hudson would run competitions for bedroom coders to send them their games and they would publish armfuls of them. In 1984 alone they published no less than 55 on home computers.

Donkey Kong 3 Dai Gyakushou screenshot

So what’s the big difference? Aside from the roadscape background and DK hanging from little parachutes there are no multi-level platforms. You’re still shooting bees out of the sky for points. There are no flowers to protect, so the aim is simply to survive the onslaught and blast DK.

But let’s come back to the roadscape background for a second. It’s bizarre! It’s easily the first thing you’ll notice, but it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the game. The box is unhelpful, recycling art from the arcade edition:

Donkey Kong 3 Dai Gyakushou box

As far as lost treasures go, Super Mario Bros. Special is still the holy grail, but it’ll be difficult to find a more obscure game than this. I hope the deviantArt Stanley the Bugman fanclub likes it!

A little bit about the olden days…

Things have been a little quiet on the NinDB front lately. I created NinDB back in 2001 to uncover a forgotten world of classic Nintendo games, but today Nintendo is no longer mysterious. The average gamer won’t know (or care) what Joy Mech Fight is, or where Takamaru comes from, but for the few Nintendo fanboys out there, there are now many resources for finding out more about these games.

Don’t worry! I’m not done with NinDB just yet… But the spirit of discovering lost videogame treasures is sometimes too strong, and I must give in to my desire to descend on the past. Without care for my personal safety or wellbeing, I have delved deep into the forgotten past of 8-bit home computers.

Just for a bit of context: I am a British guy, but I was not into home computers. Our single-parent, 2-child family didn’t have much money, and aside from programming Hangman into a ZX81, or playing an educational adventure game on the BBC Micro at school, my first gaming experience was a borrowed NES with about 30 games, which included Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. I was an instant convert to Nintendo (as if you hadn’t already guessed).

But this means that I missed out on the entire British gaming scene in favour of a very American alternative. Those were formative years for the British gaming industry, when bedroom coders or small development teams were tearing apart computers and making them do things they were never designed to do.

I had assumed this was a very British thing, but it turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Videogame companies back then got their start in the arcades or the 8-bit home computing scene. In Britain the biggest home computers were no doubt the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64. In Japan, the market was also divided up into the NEC PC8801, the Sharp X1, the Fujitsu Micro 7 (FM-7), and the MSX1.

In America, Atari had created a console gaming market. Following the video game crash of 1983, it was widely believed that console gaming had been a fad, and the focus would shift to home computers, but the NES arrived and America didn’t widely adopt home computers for gaming until the arrival of the PC during the mid-90′s.

When Nintendo launched the Famicom in Japan in 1983, they were not only bringing the hugely popular arcade experience into the home, but also competing against an established home computer gaming market. In other words, Japan had the best of both worlds, with companies such as Namco, Taito, Capcom and Nintendo coming from the arcade market and Hudson, Enix and Square coming from the home computer scene.

It was actually one of the home computer companies that had a significant impact early on.

Hudson Soft was a home computer developer and publisher, who had even developed a widely-adopted variant on the BASIC programming language called HuBASIC. They were the first third party developer for the Famicom, and they arrived with armfuls of variants of their home computer games, including Nuts & Milk, Binary Land and Bomber Man. They developed the Nintendo-published 4-Player Family Mahjong, and within a year they had transformed the Famicom into a home computer with its own keyboard, data recorder and HuBASIC programming tool in the form of Family BASIC.

Perhaps as thanks (or as part of a deal) for setting up the Famicom in Japan, Hudson were given a license to develop variants on Nintendo games for home computers. The most famous of these are no doubt Punch Ball Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special and Super Mario Bros. Special, but they also published Nintendo Golf, Nintendo Pinball and a variant on Donkey Kong 3 for home computers.

The history of Hudson is interesting, as their official website doesn’t trace their history any further than the Famicom, and early Japanese home computer information is notoriously difficult to track down. Part of the reason will be that those first years were about quantity rather than quality. Hudson spent a year flooding the market before pulling back and focusing on their successes, such as Bomber Man. They certainly won’t want to remember their Pac-Man clone “Zombie Panic”, or the exactly-what-it-sounds-like “Strip Rock-Paper-Scissors”.

Looking at all the companies publishing on computers, one thing is clear: Japan was hugely into graphical text adventures. Europe had a similar love for the genre, born from the text-adventure scene. The most common theme is murder mystery, and Enix seems to have played a formative role in getting this set up. Enix were also the first company to develop a graphical adventure game for the Famicom, which eventually grew into a big market on the Famicom Disk System where storage and graphical capabilities were better.

And then you have Konami, who may have started in the arcade, but poured a significant amount of their resources into developing for the MSX before moving to the Famicom. This mix of experience in flashy arcade graphics, coupled with the coding mentality of the home computer scene may explain why they were producing some of the most impressive-looking games for the Famicom much earlier than other companies (including Nintendo).

Sometimes I think a little bit of context goes a long way to understanding a game. Our problem as foreigners to Japan is understanding that the games we played may have been released several years after their Japanese release, and may have been a port from an even older computer game.

What is still mystifying is why some games were localised for the US market at all. Why was Konami’s outstanding 1987 action title Ai Senshi Nicol passed over, while something like the Famicom port of T&E’s 1985 Hydlide was brought to America in 1989? Perhaps some mysteries are best left unsolved…

Metroid: Other M

Metroid is a series people love only with hindsight.

I was a latecomer to the series: the first game I beat was Metroid Fusion, which was followed by Metroid II and Super Metroid in quick succession, and Zero Mission after that. I have never beaten the original Metroid, and this is why I was so late to this party.

The original game is a tough sell to someone who didn’t play it in the mid-80′s. The game itself is very much a product of its time, with a punishing difficulty, little to no indication of where to go, and that awful grind if you die in order to fill your energy bar back up. Today, games will point you in the right direction, but in the mid-80′s you would have to either buy a player’s guide (usually as part of a Nintendo magazine), or plot your own maps. Give the original Metroid to someone who wants to get into the series, and you won’t see them again.

Metroid II did away with the grind, it had better pacing and set save points. The game also did other things differently, like upping the creepy SFX factor by 10, and pushing the anticipation of being scared. You drop down and see an empty Metroid shell. You know there will be a Metroid mutant around here somewhere, but it won’t necessarily be immediately nearby. This really was the evolution of Metroid, bucking the trend of 16-bit games setting the stage for the games to come.

Super Metroid gives the impression that it knew it would be something great and unique. The first game’s exploring was focused with an intuitive map and visual cues, the second game’s creepy sounds were preserved and extended to the graphics and screen-filling, grotesque boss battles. Alien Scum isn’t a foreign concept to videogames, but when you’re on their turf, and they are squealing and croaking and (often) screaming, Super Metroid presents them with something approaching respect.

Metroid Fusion was divisive upon its release. Not a lot of people played it, and many who did complained about it. This was the first Metroid game I played through to completion and I loved it. I had tried Metroid and it didn’t work for me, and this was my first real experience with the mechanics that had been introduced since. It’s Super Metroid in design, and it’s been refined further. The biggest complaint is that it lacks the isolation of the earlier games. The colours are saturated thanks to the GBA screen, removing much of the gloom, and the occasional chats with Adam Malkovich (the computerised personality of Samus’s former General) removed some of the isolation. Luckily, several parts of the game are big deals. The fight against the melting face of Nightmare, hiding from the overpowered Samus-X, the revelation that the Galactic Federation is farming Metroids, and as the space station self-destructs around you, discovering the discarded shells of a Metroid ala. Metroid II… The end-game made up for the whole experience.

By the time Metroid Zero Mission was released, the GBA had been updated with brighter screens, and so this remake of the original game went back to creepy dark caverns. It was a total rebuild of Metroid, from the screen-filling boss battles, to the map screen and being guided around the map, and even throwing in many new areas that tie the game in with Super Metroid (realising the Space Pirate ship you destroy at the end of the game is the same as the Wrecked Ship from Super Metroid is a small treat). This is one of my favourites in the series, and it finally gave me the ability to play the very beginning of the series on the terms of the later games.

Interspersed are the Metroid Prime titles. I don’t get on well with FPS games, and while I tried them all, I certainly didn’t come close to beating any of them. Nevertheless, they tried hard to make me like them. They are more intuitive to control and they certainly borrowed the right elements from the other games in the series, but I have to accept that I will probably never beat these games.

Now we come to the latest title, Metroid: Other M. This is a continuation of the 2D line of games, but influenced in some ways by the 3D Metroid Prime games. I’m not just talking about the ability to switch from side-scrolling to first-person by pointing the camera either. The puzzles and aesthetic seem to have been heavily influenced by the Prime games as well. What we have here is an interquel between Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, but it is truly a melding of every game in the entire series.

The biggest criticisms have been against the cutscenes. Now, as an avid Nintendo player, I may be missing some fantastic stories as told on other systems. Maybe videogame stories are now at some peak of cinematic excellence and this is a massive joke in comparison. I dare you to claim that’s the case. Other M’s cutscenes are too long and they’re not acted out to the best standards, but they’re also infrequent and there as backstory to Samus. The game concerns itself with telling its own story of the Bottle Ship in the same way as the other Metroid games: through exploration and horrifying discovery.

My biggest gripe is the controls. Super Metroid’s controls were fiddly, and this has carried over into Metroid: Other M. Considering it works exclusively with the Wii Remote, it’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but you do get the feeling that a Nunchuk would have ironed out some of the more fiddly moments. Jump on an enemy to charge and execute a powerful attack: Great, except you’re moving with a D-Pad and so precisely landing on an enemy isn’t as easy as that. To interact with a computer terminal, walk up to it with the D-Pad – only you can be walking around in front of it for a while before Samus is lined up enough to trigger the scene of her interacting with it.

Nevertheless, these are small complaints for what has so far been a stellar return to the 2D game style, even though it’s  actually kinda 3D. I suggest you try it at least, as reviews of the game are a very mixed bag, and the most correct reviews barely mention the cutscenes and focus on what is an excellent piece of classic gameplay.

Project: Mario

The first website I ever completed was the Yoshi’s Island guide for SMBHQ.com. It was, what you might call, incredibly basic, and clearly the product of someone getting to grips with the medium.

But even back then I was looking for a way to combine my love of games with my love of drawing. Some of the best websites from back then were doing it, including Zelda HQ and NintendoLand, both of which seem to have rebranded into more conventional news websites, which really is a crying shame.

NinDB really doesn’t leave much room for artistic talent, as it’s pretty objective game information, and there’s so much of that raw information and so little creative writing that it’s never seemed a good fit. The closest I ever got was the Nintendo All-Stars section, now dead. In it, I drew a Nintendo character and wrote up a profile on them. The aim was to inform about lesser-known characters like Mike Jones (StarTropics), Takamaru (Mysterious Murasame Castle) or Muddy (Mole Mania) while also finding an outlet for my artistry. Funnily enough, official artwork for some of them is so scarce that my art started showing up in unusual places – including IGN’s “Characters for Brawl” list.

This is all leading up to a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind since those very first steps into the world wide web back in the late 90′s. A Mario guide, illustrated, and thorough. At present I am looking at an enemy listing covering every major Mario release.

Here are some problems I have with Mario guides (e.g. MarioWiki, Mario Monsters, TMK’s Mariopedia):

• They rarely make note of something that is poor localisation. For example, Cheep Cheep is in many games, but has been localised as Goby, Bub, Piscatory Pete, etc. Many guides will list these separately, even though it was just poor localisation.
• Where there is no English name, sometimes the names concocted are a joke. The fireball in Donkey Kong 100M stage has been listed as “Foxfire” in MarioWiki. Upon discovering that the source for this name was an unofficial American Donkey Kong guide, I gave up relying on MarioWiki for anything.
• Some of them contain information on appearances in TV shows and comics or even the godawful movie.
• MarioWiki especially is written as if there is some underlying ecosystem, or political structure, or motive, as if they are trying to construct a coherent world from scraps. This smacks of fanfic, and I will have none of it.

All we need is a list of enemies, divided into family groups (so all Shy Guys are together). Enemies that have been translated wrongly will have their original names restored. We need a game list and a short description of the enemy. And, ideally, they will be joined by an illustration of the enemy.

I’ve already compiled enemy lists for the following games:

• Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels
• Super Mario Bros. 2
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• Super Mario Land
• Super Mario World
• Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• Super Mario 64
• Yoshi’s Story
• Paper Mario
• Luigi’s Mansion
• Super Mario Sunshine
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
• Super Princess Peach
• Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
• New Super Mario Bros.
• Yoshi’s Island DS
• Super Paper Mario
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii
• Super Mario Galaxy 2

So, no mean feat, I think you’ll agree, but it’s surprising how many of them fall into a small subset of family groups. So by keeping all the families together, this will significantly reduce the ludicrous amount of information that needs work. And I have been drawing like crazy, and have just started experimenting with finishing up on Illustrator, to see if it offers any much-needed speed.

Will I finish it? Will I post it early? Who knows. It would be very out of character for me to finish it… but then this is a labour of love that’s been in the pipeline for the best part of 13 years, and longer if you discount the internet as the medium to present it.

What’s the deal with Donkey Kong?

There is a school of thought that Donkey Kong Jr. and the “modern” Donkey Kong from the Donkey Kong Country games are one and the same character, based loosely on the evidence that circa Donkey Kong 64, Cranky Kong was changed from DKC DK’s grandfather to his father in a sloppy bit of retconning.

The first two classic DK arcade games were massive hits. Donkey Kong 3 didn’t do so well, and following its 1984 release the next release didn’t appear until 10 years later on the Game Boy. This was also the last main Donkey Kong game before the DKC games took the reigns. It starred Mario, Pauline and Donkey Kong, appearing in his trademark tie for the first time (although not the first time he appeared in a tie: see NES Open Tournament Golf). Donkey Kong Jr. even showed up as a minor antagonist in the later levels. The characters were all given makeovers in line with Nintendo’s output at the time.

Then Donkey Kong Country appeared and not only gave DK a 3D makeover, but 2D gaming as a whole was changed. The series introduced us to a “new” DK, grandson to the original DK, who was now old and grumpy and named Cranky Kong.

What the game did was distinguish that classic DK and modern DK were two entirely separate series. The classic redesign continued to be used in the Game & Watch Gallery series, while the modern redesign was used for pretty much everything else. The problem appears when you consider that time has clearly passed on DK Island for Classic DK to age so much, but time doesn’t seem to have passed in the Mario games, where both classic and modern DK appear. In one case, Donkey Kong Jr. appears alongside modern DK in Mario Tennis 64.

In the Donkey Kong Country games, there was no question that Cranky was modern DK’s grandfather. It was said enough times that was the case, and has pretty much been said every time since. The weak point is Donkey Kong 64, where he said he’s modern DK’s father. The script writer for the game, who also writes the Rare website, pretty much acknowledged that this was a retcon on the Rare letters page.

If you say something on the internet that could be official, it sticks around like a bad smell. Fans will fight tooth and nail to interpret the facts to fit the outcome they want to see, from declaring the original DK arcade games as non-canon, to arguing over whether you can interpret Cranky’s ramblings to mean “father” in other DKC games.

I’m a firm believer in following what is correct now. Rare left Nintendo, and they left the DKC series. Nintendo is once again the caretakers of the series, so if their current input disagrees with Rare’s past input then we have to accept that change and move on. Consider it a continuity error. Don’t try to explain continuity errors, as then you’re no better than George Lucas.

The current line is that Cranky Kong is the classic arcade Donkey Kong, and modern DK is his grandson. Until we hear definitively either way, something neither Nintendo nor Rare has done, it doesn’t make sense to declare that modern DK is Donkey Kong Jr. grown up. Even if Cranky was the father, that doesn’t mean modern DK is Donkey Kong Jr. either, as it is possible to have more than one child.

And you know Wrinkly Kong was a rabbit in the sack, right?

Zelda Timeline

Anybody who hangs around Zelda forums for long enough knows that theorising about the Zelda series timeline is a hotly debated topic. I remember when it began in 1998. Up until the release of Ocarina of Time there was no doubt that the timeline was as follows:

(ALttP/LA) > (LoZ/AoL)

That’s all we had to worry about. A Link to the Past was stated to be a prequel to the NES games right there on the box. Then Ocarina came along, another prequel telling the legend of the Imprisoning War from ALttP, leaving the timeline something like this:

OoT > (ALttP/LA) > (LoZ/AoL)

But then in an interview, Miyamoto suggested the timeline might be the following:

OoT > (LoZ/AoL) > ALttP ~ LA (could go anywhere)

That quote started the timeline debate. Fans began to side with either the original timeline or Miyamoto’s timeline, and even though Miyamoto has since confirmed that the original timeline was the correct one, the damage was done. One website that sprung up in the aftermath was The Legends of Zelda (now Zelda Legends), where timeline theories were collected and shared by Davogones.

One theory that struck a chord was the split timeline theory. This suggests that the ending to Ocarina of Time results in two separate timelines due to its time travel endings. In the Adult Link ending, Ganondorf is sealed in the Sacred Realm by the Sages and Link disappears (sent back in time), and in the Child Link ending, Link changes the future by stopping Ganondorf from ever entering the Sacred Realm. The concept of the two endings resulting in two timelines was actually debated in various forms by myself and Davogones, who then posted one of the first articles on the subject.

While the details of the split timeline were embryonic, I was delighted to hear that it turned out to be part of the official timeline with the release of The Wind Waker. Taking place after the Adult Link ending, Ganondorf escapes the Sacred Realm, and without Link to save the day, all of Hyrule is flooded by the Great Sea. It was later confirmed that the result of the Child Link timeline is the events of Twilight Princess, on a parallel timeline to TWW. Here, Link changed the future and Ganondorf was restrained by the sages, but a “cosmic prank” led to Ganondorf acquiring the Triforce of Power anyway and escaping to the Twilight Realm.

So we have the result of the two endings:

OoT:A > (TWW/PH/ST)
(OoT:C/MM) > (TP)

If it seems straightforward, then what happened to the old games? ALttP tells us what happens after the OoT:Adult ending, with Ganondorf trapped in the Sacred Realm and freed by Aganhim. So shouldn’t ALttP be a sequel to OoT as well?

And this is where the timelines become a problem. We have three outcomes to a story with two endings. One suggests Ganondorf escapes the Sacred Realm in search of the Triforce of Wisdom and Courage, one suggests he doesn’t escape but acquires the Triforce in the Sacred Realm, transforming it into the Dark World, and one suggests he was never put in the Sacred Realm in the first place, but escaped into the Twilight Realm with the Triforce of Power.

The natural inclination would be to move the (ALttP/LA) > (LoZ/AoL) timeline somewhere around those two timelines, but no matter where you place them it simply doesn’t work:

OoT:A > (TWW/PH/ST) > (ALttP/LA)
At the end of Wind Waker, Ganon is not sent back to the Sacred Realm, but dropped into the ocean as a rock with the Master Sword in his head.

OoT:A > (ALttP/LA) > (TWW/PH/ST)
Ganondorf escaped the Sacred Realm, but took over and Hyrule was flooded, but in ALttP, Ganon is pretty certainly killed.

(OoT:C/MM) > (ALttP/LA) > (TP)
Between OoT and TP, Ganon was never sealed in the Sacred Realm according to both games, so this placement doesn’t make sense.

(OoT:C/MM) > (TP) > (ALttP/LA)
At the end of Twilight Princess, Ganon has been run through with the Master Sword. He could still be revived (it happens to him a lot), and sealed in the Sacred Realm. After all, very few people knew of Ganondorf’s involvement in the events of TP. It was mostly Zant’s work.

Of course, having ALttP follow the Child Ending means that OoT really isn’t a backstory to ALttP at all, as the Imprisoning War never happened in the child link timeline. The Imprisoning War would then have to be a separate event that occurred, as yet unseen… and those are the kind of loose ends that drive a man to madness.

We’re still just dealing with the main series here. There’s the Oracle games which actually seem to fit comfortably between ALttP and LA, were it not for the fact Zelda doesn’t recognise you at the end (translation issue, perhaps?) Then there’s the Four Swords series, including Minish Cap, which is its own mini-timeline (MC/FS/FSA) but doesn’t weave comfortably into the above timeline at all. Theories abound, but none of them conclusive.

And that’s the problem. No matter what theory you propose, you could never make everyone happy. The fabled Master Timeline that sits at Nintendo’s HQ where only three people can look at it will not be an airtight and conclusive document that will make everyone happy. It will have holes. It will have evidence against it, no doubt much of the evidence already hotly contested by fans. The only thing it will do is canonise one of the wrong timelines, so everyone has to tailor the evidence to fit the canon. A new game will come out and screw us all over.

Speaking of which, it has been said that Skyward Sword will be a prequel to Ocarina of Time. I really hope Ganondorf appears as the villain. That will start the Multiple Ganon debates, the placement of the Four Swords mini-timeline will become more vociferous and the fans will spit more blood than ever before.

You have to admit, it’s amusing to watch.

Wikipedia

There’s an old saying that two wrongs don’t make a right. Democracy is kind of like that, and, voting aside, there are few places more democratic than Wikipedia: The encyclopaedia that anybody can edit!

NinDB is far from perfect. In fact, some might say it’s the inconsistent product of a young games enthusiast. And that’s because I am no longer 18 and excitably throwing up a little bit about every game that I could glean from the “world wide web” back in 2000. I am 27, my writing has improved massively thanks to work, my knowledge of games has improved thanks to the sheer space of time, and the internet as a whole has improved its coverage of these games as well.

If any one site does what NinDB does better, it’s Wikipedia. It covers every system and every game. I’ve been using it to give me a kicking off point for a project and I’ve noticed three distinct categories of game article:

1. The Bloater: Long articles that you soon realise repeat themselves a lot. There is no categorisation or heading breakdowns, as apparently writing an article with easy to read headings counts as “game guide material”. But squishing it all into a paragraph that looks like a Magic Eye picture is fine.

2. The Lovely: Articles that have very little repetition and headings. Often these are for games that have small fanbases who love and care for the series, but the pages aren’t popular enough to warrant moderator whining.

3. The Piddler: Oddly, very common articles for US-only games. These essentially contain information ripped from NinDB.

So you can see why I’d be embarassed!

Wikipedia doesn’t allow certain information to be posted on the English language version if it might be classed as “game guide” information. This includes enemy lists, item lists, etc. Luckily, the Japanese Wikipedia does allow this, and is a fantastic resource if you speak “Bad Web Translatorese”… a language I have been fluent in since 2001.

My aim is to make NinDB a resource akin to Wikipedia Japan’s website… that is, more useful than Wikipedia, contains some guide information (but not too much) and is divided up into clear headings.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and more editors don’t make a good article. Give me an article written by a specialist any day of the week.

The new NinDB Blog

Welcome to the NinDB Blog, where I will hope to be posting information, findings and updates on www.nindb.net and possibly throwing in some general rambling.