JALECO RALLY: BIG RUN (ARCADE)

A couple of months ago I wrote about Tuff E Nuff, a SNES fighting game that (awful title aside) helped creators Jaleco strengthen their claim as the most consistent developer of average videogames. Sometimes Jaleco’s games are slightly above average, sometimes they’re slightly below average, but they’re never titles that make you jump for joy or jump around in pain because you hurt your foot when booting the game out of an open window. For this reason I have developed a tremendous amount of affection for Jaleco over the years, and it’s time I put that affection to the test by playing their 1989 off-road-race-em-up Jaleco Rally: Big Run!

“The Supreme 4WD Challenge,” claims the title screen. I’m pretty sure that refers to the concept of the race in question and not the game itself. Jaleco would never have the confidence to describe one of their products as “supreme.”

The Big Run in question is the Paris-Dakar Rally, a real-life off-road rally that sees competitors race from Paris, through southern Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea and down through Africa until they arrive at the finish line in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Or at least it used to, because concerns about terrorism saw the event move to South America in recent years. Supposedly the rally was started when its founder got lost in the Sahara during a different rally and though “hey, this would be a great place to hold a rally of my own!” I think that’s what they mean by making the best of a bad situation.
I feel that I should also mention that the screenshot above means I’ll be humming a-ha’s “Take On Me” throughout this entirety of Big Run. Not to be worry, I’ll be finished writing this article in a day or twooooo…

The attract mode also reveals our racer’s entry form. Apparently our team is called “Big bois.” The Akihabara Big Bois, that’s us.

With coins inserted and start button pressed, the race gets underway. Immediately the Paris part of the Paris-Dakar thing goes right out the window, because you actually start in Tunis. No European section at all, then, and I suspect this is because if there was a Parisian component then Jaleco would have had to create lot of very different backgrounds instead of being able to reuse the same sand dunes and palm trees for the majority of the game.

Big Run is a racing game, of course. A very arcade-y racing game at that, with a sense of depth generated by sprite-scaling techniques a la Sega’s OutRun and some very tight time-limits to beat. The game also measures what position you’re in amongst the other racers, but you can ignore that. The only thing you need to worry about is beating the checkpoint time. In fact, you can be in first place and still be disqualified for running out of time. Presumably this means all the other racers are disqualified too, and this year’s Paris-Dakar Rally comes to an abrupt stop somewhere near the Tunisia-Libya border.
The controls are exactly what you’d expect for this kind of arcade racer. A steering wheel for turning, accelerate and brake buttons, and a gear shift for switching between low and high gear - again, much like OutRun. Man, I wish I was playing OutRun. Oh, and Big Run also has a button for honking your horn. It does nothing besides making a noise but it makes you feel a bit better to honk at the other racers, just like a real car horn.

I was making decent progress in the early going, until there was a sudden ninety-degree turn on the course and I slammed right into this huge billboard of a bikini-clad Marilyn Monroe type. I say billboard, but Monroe’s expression changes from serenity to surprise when you crash into her so maybe she’s actually the 50 Foot Woman on a relaxing desert holiday. Jaleco seem to be very proud of this particular billboard, because it crops up throughout the rest of the game – and I’m convinced they placed the first one on the outside of this tight corner because they knew most first-time players would hit it and thus see it in action.

Aside from the huge sentient advertisements, the rest of the first stage plays out just as you’d expect from an arcade racer of this vintage. You barrel through the sandy locales, trying your best not to get caught in the pack of CPU cars while also avoiding the more interesting hazards. Here, for example, you have to race along a raised section of the track and it’s fully possible to fall off the side, costing you vital seconds. In fact, if you fall off the side you might as well give up there and then because Big Run’s time limits are very strict. Any time I play an arcade racing game of this type I always turn the difficulty down because I have enough confidence on my own self-worth that I don’t need to seek validation by beating a coin-guzzling arcade game on its default settings, but even on easy one major crash can spell the end of a Big Run, erm, run.

After a couple of attempts I made it over the finish line, mostly thanks to a potentially disastrous spin-out being averted when a CPU car rammed me from behind and immediately accelerated me to top speed. Big Run has discrete stages rather than one long course dotted with checkpoints, and here you can see the finish line of stage one. The Colossal Marilyn returns to survey the scene, but I’m more interested in the woman on the right. That’s the girlfriend from OutRun! She’s wearing the same outfit and everything. I guess she just really loves racing. C’mon Sega, give her a spin-of game of her own! Or at least get her in Smash Brothers.

That’s the general flow of Big Run, then. Racing through the desert, crashing into things, admiring the scenery. Look, there’s some camels! And sand! Lots of sand in this one, folks. I dare say there won’t be another videogame with this level of sand content until I get around to creating Professional Sandcastle Builder 2019 and releasing it on Steam. Hey, if all these farming sims can sell thousands of copies I think I can make it work.
In the screenshot above you can just about see that there’s a choice of routes to take through the stage. It’s not like OutRun where each path leads to a completely different stage and most of the time which route you take is determined solely by which direction the computer-controlled cars are shoving you towards, but it’s nice to have a bit of choice.

Ah yes, the CPU cars. Here we come to one of Big Run’s deepest flaws, and that’s too much traffic. There are almost always cars nearby and frequently, as in the screenshot above, they’re positioned in such a way that they cover the entire road ahead of you despite having the whole goddamn desert to drive in. It makes it very difficult to build up any sense of speed – and consequently fun – when you’re constantly having to nose your way through a congealed blob of your fellow racers. In other racing games of this type, the issue of traffic is alleviated by having wider roads and a nimble, precisely-controlled vehicle, but neither of those things apply to Big Run. As a result, the other cars aren’t a challenging obstacle to avoid, they’re just a pain in the arse.

Honestly, just look at this bullshit. Guys, the Sahara Desert is over three and a half million square miles in size, so why are you all right up my arsehole?!

Sadly, even when the traffic is flowing a bit more freely Big Run still isn’t all that much fun to play. It never feels fast, for one thing, and I’m sad to report it doesn’t handle very well, either. A lot of the time it’s merely okay, but your car does feel sluggish and tight corners can be a proper nightmare because your car has a tendency to turn slowly for a while and then suddenly “snap” to a point past the angle you’re aiming for, making it difficult to perform anything but the shallowest turns smoothly. It reminds me a lot of Jaleco’s other arcade racer Cisco Heat; I assume both games run on the same engine. Sadly Big Run lacks Cisco Heat’s engaging visual madness. As we’ve established, it’s mostly sand.

It’s nicely drawn sand, at least, and the visuals are a strong point in Big Run’s favour. It looks better in motion than it does in still pictures – especially now that recent versions of MAME can run the game more accurately than ever – and I particularly like the way the sand dunes are drawn and shaded. They look really solid. Or perhaps I get that feeling of solidity because I couldn’t stop crashing into the bloody things.

As Big Run moves into its latter stages and you race through Niger and past Timbuktu, the scenery gains a bit more greenery and even the occasional water hazard - and the hint of a good game glitters below the dusty surface. That might just be down to me wanting Big Run to be fun, though. I really like this style of arcade racer, and I can usually trust Jaleco to come up with something that’s a solid six-out-of-ten at least… but Big Run doesn’t quite make the cut. I’ve certainly played worse racing games from the time, and Big Run does offer something different from the usual street or circuit races of its competitors, but the punishing time limits, the twitchy, unsatisfying controls and the vast swarms of roaming cars completely unconcerned by the safety of themselves and others make Big Run something of a chore to play. By the time I’d reached Mali, every minor collision or contact with the undergrowth was making my grind my teeth in a way that would horrifying my dentist.

I did find myself negotiating some of the most convoluted sections of track while leaving my car in low gear, something that’d you’d never really do in any of Big Run’s peers – but it worked well enough that I wonder whether it was the intended way to traverse the trickier roadways. There’s almost an interesting idea in there, the concept of selecting the right gear for the situation, and because it’s an interesting idea that means it almost certainly wasn’t intentional.

Eventually I reached the final stage. The game calls it the “victory run” in the bottom corner, which strikes me as rather presumptuous. They must not have seen me barely scraping through all the other stages in fourth place. The only victory here is the victory over common sense that playing all the way through a game I'm not enjoying represents.

In the end I did achieve victory, and the ending sequence begins with your car driving slowly past all the people who have made this trans-African rally possible: your pit crew, the girlfriend from OutRun and her many identical sisters, the living billboards of iconic actresses, the scores of locals who have every right to be pissed off that I showed up in their countries, drove like a like an absolute lunatic through their cities and repeatedly crashed my car into their houses before receiving a prize and pissing off home. Frankly, I should be in prison.

Then our driver ascends the podium, accompanied by a woman who is at least eighty percent leg. No wonder she’s wearing a leotard. Imagine how hard it’d be to find trousers with a twenty-inch waist and thirty-four inch legs.

Jaleco Rally: Big Run is a mediocre game and therefore fits nicely into Jaleco’s catalogue, but sadly there are degrees of mediocrity and this one falls on the low end of that scale. It’s not totally awful or anything; the graphics are nice, the soundtrack’s okay and on the simpler, less busy sections of the course it’s a perfectly acceptable racing game. However, it commits the sin of being a racing game that never lets you really get going. There’s very little sense of speed or flow when you’re constantly being boxed in by other drivers and struggling to take corners without suddenly lurching off in a new and unexpected direction, and with that in mind it’s not a game I can recommend. Perhaps the SNES port is better, but I haven't played that one and the arcade original isn't exactly encouraging me to check it out. I’ll be sticking to OutRun, but then of course I will. Hell, I might even mix it up a bit by playing some Super Hang-On. I’m a man of simple tastes, after all.

Oh, and while I’ve got you, here’s my roughly annual reminder that if for some reason you enjoy VGJunk you can always donate a couple of quid to the cause, if you like. I’ve got a new job coming up but it doesn’t start for a while, so hopefully this’ll be the last time I ever bring it up. Thanks for reading, as always.

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TUFF E NUFF (SNES)

Has it really been almost two years since I covered a game with Jaleco’s name on it? It’s definitely time to remedy that - I have missed diving into the library of the Masters of Mediocrity, a videogame developer more middle-of-the-road than a zebra crossing. Today’s offering is the 1993 SNES game Tuff E Nuff, and it’s a fairly decent Street Fighter II clone. I haven’t actually played it yet, but I saw some screenshots and it was developed by Jaleco so if Tuff E Nuff isn’t a fairly decent Street Fighter II clone I’ll eat my hat, your hat, an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe stuffed full of baseball caps, whatever hats you like.

Tuff E Nuff is a hell of title, huh? It’s edgy, it’s hip, it’s street, or at least that’s what I assume the people in charge of localising the game thought. It’s a title that reminds me of 90’s glam metal band Enuff Z’Nuff, and I suppose it’s possible that the name crept into the localiser’s mind while listening to “Fly High Michelle.” Enuff Z’Nuff have their own genuine videogame connection, of course:  Guilty Gear character Chip Zanuff is named after the band’s bassist.
In Japan, Tuff E Nuff is known by the grammatically wonky but far more poetic title of Dead Dance, and I’m as surprised as you are that Dead Dance isn’t the name of a nineties glam metal band.

Jaleco have slapped the standard Mad Max / Fist of the North Star story onto Tuff E Nuff: World War Three, only the strong survive, shoulderpads come back in a big way, roving gangs of psychopaths, the usual. They’re described as “crazy times,” which I’m convinced is a reference to "Tough Boy", the opening theme for the second series of Fist of the North Star. Out of this chaos emerges some kind of punch king, who conquers the world – and then for some reason holds a fighting tournament.

The “remaining four great states” send their champions to the tournament in the hopes of defeating “JADE” the fighting king and restoring peace to the land. Given how hard Tuff E Nuff is leaning on Fist of the North Star for inspiration my guess is that Jade will be a very large man with short blonde hair like Fist of the North Star villain Raoh. If he isn’t, you can add another eatin’ hat to my plate.

The three gameplay modes are story, two-player and basic versus CPU battles, and I’ll be playing through story mode. I think it’s supposed to be an ironic name, because if you’ve watched the game’s intro that’s all the story you’re getting. Arcade mode might be a better name, but even arcade modes in fighting games usually have some kind of ending.
Right from the off you can spot a flaw with Tuff E Nuff – there are only four playable characters. You’ve got generic post-apocalyptic punchman Syoh, the equally generic Zazi, Kotono the lady ninja and hulking wrestler Vortz. We’ll meet them all in time, but I’ll be playing through the game as Syoh so let’s get to it.

First up is a battle against Zazi, which is being held in a sports arena that just about survived the apocalypse. Zazi’s weapons are his bare fists, and so are Syoh’s so this should be an evenly-matched fight.

Extremely evenly matched, because Syoh and Zazi are the exact same bloody character with slightly different sprites. Tuff E Nuff’s cast of characters just shrank from four to three, and the tiny character roster is a real mark against the game. Imagine if the SNES version of Street Fighter II was released and the only playable characters were Ryu, Ken, Chun Li and Zangief.

Gameplay-wise, TEN is very much what you’d expect. You’ve got four attack buttons for light and heavy punches and kicks, you hold back to block, special moves are executed with d-pad manoeuvres plus a button, so if you’ve ever played a fighting game of the era you’ll have no trouble getting a handle on TEN’s gameplay.
As for those special moves, would you be shocked to learn that Syoh and Zazi fight a lot like Ryu and Ken? They’ve both got the traditional fireball and a rising punch that calls to mind the towering form of a dragon. The fireball is executed in the usual way, while the dragon punch is away, down forward and punch – I had trouble getting the dragon punch to come out a few times, but that might be because I’m so used to doing dragon punches the Street Fighter way. On the whole, though, the controls feel more than adequate for the job at hand. They’re fairly crisp, characters move as you’d expect and I could launch a fireball about nine out of ten times I tried. This is very important, because I’d guess that about eighty percent of the damage I inflicted while playing TEN was chip damage from blocked fireballs.

Syoh and Zazi have one other special move and it’s their most interesting by far. It’s a defensive upwards swipe that protects from frontal attacks and is performed by holding the d-pad towards your opponent for a moment and then pressing back and punch. This feels like a very usual command for a fighting game move to me, but its addition gives Syoh’s fighting style that extra tool it sorely needed to avoid becoming extremely simplistic. It’s great for turning attack into defensive attack in an instant and catching your opponent off-guard when they try to jump up and plant their foot in your nasal cavity.
Above you can see I used this move to land the final blow on Zazi, and you can also see that TEN offers players an instant replay of the fight’s last few moments, which is a nice touch in a game that otherwise feels a bit bare-bones.

Kotono is your next opponent, and she’s got all the graceful ninjas skills you’d expect, like speedy dashing attacks and the power to throw sharp bits of metal at your face. Definitely very ninja-ish, even if she does appear to be wearing hiking socks and lederhosen shorts, as though she’s going to throw down her kunai at the end of the fight and start up the oompah music.

The end of the fight came a lot quicker than I would have liked, because Kotono kept kicking my ass. Considering she’s the second opponent you face you’d think you’d get something of an easier ride but no, she careens around the screen like a squirrel with amphetamines stuffed in its cheeks and even Syoh’s defensive special move was having trouble stopping Kotono in her tracks.

Once I eventually managed to scrape a win against Kotono it was onwards to a bout against Vortz, the massive wrestler. Like most fighting game wrestlers, Vortz is all about getting up close and putting his techniques of bone origami into practise, so it’s a bloody good job the command for Syoh’s fireball is fairly responsive.
The most interesting thing about Vortz is that he’s from The Netherlands. You don’t get many Dutch fighting game characters, do you? Or Dutch videogame characters in general, I suppose. The intro said that the fighters were from the four remaining great states, so The Netherlands' international cachet must have really spiked after the bombs fell. Perhaps the atomic war boiled away the oceans – traditionally The Netherlands' bitterest foe – and they expanded from there.
After the repeated application of off-brand hadokens, Vortz was felled and Syoh emerged victorious. So we’re off to battle the fighting king now, right? Wrong! There are a bunch more CPU-only characters to fight before we get to the final boss, starting with a man called Beans.

Beans’ weapons is “American sack.” I have no idea what that entails. I’m just praying that he doesn’t have elephantiasis of the testicles and he’s making the most of it by painting the star-spangled banner across his ballbag.

Oh thank god. Beans is just your typical post-apocalyptic shoulderpads-n-mohawk thug, although he’s definitely on the more flamboyant end of that particular spectrum. Most wasteland warriors go for studs or spikes on their shoulderpads, but not Beans; he seems to have a curled-up sheepdog puppy on each arm.
With a fighting style you could confidently describe as “crap,” Beans only has two special moves. There’s a strange flying kick that’s easily countered by using Syoh’s special defensive punch, and a flurry of very short-range punches. This makes that fight against Beans far easier than the last three battles, and it really does feel like Beans should have been your very first opponent, a useless fighter for you to practise on before moving on to opponents who don’t look like they stopped off for a game of American Football on their way to the disco. Oh, wait, is that what “American sack” is supposed to mean? Sack is a thing in American football, right?

Next up is Libyan soldier Dolf. His weapons are listed as rocket launcher and bowie knife. Nice and fair, then. In his defence, Dolf mostly uses the rocket launcher to clonk you over the head and when he does fire it the rocket travels so slowly that it’s easy to avoid, undercutting the very concept of rockets. It’s another simple fight, because the range of Dolf’s attacks are far shorter than you’d think they’d be and I often snuck in the odd hit by virtue of Syoh’s legs being that little bit longer. Dolf also like to jump a lot, and here’s my number one top tip for playing Tuff E Nuff: learn what your best anti-air move is, because the enemies love jumping towards you. In Syoh’s case it’s either his defensive special or his standing hard kick. To reiterate, find your best anti-air and learn it, embrace it, treat it like a lover.

Speaking of Syoh’s special moves, you can see above that they’re better than they were before. His defensive special now covers Syoh in a sparkling curtain of what my top scientists have dubbed “murder energy,” and as a result it does seem to offer more protective coverage. What happens is that ever time you win a fight, one of you special moves gets a bit better and a lot flashier, with dragon-headed fireballs and pillars of energy making an appearance as you pummel your way through the story mode. I’m not sure whether they improved attacks do more damage – if they do it’s not by much, I don’t think – but they’ve got bigger hitboxes and they look a lot cooler, which is far more important.

Here’s Rei, a shrine maiden type who rather undersells her fighting prowess by listing her weapon as “iron shoes.” This is technically correct. Rei is indeed wearing iron shoes, much to the irritation of whoever lives below her in the battle tower. However, Rei can also create small black holes and shoot fire along the floor. I probably would have lead with that on my personal profile, Rei. Maybe the box on the form was too small to fit “wizard with the power to control space and time who wears iron shoes.”

Again, this is another relatively easy fight, thanks to Rei’s reliance on predictable and easy-to-block projectiles. My theory is that the developers spent a lot more time working on the playable characters, giving them more balanced special moves and such, which is why they’re harder to beat than the middle section of the fighting tournament.
At least Rei’s stage looks nice, what with the rolling mist and the candlelight. TEN looks rather nice overall, in my opinion. Nothing that’s likely to blow you away and a few of the animations look a bit stiff, but it’s certainly not ugly and there are a few especially nice touches, like Dolf riding into battle by clinging onto one of the missiles in the background of his stage.

After Rei is the masked wrestler Gajet. Gajet is Vortz, except a different colour and with a Phanto from Super Mario Bros. 2 stuck to his face. His weapon is “great strength,” which is all well and good but my weapon is, as previously established, murder energy. Bye, Gajet. At least you made me hum the Inspector Gadget theme while we were fighting.

Then everything fell apart when I had to fight Sirou the slicin’ samurai. The difficulty level swings up wildly here, most thanks to Sirou’s big sword and his even bigger hitboxes: one swipe from his mighty blade covers half the bloody screen. Sirou’s fast, he’s ruthless and you know what? He’s quite good fun to fight against. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was the intention all along, but all the previous fights and the upgrading of Syoh’s special moves seem to have built to a fight where I felt quite evenly matched, a fight where the outcome was dependant on my skill and reflexes. The resulting battle was an exciting slugfest of clashing blows and fireballs that look like dragons carved from marshmallow, topped off with the realisation that there are still two fights to go and I’m probably going to get my arse handed to me. Okay then, who’s next?

It’s K’s, and he’s got weapon arm. Aren’t all weapons “arms”? I guess he’s probably got a robot hand or something.

Oh yeah, those are definitely weapon arms. A whole lot of weapon arm. Enough weapon arm that you’d think K’s would have trouble maintaining his balance, although on the flip side he’s never going to have trouble getting the Christmas decorations out of the loft, is he? Another day, another German fighting game character with cyborg arms.
As you might expect, much of K’s’s (good lord) fighting style involves poking at you with his robotic orang-utan arms or using the rocket boosters concealed within to get close enough for yet more poking, but he’s also got a projectile move that launches electricity which covers the screen from top to bottom so you can’t jump over it and frankly that is the height of rudeness.

At last, it’s the final battle against Jade. Turns out he’s a big guy in armour with spiky blonde hair and a “fighting aura,” so yeah, he’s Raoh. That’s one less hat for me to eat, I suppose.

Then I got into the fight, and Jade proceeded to use his fighting aura to carve me a wide variety of interesting new orifices. I could not get near him, although of course a good part of that is down to me being bad at videogames. Jade doesn’t feel like he’s quite in “SNK Boss” territory, but he’s still a right pain in the arse to fight.

Jade does look cool, though. Many of his attacks represent his fighting aura with this red flash effect that illuminates his sprite as he fights, and it does make him seem very powerful. Powerful enough for me to have to turn to the Game Genie for an infinite health code if I wanted to beat him in a reasonable amount of time, although I reckon I would have gotten there in the end if I’d put in a bunch more practise. TEN does generously offer you passwords if you lose a fight, so you can come back and practise to your heart’s content – it’s just that my heart was more than content with getting battered by Jade ten or fifteen times rather than the fifty it would have probably taken me to beat him fair and square.
With the fighting king disposed of, it’s time to see how Syoh will celebrate his victory. Will be become corrupted by the power of marshmallow dragon fists and embark upon a tyrannical rule? Will he become an inspiration to the downtrodden and hopeless? Will he open a chip shop in a Middlesbrough suburb?  Only the game’s ending can provide us with those answers.

Or, you know, no fucking answers at all. This is all you get if you complete the game on normal, and even beating the hard difficulty just shows some developer credits and a few screenshots. Great, you’re tuff e nuff, now piss off. Thanks for that, Jaleco.

The problem is that I’m playing the US / EU version of the game. The original Japanese version actually does have a story mode that doesn’t makes a mockery of the word “story.” The Japanese version has proper endings for each of the playable characters and the fighters even talk to each other between fights, but all of that was excised for the overseas releases for reasons I can’t ascertain. I hate to put these things down to laziness on the developer’s part but come on, pretty much anything would have been better that the shallow excuse for an ending you get in this version of the game.
Another feature present in the Japanese game was that the fighter’s faces become progressively more bloodied as they take damage, although the exclusion of that gimmick is more easily explained with Western developers being squeamish about a game where women can have their faces graphically rearranged.

There’s one saving grace for Tuff E Nuff that I should share with you all: via the magic of cheat codes, you can play as the boss characters in two-player and versus CPU modes! That’s right, if you wanted to take Beans out for a spin in the hope of unravelling the mysteries of his American sack, that option is available to you. The boss characters have all their special moves intact and thus they’re completely unbalanced, but they’re all there and that makes it even more baffling that they’re not available in the versus modes without using a cheat code.

Let’s go back to the very beginning of this article and oh hey, look, your hats shall remain unconsumed. Tuff E Nuff is, in fact, a fairly decent Street Fighter II clone. Maybe even a little bit more than fairly decent. It’s got plenty of fighting action, it mostly controls well, the graphics are nice and the characters are a pretty engaging bunch of pugilistic weirdos. However, it’s held back from greatness in part by being too beholden to the fighting games that came before it, but also because of things like the tiny roster of playable characters, the weird difficulty curve and the poor localisation. There is a translation of the Japanese version out there, though, so if you do want to play Tuff E Nuff / Dead Dance, that’s probably the version to seek out, and it’s proof that when Jaleco really pushed themselves they could reach the heady heights of, ooh, a seven out of ten.

Oh, and I can’t leave without mentioning Tuff E Nuff’s famously terrible US cover art. The story goes that when UK games magazine CVG were covering the game, they didn’t have any official art to use so they drew their own – and Jaleco liked it so much they asked if they could use it for the game’s actual cover, despite the Japanese version already having a perfectly good cover illustration. Absolutely baffling, I’m sure you’ll agree, and the screaming face of this Liefeldian monstrosity probably traumatised hundreds of kids across the Western hemisphere. Is it supposed to be Jade? It must be, right? It’s just that I don’t remember Jade having one gigantic tooth in his upper jaw, like a triceratops’ beak. Then there’s the tagline “master the moves to master me,” and hey, buddy, I don’t want to master you. No judgement, I’m just not into that kind of relationship. Now please close your mouth.

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YOUKAI CLUB (FAMICOM)

It’s Halloween season, and what could be more bone-chilling than a Famicom game developed by TOSE? How about one that’s mixed up with the terrifying power of Jaleco to release extremely mediocre games? Ohh, spooky! So, here we go – it’s TOSE and Jaleco’s 1987 Famicom game Youkai Club!

Here’s the title screen, rendered in English thanks to the fine work of some fan-translators. Not that there’s much text in this one to translate, it’s very much focussed on the platforming and the monster-slaying and vast reams of prose are not Youkai Club’s style.
Youkai, of course, refers to the panoply of Japanese ghosts, spirits and monsters that are known under that umbrella. There’s also a youkai that is an umbrella, although sadly that particular creature doesn’t pop up in this game. Nowadays youkai are probably most familiar to people via the runaway success of Yo-kai Watch, but there aren’t any cuddly cat friends in this game. What it does have is the Grim Reaper, floating around the title screen like someone trying to remember where they left their car keys. The Grim Reaper isn’t a youkai, which is a good sign in my book. I like a good mix of monsters. A monster mash, if you will.

Youkai Club is a game concerned only with rip-roaring high-stakes action – I assume that was the intention, at least, even if it doesn’t exactly pan out that way – and so it doesn’t bother with anything so banal as an intro. Instead, when you hit start you’re only shown a screen telling you what level you’re about to enter. I wonder why it’s called Face Mansion?

Oh, right, all the faces. Not the wallpaper choice I would have made, but perhaps I’m too parochial in my interior design tastes. The face part of the name is accurate, but the mansion part is way off, because this is just a big, blocky tower with the odd small room sticking off the side.
As you can probably guess, Youkai Club is an action-adventure game, full of platforming and throwing projectiles at monsters. You play as Akira, a hot-blooded young man wearing a red tracksuit, and his special power is the ability to throw three knives at a time about six feet in front of him. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it seems to be doing a good job of eliminating these bats and snakes. You will notice that bats and snakes are not youkai. Three screens in, and I’ve already been lied to. I bet they’re not even in a club, either.

Ah hah, that’s more like it – this room is haunted by a floating female ghost. I think she might be a yuki-onna, but Japan has such a wide and varied buffet of creepy ghost women that it’s difficult to narrow it down. She might be a ghost, but for some reason she’s still vulnerable to the cold steel of Akira’s knives, so she’s hardly the most menacing foe I’ve ever faced.
When you kill pretty much any enemy in Youkai Club, they’ll drop an item, almost always a small red pellet. These pellets add to your experience meter. That’s what I’m told they do, anyway, because I collected a lot of them during the game and never once did I see my experience bar move after grabbing one. Oh yes, Youkai Club has an experience system, because finding a Japanese Famicom game that doesn’t have “RPG elements” attached to it is a surprisingly difficult proposition. Later on, I’ll find something that actually get the experience bar moving, but for now I’m stuck picking up the pittance offered by the red pellets. One problem is that a lot of the enemies in this game can float through the scenery, what with being ghosts and all, and you’ll often end up killing them while they’re in the walls and thus you can’t grab the items they leave behind.

There’s not much else to the rest of the first stage, just Akira bouncing his way up the tower and stabbing the various monsters he finds. This small goblin is trying to get his stabbing in first, but he’d have to run right up to me and frankly I’d already decided to ignore him. Goodbye, stabby goblin. You can go and tell your goblin friends that you have emerged triumphant in a great battle, if you like.

Waiting at the top of the tower is this blasphemous wizard, and to perpetuate a tired old joke, that’d make a great name for a metal band. Anyway, the man with the cross on his chest is your typical first boss, not doing much besides waddling around at the bottom of the screen, cursing his lack of peripheral vision and flinging the odd fireball in Akira’s general direction. Fortunately the wizard has installed some shelves but hasn’t got around to filling them with his evil knick-knacks, so Akira has somewhere to stand where the boss has trouble hitting him.

Stage two is the monster forest, packed with flying oni / tengu things and what appear to be sponge fingers sticking out of the ground. Hopefully there’ll be a twist at the end of the stage that reveals Akira’s been fighting his way through a giant trifle this whole time.

The first miniboss in this stage is a ghostly woman who pops out of a well, so it looks like we’ve got a prequel to Ring on our hands. Obviously Sadako Senior here can’t sit Akira down and force him to watch a cursed videotape, so instead she throws lots of… things at him. What are those things, anyway? Pebbles? Severed human ears? Let’s go with ears, because it’s the spookiest option. Of course, that doesn’t explain why the ears hurt when they hit you. If ears were painful to the touch, the sides of your head would always be sore.
As for actually beating this boss, I found the best way was to jump up right next to her on the well and attack as fast as possible. She’ll run out of health before you do. This turns out to be the best way to beat most of the bosses in the game: find the spot that lets you take the least damage and stand there chucking knives.

These rock monsters are pretty adorable, bumbling around in a manner the brings to mind marshmallows rather than time-worn boulders of granite. I’d say the enemy designs are the best thing about Youkai Club, with a wide variety of small, simple but charmingly drawn creatures. Certainly, they’re a good enough reason for Youkai Club to appear in this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, even if the stages themselves aren’t all that sinister for the most part.

For instance, check out this grotty ghoul. I have no idea if it’s supposed to be anything specific – it looks a bit like a Zora from Zelda that fell into a basket of mousetraps – but it’s so endearingly ugly that I almost felt bad about sticking knives in it.

Sadly not every monster can be a hit, and the boss of the monster forest is this angular leonine vampire thing that stands in the middle of the room and gets various monsters to do his dark bidding, the lazy sod. You have to shoot him in the eyes to damage him, but as you can see his eyes aren’t always there so you’ve got to spend most of the fight avoiding the flaming dogs and such. It’s not much fun, truth be told, but happily I’d managed to get Akira’s experience bar up far enough that his knives have been replaced by small projectiles I can only describe as “energy croissants.” That sped things along a little.

The next stage begins with a more platforming-focussed area, with narrow pits and jets of flame waiting to knock you down said pits. In true Jaleco tradition, Akira’s controls and jumping physics are resolutely “decent enough.” Your jumps are a little floaty, especially at the top of your arc, and sometime Akira interacts with the scenery in a slightly strange manner. It’s especially noticeable when you’re jumping through a narrow corridor, because Akira’s head will “stick” to the ceiling and you slide along for a while in defiance of gravity. It’s not terrible, though, and it’s at least consistent. The bigger issue is that Akira slides so far backwards when he takes damage, and unlike Castlevania (the game Youkai Club most resembles in many ways) there’s no way to mitigate the knockback. I’d estimate a good eighty percent of the deaths I suffered in this game were caused by a floating skull or some other nasty thing bumping me off a one-block-wide pillar.

I should make it clear that the stages in Youkai Club aren’t linear, but there’s not much exploring to be done because the stages are mostly one big, “main” area with smaller rooms to explore at various intervals. As the game progresses, the entrances to these smaller rooms become less and less obvious, but the stages never really get confusing or anything. There are a few strange moments where you can’t progress until you’ve been into one of the side rooms, but there’s no visible obstruction: you just can’t scroll the screen until you’ve stood in the right place. All in all, it’s an unusual way to gate progress but thankfully it doesn’t lead to much frustration.

The final section of this stage is a jaunt across the clouds. You jump between the clouds, and sometimes an orange cloud appears. Beware of the orange clouds, because they’re made of that really dense water vapour that can push Akira off the platforms. There’s also the tengu to watch out for. That white thing up there, the thing that looks like a diagram of a uterus turned on its side, is actually a gust of wind that the tengu has wafted at me by swinging his fan. Given what I said earlier about falling off narrow platforms, it should come as no surprise that these tengu gradually got bumped up from “annoying” to “hated nemesis” during the course of the game.

The boss of this stage is the Japanese Shinto god of wind Fuujin, complete with his big sack of wind. Feel free to insert your own Donald Trump / Nigel Farage / politician of choice joke here. A bag seems like terrible receptacle for wind, doesn’t it? It’s going to be difficult to keep airtight, you need a jar with a screw-on lid or something. By the way, I was looking up Fuujin and it’s theorised that he was originally, before a long period of cultural assimilation thanks to ancient travellers on the Silk Road, the Greek god Boreas. I’m telling you this because it’s far more interesting than anything that happens in this fight.
With Fuujin defeated, Youkai Club prepares to take Akira to Bone Town.

Because everything’s made out of bones, you see. Why, what did you think I meant?

Oh, neat, a classic western-style witch has appeared to increase the Halloween mood. You know, I’ve come to appreciate witches – both the cute variants but more specifically the traditional hag-like kind – as Halloween monsters a lot more in recent years. I put it down to spending so much time with old people. Anyway, the witches are a good example of what I mean about Youkai Club’s monster sprites being particularly enjoyable. If you look closely at the witch’s face you can see it’s just a white shape with a single diagonal line of black pixels, but that’s all it needs to create the hooked nose and pointed chin of a real cauldron-stirring, newt-de-eyeballing witch.

It’s the Grim Reaper from the title screen, having become so fed up of waiting for the other monsters (or gravity) to finish Akira off that he’s come to the mortal realm to do the job himself. It’s a shame for him that he’s not very good at it, then. You know the standard battle against Death from most Castlevania games? Imagine that, but slower and without all the small projectile sickles flying around the screen, and you’ve got a good idea of what this fight is like. Stand on one of the platforms, tap the fire button, hope you’ve got enough health. The best thing about the fight is that the Reaper always moves towards Akira with his back facing towards his target, so it looks like he’s moonwalking everywhere.

Next up is Dharma Castle, and I’ve got to be honest, it’s a boring stage. There’s nothing new to it and it’s mostly made of haphazardly-arranged blocks in various shades of grey, the colour of excitement. So, instead I’ll take a moment to talk about Youkai Club’s power-ups. There are two kinds: ones that you use as soon as you grab them, and some that you store away as inventory items to use when you need them. The regular power-ups cover the usual run of effects: health refills, temporary invincibility (complete with a hideously ugly palette-shifting effect), a speed-up, books that give your experience bar a big boost, that kind of thing. Then there are the four inventory items. You’ve got a flashlight that stuns all enemies on screen for a while, a bomb that deals damage to all enemies on screen and is best saved for boss battles, a pair of stylin’ sunglasses that let you see and kill a certain type of semi-invisible monster, and the hand. As soon as I picked a hand up I tried it out, naturally. It didn’t seem to do anything, but it did disappear out of my inventory. Oh well, I’m sure it’s not important, he foreshadowed.

The stage is guarded by this walking daruma doll. His main method of attack is sending smaller daruma dolls to roll along the floor after you. He generates these mini-minions by grabbing his midriff and pulling it apart to reveal a gaping orifice from which his children are nightmarishly disgorged. This makes the daruma the creepiest boss in the game by far. The Grim Reaper can’t compete with the self-generated flesh portal, can he? Aside from that, though, I think it’s fair to say that the developers had run out of ideas, motivation or both with this battle. “A square box will do for this boss chamber, I think. Don’t want to get the player too excited, not after daruma has birthed all over the arena floor.”

The final stage is the Labyrinth, (or at least that’s what this fan translation calls it,) but it’s not much of a maze. A few of the entrances to other areas aren’t marked at all and you’ll likely only trigger them by stumbling blindly into their vicinity while trying to fend off a mummy, but I never managed to get lost and my sense of direction is shocking. Also, mummies! If you can call that ugly, motionless boss a vampire, we’re only a werewolf away from getting all the big Halloween monsters on board. Oh, and a Frankenstein, I suppose.

Youkai Club has been doing a good job of gradually ramping up the difficulty as the player progresses, and unsurprisingly this is where it starts getting really tough. There are far more enemies about, for one thing. The problem is that Youkai Club suffers from a milder version of Gradius syndrome – when you die, you lose a chunk from your experience bar. This can cause your attacks to revert to a weaker state, which means it’s harder to get through the stage, so you die more, rinse and repeat. If your attacks get too weak, you’ll have trouble getting through the stages before the time runs out. Your experience bar also acts as your lives: once it’s completely drained, it’s game over and there are no continues. It’s not that harsh, but it’s something to be aware of. No, the real frustration comes later in the stage.

Here is a block, living up to its name by blocking Akira’s progress. You need to move the block, and the only way to do that is to use the “hand” power-up when you’re nearby. There are two of these blocks in the final stage, and there are two hand power-ups in the game. In the entire game. If you happened to miss either of the hands then you can’t move the blocks and you are, as far as I can tell, thoroughly screwed. Go back, start the game over again, pay more attention. There are codes that let you start on later stages – weirdly they take the form of push-button cheat codes rather than passwords – but they only go up to stage three, so you’ll always have to play through at least two-thirds of the game. To make matters worse, the first time I played through this stage I reached the second block, used the hand… and nothing happened. Okay, that’s not quite true. The hand did disappear from my inventory, but the block sure as hell didn’t move.  What a god-awful thing to include in your videogame, and one that has the potential to ruin what is otherwise a perfectly mediocre game.

Your “reward” for getting beyond the blocks is a battle with a clown. A good choice for an honorary youkai, and it’s nice to fight a videogame clown that’s not a scary clown. Just a regular, normal clown seething with the bloodlust endemic to his kind. His attacks are all clown-based, too, which is fun: he walks on top of a big ball, he throws juggling pins and he’s got a fiery hoop. All in all, an enjoyable fight and the chance to hurl fireballs at a clown. What more could you ask for?

Even the evil of a clown isn’t enough to claim the position of Youkai Club’s final boss, an honour which goes to this large pink blob. Presumably it’s some kind of elder creature from a distant star-scape, but mostly it's just there. Rather than doing the fighting itself, the boss summons a load of other bosses from the game to do his dirty work. I mean, it’s nice to see the Grim Reaper again but it doesn’t exactly make for an interesting fight. You might notice that this is basically the same as the fight against the vampire thing, a boss that you have to fight twice during the game, so this glob of chewed bubble gum makes it three interations of the same battle.

This is new, though: the boss creates a clone of Akira that you must defeat. Having played as Akira for the whole game, I was fairly confident that this wouldn’t be a difficult battle. Turns out it was even easier than I anticipated, because clone-Akira only has the un-upgraded knives to attack with.
Once you’ve dispatched all his minions, the boss opens his sleepy eyes and lazily tosses a few fireballs around, which gives Akira the chance to throw his fireballs into the boss’ now-vulnerable ocular region. This damages the boss, because apparently he’s got asbestos eyelids. If he’d just gone back to sleep I’d have been stuck, but as it is I can finish the job and bring Youkai Club to a close.

It’s a good job I wasn’t expecting a lavish ending sequence. Nobody likes to be disappointed.
For the most part, Youkai Club falls snugly into the usual furrow occupied by games that have Jaleco’s name attached to them – an overall feeling of mediocrity, with one inclusion that’s bafflingly awful. There’s nothing wrong at all with the core gameplay: it’s a little loose and floaty, but perfectly acceptable and certainly no worse than a lot of other low-effort 8-bit platformers. The stages are mostly bland, with some peaks and troughs in visual quality but nothing too extreme in either direction, and the soundtrack is above average but only slightly. The monster sprites are easily the stand-out part of the game, for me anyway. All in all, Youkai Club is okay, the complete bullshit of the missable hand power-ups not withstanding, but it’s never going to tear you away from playing a Castlevania game.

A solid seven out of ten on the Halloween-O-Meter for Youkai Club, almost entirely thanks to the selection of monsters and the vague suggestion that Akira might be wearing Michael Jackson’s leather suit from the Thriller video. It would have received a higher score had the backgrounds been spookier, but aside from the faces in the first stage they mostly look like an unfortunate acid flashback in a tile warehouse.

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