Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 17-18)

We've reached the end of another Cover to Cover pagethrough series, as we wrap up the 1987 catalog from interactive fiction pioneer Infocom.  The company had been acquired by Activision at this time and would soon be pressured to include graphics in its future and final products; in some ways this feels like the last of the "old" Infocom era.  The last two pages feature support for frustrated adventurers and faithful fans alike.

Page 17 promotes the legendary Invisiclues -- sold separately, these packages included full maps and hint books, with clues printed in invisible ink that could be developed with a special marker.  Infocom's hint design originated with an unofficial adjunct called the Zork Users Group, and was eventually made part of the company.  The concept worked very well -- ideas and suggestions were revealed gradually, and red herrings were included among the questions, so players could get themselves unstuck without cheating themselves completely out of those memorable "Eureka!" moments:

Infocom also published a promotional quarterly newsletter called The Status Line (originally The New Zork Times) which included news, hints, and behind-the-scenes articles.  It was provided free to people who registered their Infocom games and was always an entertaining read.

And that's it for this trip down memory lane.  These old catalogs fascinate me because they capture moments in time -- the games that were being promoted in this printing, and moreover the games that were not, say something about the state of Infocom and the text adventure genre in 1987.  In the digital distribution era, games need not go "out of print," but physical production concerns and sales to date likely account for the absence in these pages of Cutthroats, Seastalker, Suspended, Starcross and other Infocom titles of the early-to-mid-1980s.

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Susano-o Densetsu (1989)

Perhaps my entire fascination with Japanese RPGs stems from a subconscious desire to rid myself of the desire to play Japanese RPGs; since I don't speak or read the language with any degree of fluency, a game has to do something really special to keep me interested.  This week I've spent a little time with Susano-o Densetsu, a rather strange role-playing game published by PC Engine co-creator Hudson Soft as Volume 17 of the company's own HuCard series.  There's a little bit of English here and there, but it's primarily in Japanese and I'm not familiar with the property if it originated in another medium, so I won't be able to tell you very much about the story.  But here we go anyway!

As far as I can tell from the opening sequence, which is surprisingly substantial given that this is not a CD-ROM game, our hero is harassed or otherwise irritated by a vampire, a little person, a Cardinal, Street Fighter II's Ken, and a shirtless caped luchador into becoming a wild-haired, glowing-eyed demon of goodness.  Or something.

Given the unusual and colorful character lineup, while I know the title translates as something like Legend of Susano-o, it's much more tempting to call it Bazooka No-o and his Friends and his Wacky Electric Hairdo:
 

Oh, Susano-o!  Oh, don't you fry for me!

After the opening, which must eat up a good half of this largeish 512 MB HuCard, the game settles into a more-or-less standard JRPG format.  The game adopts a cyberpunk aesthetic -- the streets are deteriorating, the buildings are rundown, and everyone dresses in improbably colorful futurewear, including our hero, who conceals his crazy eyes and mod hairstyle beneath an attractive suit of golden armor.  The usual fantasy role-playing lineup of shops and inns is morphed into more modern establishments -- a Bar, weapons shop, Hotel, and everyone's favorite restaurant, Food:

The proprietors do not buy into the conventional wisdom that the customer is always right, though I guess it wouldn't feel right to buy weapons from the friendly, perky type usually found working in retail:

Everything takes place in an overhead view; after leaving town, the player wanders around the world map.  Something I always appreciate is that enemy attackers can be seen from a distance, giving a weak and fleeing player a chance to avoid confrontations.  But if we get too close to an incoming enemy formation, the battle begins.

The combat system is unusual  -- forward-looking in some ways, yet hopelessly clunky in others.  It tries to play like a very slow-paced action RPG, with a real-time counter permitting enemy and player attacks.  When the player has a chance to act, we can spend the opportunity moving away from enemies or attacking with ranged weapons.  But the detailed text displays (most of which seem to be of the "Player hits enemy for N damage!" variety) slow the whole operation down -- we can't speed them up very much or skip over them, which makes fighting more tedious than it ought to be.

Also, once enemies get close enough to strike our hero, it's hard to get out of the way -- the player tends to be surrounded by foes who simply close in turn after turn, so if we don't succeed in taking them out while they're halfway across the screen, our hero is encircled and summarily dispatched.  The open screen layout implies more flexibility and control, but without some structure to the combat it's almost impossible to strategize effectively; there's something to be said for the traditional lineup approach.  It also doesn't help that the player's sight tends to shift from enemy to enemy each turn, so that if we hit buttons too quickly our default target is usually not what we expected it to be.

When our hero succumbs to the onslaught and flickers offscreen, he returns to the friendly local hotel, where the crusty manager seems less than sympathetic:

Susano-o Densetsu is pretty standard RPG fare -- without being able to understand the story, at least, the dystopic trappings quickly devolve into the usual attack-and-level-up-then-rest-up cycle.  And while the combat system feels fresh to some degree, its best featured get bogged down in a clunky and uncooperative interface.  But it does close another gap in my Hudson Soft numbered-volume HuCard collection -- Volume 17, check!

---

It's fairly rare to see a substantial RPG on the HuCard format, so collectors may find this one interesting on that count.  It's not an expensive game to collect -- like most early PC Engine titles, it's fairly common these days.  You might be able to find a copy for sale here.

The LoadDown -- 04/05/2012

April showers bring... well, May's not quite here yet, so it's hard to say.  Here are some games, though.

WiiWare -- One new game this week, TNT Racers, a multiplayer racing game that seems like it was announced ages and ages ago; it features colorful tracks, a variety of racers to choose from, and online multiplayer (up to 4 players.)

DSiWare -- One new title up: Penguin Patrol, which at first glance resembles the 80s arcade game Pengo but is actually more like Skweek.  As a heroic Inuit, the player must rescue baby penguins stranded on the ice by traversing the tiles, which break up as they are walked on.

3DS eShop --  No games this week as such, but Colors! 3D arrives.  It's an art application that supports creation of layered 3-D drawings, posting drawings online, and collaborative creation with another local 3DS user.  Some impressive results have been posted by the app's creators, and the 3DS stylus is fine-grained enough that this might actually be a neat little art tool.  It also features coloring pages for those who would rather not be creative.


XBox Live Arcade -- Three new games since our last update.  Licensed platformer South Park: Tenorman's Revenge arrived late last week, to mixed reviews.  Farsight Studios' The Pinball Arcade is intriguing -- the developer did a fine job with past Gottlieb and Williams collections, and this online venue also features classic licensed pinball machines, launching with Black Hole, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Theatre of Magic.  And there's also Grasshopper Manufacture's Diabolical Pitch, a looney Kinect game created by the always-quirky Suda 51, pitting the player's baseball hero against an array of animal-headed foes.

PS3 on PSN --  Just one new titles, but's something we haven't quite seen before -- Sega's The House of the Dead 4, an arcade sequel coming straight to PSN without a disc-based release.  The coin-op barely surfaced in the US, so this console port will be the way most American gamers experience the game, using the Playstation Move controller as a light gun.

PSOne Classics -- Going three times... not that it won't bob up again whenever something is going on, so fret not.

Adventure of the Week: Sam & Max Episode 103 -- The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball (2007)

This week, we return to a series that's just beyond the five-year release threshold I try to maintain, with Telltale Games' Sam & Max Episode 103 -- The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball.  This 2007 animated point-and-click adventure game was the third episode in Telltale's first series based on the comic books of Steve Purcell, popularized within the genre by the classic 1993 Lucasarts graphic adventure Sam & Max Hit the Road.  The sardonic canine detective Sam and his hyperactive, joyfully violent rabbit buddy Max have starred in three successful series at Telltale at this writing.

This episode picks up where Episode 102 left off, as our heroes set out to investigate the bizarre hypnotic teddy bear sent to control a talk show host at WARP-TV.  We can see that the writing and design were still finding their stride in these early efforts, and some of the resource reuse that made episodic gaming a good economic fit for adventure games is still a bit obvious.  But it's a solid adventure game design, with some very funny moments and puzzles.

As always, I encourage interested gamers to tackle Sam & Max Episode 103 independently before proceeding here, especially because the game is still commercially available (and frequently on sale at very attractive prices.)  While Telltale's own published walkthroughs make me less concerned about spoiling the puzzles than is usually the case, good fun is to be had experiencing the game's plotting and dialogue firsthand.  With that said, be forewarned that there are likely to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The story opens, per usual in the first two seasons, with a call from the commissioner -- amid the morbidly witty dialogue, we learn  that a mole sent in to investigate the Toy Mafia has not been heard from in quite a while.  Sam and Max are asked to go in after him, starting their investigation at Ted E. Bear's Mafia-Free Playland and Casino, a name which doth protest too much.  The opening credits feature a purple background this time; the episodes cycle through a rainbow of colors as the season progresses.

To find the mole, our heroes are equipped with the secret code phrase: "Does the carpet match the drapes?"  Sam informs Max that if we have located the mole, "He'll say, 'Well, I never!' and smack me across the face."  This does eventually come into play plotwise, but serves mostly as an excuse for us to ask this question of everyone we meet, earning innocent and wholesome responses despite the setup.


Sam & Max's office is much as it was in previous episodes.  The TV is showing Midtown Cowboys reruns from the last episode, and there's still quite a bit of dialogue reuse here; economic constraints are still showing a bit.  Our resident rat "friend" Jimmy Two-Teeth is operating a fencing joint out of his usual rathole in the wall below the bulletin board, and the closet now contains the charred Hypno-Bear from Episode 102, which may indeed be a clue about the Toy Mafia's doings in this episode.  There's nothing useful plotwise in the office at the moment, so we're off to explore the street and see what's changed since the last episode.

Convenience store proprietor Bosco is in a Frenchman disguise this time, donning a beret for the sake of entertaining yet another paranoid fantasy.  This time he's afraid of the Toy Mafia, and believes they saw through his Englishman disguise last time, though his accent and mangling of the language are even less convincing en Francais.  He fears unauthorized deliveries to his store, and has created an improved security system to prevent such nefarious product placement -- it consists of an image recognition camera and a vacuum system that places unrecognized merchandise out on the street.  He has a listening device for sale -- for ten million dollars, following his usual pattern of outrageous pricing for something that will likely turn out to be mundane.  There's a Secret of Monkey Island reference here -- we can ask Bosco if he has random items in stock, including a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.  There's also a funny series of "Do you..." -- "NON!" gags based entirely on comedic timing, something not possible in the pre-talkie adventure era.  At the snack counter, there's a promotion going on the Not'Cho's -- a free toilet brush with every purchase, but Bosco hastens to inform our heroes that it's a USED toilet brush.  It's been fun, but we haven't acquired any inventory items here either.

So next we're off to see what line of work Sybil is in these days.  Someone has installed a webcam on top of one of the cactuses in her office.  Hmmmm.  Now she's a professional trial witness, though she doesn't have her first case yet; she swears this, her latest career, is the one that she's sticking with.  We hear some more recycled gags here, as Sybil's decor hasn't been updated much since Episode 102.

Lefty's hardware store and Stinky's restaurant are still closed, and the posters at the back of the alley have been updated, though they're not as funny as some of the offerings in earlier episodes.  There's a suspicious car parked behind the DeSoto, with a license plate reading "DRGDLR", but it doesn't factor into the plot.

We've established that not a lot has changed in the neighborhood, so it's off to Ted E. Bear's Mafia-Free Playland and Casino for some plot progress.  The greeter, Lovey Bear, is a human in a costume bear head and a tailored Italian suit.  He sounds suspiciously Mafioso as he hands out free tokens and accidentally refers to "Don Ted E. Bear" who is doing some "business" in the back -- inquiring informs us only that it is "the kind of 'business' with quote marks around it, so's you know not to ask."

The establishment is brightly lit and colorful but still somehow seedy.  We can use tokens to play Whack Da Ratz! -- we have to shoot 20 of the singing rats to win, without touching the ones that are keepin' their mouths shut.  This wasn't super easy to do without a real mouse on my laptop -- I got 19 on my first try, 17 on the second, and 21 on the third, winning a Ted E. Bear refrigerator magnet.

We can hear (with repeated clicks) the entire Ted E. Bear theme song, as performed by the DISTURBING BEAR HEADS mounted on the wall.  Jared Emerson-Thomas did a great job scoring this series, and this bouncy protest song -- by which I mean protested innocence -- is a lot of fun.  It's a shame we don't hear the whole thing in one go until we get to the credits.

Dealer Cuddly Bear hosts a card game.  We can play a game of Indian Poker against one Leonard Steakcharmer, a mustachioed bald-headed circus strongman type (conveniently reused from Telltale's "pilot"/test effort, Texas Hold 'Em.)  The game involves each player drawing a card and putting it on his forehead; we can see Leonard's card but not our own, and the highest card wins.  It appears, of course, that Mr. Steakcharmer has some way of discerning his own card -- he looks over Sam's shoulder before deciding how much to bet.  We'd like to win his ten million tokens, and he's generous with the terms, as he assumes he can't lose; this seems to be true for the moment.

The guard at the back room door indicates that only Toy Mafia members are allowed in, with a required password; Max asks about joining the Toy Mafia, but the membership contact is also behind the door.  We can guess at the password with unsuccessful but entertaining results, and we see other Toy Mafia bears come and go, whispering the password -- Bosco's listening device would probably be handy, and maybe Leonard's ten million tokens would be suitable to close the deal.

A one-armed bandit resembles an actual bandit, with mask and striped shirt; it's not hard to win, but we don't actually win anything.  Ted E. Bear's original meatball sandwich -- circa 1957 -- is on display in a glass case.

Aha!  Here we are -- a very shiny clown nose over the entrance reflects Leonard's face, and he can likely see it from across the room.  Can we find some way to obscure the reflection?  This is where we might want to remember that Sam and Max were playing a game at the beginning of the episode that involved throwing playing cards into a wastebasket.  Yep -- the Ace of Spades is still lying on the floor by Jimmy Two-Teeth's place.  Returning to the casino and putting it on the clown nose causes Leonard to think he's always got an Ace, and we can easily win his 10 million tokens by exploiting his overconfidence.

Bosco accepts the tokens and gives us his listening device -- it's a bug, literally.  That is, it's a cockroach with a military background who will repeat precisely what he hears.  Back at the casino, we can listen in and determine the passphrase, which is "Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."
 
Now we can enter the back room and meet Chuckles, the pit boss, who's had his eye on our heroes via the establishment's security cameras.  To get into the Toy Mafia, we have to complete two -- wait, three assignments, as Ted E. Bear's original meatball sandwich has just been stolen during our conversation.  We need to lean on an uncooperative businessperson, whack a witness in an upcoming criminal case, and "recover a small item that belongs to us."  Further consideration verifies that we have to lean on Bosco by putting toy bears on his sale table; whack Sybil, who the mob has under surveillance; and recover the meatball sandwich, of course.

So how do we sneak product into Bosco's Inconvenience Store?  Can we use the Ted E. Bear refrigerator magnet to fool the security system into thinking the bears are expected items?  Doesn't seem like it.  We can't sneak a Bear onto the table directly, but we can distract Bosco by telling him the Toy Mafia is outside.  He spends quite a bit of time looking through his binoculars, speculating about whether the subject of his interest is CIA or else CIA, or Illuminati or The Knights of Malta or Skull and Bones, based on what the person he's observing is reading in the newspaper. This is funny dialogue, and also buys us some time.

Bosco's B-TADS 2 security system works as promised if we just try to put a bear on the sale table.  But we can put the Ted E. Bear magnet on the camera, making it contraband and sending it out the door (this didn't work quite the way I expected, but was effective enough!)  Now we can put the purple "I Love You No Matter What" bear on sale, and a Toy Mafia rep stops by to give us the thumbs-up.  Bosco is quite distressed, though the animation isn't quite up to communicating the excellent angst of the voice acting; Telltale's engine and technique would improve over time.

So that's one down, but as Sam says, "Our journey to the dark side has just begun."  So let's see if we can track down the meatball sandwich by way of Jimmy Two-Teeth.  Whoops -- that idea panned out a little to well!  We walk in on Leonard, who is waving a gun around and trying to fence the hot sandwich.  Sam tries to be reasonable, but once in a while it's good to let the anarchic Max take the lead.  "Hey, is that a cap gun?" he asks, catching Leonard in another cheap cheatin' move, and then a little rough-and-ready Max action ends with Leonard tied up.  He swears he won't reveal the sandwich's location, but we know from previous interaction that his late mother means the world to him.  Sam and Max (and the player) team up to deliver some "Yo' Mama" jokes - Sam's options offer various setups, while Max's include appropriate punchlines -- making for a fun little dialogue-matching puzzle to break Leonard's resolve.  Not all of the lines are jokes per se, some are rather complimentary or at least sentimental, and soon we learn that the sandwich was stashed in the one-armed bandit, and Leonard stole the arm, which we now reclaim.  In short order the arm is restored, a token inserted, and the stolen sandwich is back in the Toy Mafia's hands.  We've left Leonard tied up in the office, of course.

Now we're left with the unpleasant task of rubbing out Sybil.  We don't really want to kill her, so we'll probably have to fake it somehow.  We have Leonard's cap gun now, and we noticed the surveillance webcam in Sybil's office earlier -- this may be handy, but we can't openly enlist Sybil's cooperation in staging her demise.  We can, however, steal her empty coffee cup right off the desk, and return it to her confused gratitude.  She seems distracted and nervous... apparently she's already been told that the Toy Mafia is going to try to kill her before she testifies in a big trial, and of course she would never suspect her dog and bunny friends.  Sam asks, "Have you considered faking your own death?", but she's too honest for that, so we will have to arrange it ourselves.  Maybe we can drug her coffee -- after we get her some coffee -- and use the cap gun, arranging it to look like we're shooting her as she passes out?  Sam refuses to obtain any coffee from Bosco's -- "We don't ACTUALLY want to kill Sybil." -- but we can fill the cup with ketchup from the condiment dispenser, which may work better for our purposes.  We can't mix in any anti-depressants from the gumball machine outside, either, so let's abandon the drug angle and see what we can do with the cup of ketchup.  We put the cup on her desk, use the cap gun on her, and -- it looks like we missed her, she doesn't fall for it.  But we can use Sam's real gun on the ketchup-filled cup, splashing her with red goo and stunning her "dead", just before Max eats the camera and cuts off the feed to the Toy Mafia before she wakes up and gives the ruse away.

Now our boys are in -- but after Ted E. Bear doffs his bear head and reveals himself as the mole, our heroes don't quite realize he's switched sides before he figures out they are freelance police.  A chase ensues (I was beginning to think we were never going to tear carelessly through the streets in the DeSoto in this episode) and the mobsters are driving a vehicle with bulletproof tires. 

We can shoot down a hanging sign to knock them out of commission, and then return to the casino to take down the Don.  He's out of the office, apparently, but Sam notes that there's always something interesting behind a door marked, "Do Not Enter Under Pain of Death."  Before entering, we can do a little detective work -- there's a map marked with national truck routes, chalkboards with Smuggling, Racketeering and Extortion accounting, and a mini-bar in the office.

Behind the door, we discover an assembly line making Hypno-Bears, and Harry Moleman is (in his debut appearance, looking much larger than we know him to be later on) running the show.  He tries but fails to hypnotize Sam and Max -- Sam is still protected by the hypno-shield in his hat and Max's brain is -- well -- but they opt to play along.  The mole orders Sam to shoot Max, but fortunately we have the cap gun.  Max goes through a lengthy death soliloquy that manages to reference the Dukes of Hazzard, Sting, and Charlie's Angels among other pop-culture references, and then puts himself through the machine's vacuum system before popping out at the other end.  He gets stuck momentarily, pointing out that the system has a pressure gauge, so maybe we can jam it and blow the whole thing up somehow.

We can see teddy bear voice gizmos in a bin, being assembled, but we can't take one.  We can grab a finished bear from the line, however -- "Give all your money to Ted E. Bear", it intones.  This isn't a very useful command to give to the Mole, but this seems like a good idea to play with.  We can use the bug to listen to and record Harry, but would have to get him to say something more useful -- he's just reading the newspaper comic strips, and his opinions about Mary Worth and Garfield aren't going to help us.  But the One-Armed Bandit is also in the room for maintenance -- someone noticed that it actually coughed up a prize when we reclaimed the meatball sandwich -- and his "You're on fire!" gizmo might be of use.  We drop it in the bin, a semi-rejected bear drops off the line, and we convince Don Ted E. Bear that's he's aflame.  This sends him running for the (fake, OSHA-violating) fire extinguisher on the wall, we pull the vacuum lever, and Harry Moleman is sucked into the machinery a few minutes before he clogs the pressure system and the factory blows up.

Sam and Max run for their lives, dodge the debris and head off for a well-deserved celebratory dinner, as Chuckles the bear removes his head to reveal himself as a secret government agent.  With the factory destroyed, it's apparently time for Plan B... which we will learn more about in episode 104.

I really like this series -- Telltale Games' success with this game did much to revive the adventure genre on a commercial basis, and the Sam & Max series consistently balances sharp humor and entertaining puzzle design.  These aren't difficult games in the brain-busting manner of the old days, but there are still plenty of fun red herrings and rewarding "Aha!" moments.  Good stuff, and we'll get to Episode 104 at some point.

Cover to Cover: Infocom 1987 Catalog (pp. 15-16)

Our current cover-to-cover series is coming down the home stretch, with just four more pages of the Infocom 1987 product catalog to go...

Page 15 presents another box set collecting three Infocom science fiction titles:

I have to wonder about the logic used to determine which games went into this particular Science Fiction Classics set -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall are certified classics, but were more comedy than hard sci-fi; A Mind Forever Voyaging was true sci-fi, but more about atmosphere than puzzle solving and not a huge success.  And Infocom's early serious sci-fi classics Starcross and Suspended are out of the picture altogether.   My guess is that AMFV hadn't sold tremendously well and was available for the set, while the other two were popular and therefore still in print.

Page 16 collects three Infocom mysteries as the Classic Mystery Library, with what looks like similar logic:

In this case, the earlier Deadline was omitted from this collection, while the newer Moonmist makes an appearance.  This means that this three-game set includes two introductory-level mysteries, Moonmist plus The Witness, plus the more challenging Suspect. 

I have to confess that I was never very good at the Infocom mysteries -- I played The Witness back in the day, but never quite found an ending I was satisfied with.  I think my methodical, exploratory approach to adventure gaming isn't a great fit for the style -- part of the challenge is being in different places at the right time to witness the autonomous characters doing or saying certain things, which requires a certain amount of efficiency and replaying to piece together the whole story and gather the best possible evidence.  I ought to try again sometime soon.

Next week, I think we'll wrap this one up!

East vs. West: Neutopia (1989)

It was 1989, the 8-bit NES was still leading the market, and NEC knew they needed something to compete with Nintendo's major franchises.  Keith Courage was no Super Mario, but Hudson Soft managed a creditable Legend of Zelda clone with Neutopia.  I played the US version from beginning to end at the time of its release, and enjoyed it immensely for what it was.  Now I'm finally getting around to sampling the PC Engine version (and adding Volume 23 in Hudson Soft's numbered HuCard series to my collection.)

The title screen of the Japanese version is completely in English:

The North American version differs only in the year of release (1990), the customary added "FROM NEC" legend, and minor layout details:

The gameplay is so clearly and completely lifted from Zelda that there's not much for me to write about here.  There's more RPG-style human interaction, with lots of characters hidden behind bombable murals and down hidden staircases; most offer hints (in Japanese text), and some sell potions or offer free healing services.  Neutopia's color palette is rich and subtle compared to its NES forebears, bringing its world to life with rounded, shaded imagery and animated water effects, without skimping on the color.  It really does feel like a 16-bit upgrade of its inspiration, although the overworld musical theme is not nearly as stirring as Link's enduring march.

Beyond the look of the game, this is wannabe-Link territory all the way through.  Our hero was known in the US as Jazeta, and the primary villain as Dirth, and in both regions the game begins with a short cutscene as the villain makes off with a princess/priestess/heroine of some sort:

Some of the enemies are clearly, shall we say, "inspired by" Nintendo's series:

And our hero joyfully lifts bombs, potions, and the Holy Bible the Book of Revival over his head when he finds them in treasure chests, just like that other fellow:

Eventually we pick up a fireball weapon that's slower but more controllable than Link's boomerang, and we can use bombs to blow holes in certain walls to meet new people and find secret (bonus and/or required) dungeon passages. And of course there are 8 dungeons to explore and conquer, with the expected aid of compass and automap -- this interface will look very familiar to Zelda fans:

 The dungeons feature simple combat, with plenty of flicker-free enemies roaming about, as well as puzzle rooms where we must push blocks or kill all the monsters to escape or gain access to a treasure chest.  There are gold and silver coins, and various powerups and new abilities to acquire, like improved armor and a fireball-throwing sceptre.  There's a boss to fight in each dungeon, and if our hero dies, he is soon resurrected back at the beginning of the map to fight his battles anew.  

If he defeats a boss and collects a medallion, he returns to the same location, with one of the empty slots on the temple floor filled in to track his progress, and the adventure continues.

That's Neutopia.  It's not a bad game at all -- the production values are solid, it controls well, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it back in the day.  Of course, at that time, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link were the only existing titles in Nintendo's now long-running series.  A few decades later, Neutopia's derivative nature, and the continued popularity and advancement of the original franchise, means this game doesn't hold up as well as the more original titles in the PC Engine library.  But it sold well -- a sequel, Neutopia II, was released in both Japan and North America -- and while it's just a classical old-school action RPG, there's nothing wrong with that.

---

If you wish to explore every incarnation of the land of Hyrule, even the unofficial ones, you could do much worse than Neutopia.  This game isn't particularly hard to find -- it was popular on the TurboGrafx-16, and is also available on the Wii Virtual Console (Nintendo circa 2007 apparently coughing politely and looking the other way.)  The American version can be readily found at Amazon:



If you prefer -- remembering that this is a HuCard, so you'll need original PCE hardware to play it -- you may be able to find the Japanese edition for sale here.

The LoadDown -- 03/29/2012

Time Marches out, with one last round of downloadable news for this month -- a relatively quiet week.

WiiWare -- Getting a bit quiet on this platform; the only new item this week is a free demo version of 2 Fast 4 Gnomz, a speedy cartoon platformer released about a month ago.

DSiWare -- And as if to emphasize that the 3DS (now officially one year old in the U.S.) is where the contemporary action is, the latest DSiWare game is 90's Pool.  It's a billiards game.

3DS eShop --  One new title this week: ARC STYLE: Soccer 3D, which borrows the Sensible Soccer aesthetic to some degree (at least in the overhead view) but doesn't play nearly as neatly; some may find it a cost-effective alternative to Konami's 3DS soccer cartridge.  There's also a demo version of the retro-styled and well-received platformer, Mutant Mudds.

XBox Live Arcade -- Wrecked Revenge Revisited is the only debut title this week, latest in a long line of car-combat games inspired by Twisted Metal; this one features fairly realistic-looking stock cars, augmented by cartoonish weaponry.

PS3 on PSN -- Just one new game here also.  Closure is an indie platformer with a light-based mechanic -- only platforms that are lit can be touched safely by the player, so manipulation of the lighting is key to success.

PSOne Classics -- Going twice...