History01: Sqoon-a-woon spoon! MIGHT BE A SQOONAtiC UR LOOKING FORRRR

What do you get when you take a tiny subhuman and

ZINGER ALREADY! SUbHUMAN! Sqoon is a half-submarine, half-man!

Or okay... a submarine with a face. Yah, it's kinda fucking weird. He is FUCKING PISSED too. Clearly Sqoon was not told he was going to be painted pink. Buncha dicks.

So anyway Sqoon is a brand new game that all the kids have been talking about and trading Pokemon Cards about and taking the nation by storm about and it's because of the submarine aspect. Submarines are hottt right now; on the TV is a new show called Submarine City, on the movies it's a new movie called Submarine City, and on the radio everything still sucks. I don't know what they're playing except on the classical station, but I promise me, it is fucking atrocious. That's why people are turning to Sqoon - they're finally getting fed up with the process cheese microwave reheated McDonalds sponsored pop musicians. Sqoon is offering something different. It's offering a new future.

It's offering a future where presidents can vote for other presidents, because America finally lost all hope. A future where everyone is painted pink, and is angry about it. A future where R-Type actually isn't the only game that Irem ever made.

This post is bad, and I do mean bad. It's like nonsense can't even read it why even post it bad. It's "whelp, that blog is dead to me" bad. Let me try to fact it back onto the rails.

Irem was a great developer. They made a lot of really cool games, and what you especially might not know is that they briefly took the name Nazca Corporation before being fully absorbed into SNK as "the Metal Slug team". It's kinda hard to follow this kind of history which is something I've always lamented - basically all we have to go by are the credit reels of various releases, full of abbreviated names and aliases. There doesn't seem to be a ton of great documentation out there because no one was sitting down with Akio and interviewing him about Legend of Hero Tonma. Instead these days all we have are these corporate ueber-icons like Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux alright now I'm derailing my rerailing. If anyone has a good resource for classic Japanese game dev history, do share. The best I know of are the woefully incomplete MobyGames and the far too wordocious Hardcore Gaming 101 (check out both sites though, they're good resources).

I was talking about Irem. They made all these random good games, and then they made Metal Slug. And that's coming from someone who thinks R-Type completely fucking blows. But there's lots of neat and experimental stuff, the kind of stuff bighead modern game devs and journalists forget existed when they talk about how primitive the '80s was. I'll tell you what's primitive. Someone who thinks they can talk about games without having played Ninja Spirit, Metal Storm, or Spartan X 2. And did you know they did FUCKING MOON PATROL?! Talk about landmark. Word on the street is that's the game that invented parallax. YA DIG?!

So if being painted pink PISSES YOU OFF and you want to kill every last shark left in the post-apocalypse, go try Sqoon. It's kinda hard and you're gonna need to find an FAQ or a copy of the manual to understand the human-rescuing system, but it's a game about a race of submarines rising in the wake of humanity to blow up what's left of sunken civilization! AGHHHHHHHHHHH

History01: Victory for Vic Tokai

Do yourself a favor and go check out the Wikipedia page on Vic Tokai right this instant. Back? That's right! Today I'm here to tell you about a Japanese cable and DSL provider! You thought this blog was all about video games, but we've got a lot more in store for you. Prepare to be educated!

Wait, what's that? You read past the first two sentences of the article and saw that the company also developed and published video games in the late '80s and '90s? Well, aren't you a smart brain. I was ready to deliver a dissertation on the market trends of internet service providers in 21st century Japan and you jump in here with this game bullshit. Fine. I'll go click through a bunch of links and YouTube a bunch of longplays and come back to you the BORING reader with some BORING information on their BORING period of experimentation in the BORING field of video games.

Ha, and your name is Bert! Asshole!

Tricked you! I actually knew all along that Vic Tokai was a games company. In fact, it was just today that I learned about their history in telecommunications. Yeah, so they made a bunch of okay games, mostly for the Genesis/Mega Drive and NES. Some are remembered fondly, some are shockingly derivative of more famous games, and most have simply disappeared over the years. I'm going to talk to you a little bit, in person, about a couple games they developed. For the most part I'll be skipping over anything they published but didn't themselves create.

So let's start with an 'over the view'. The only Victor Kai game I've heard mentioned by anyone ever is a Sega Master System platformer called Psycho Fox. It's one of those games you may hear mentioned as "one of the only SMS games that doesn't completely suck". Some people think it sucks though. Some think it's just alright. If one thing is true, it's that it's for the Sega Master System. Hm you know actually I told a lie at the beginning of this paragraph. There's one other VT game you may know by name: Clash at Demonhead. This one came out for the NES and had a kind of weird Metroid / Bionic Commando thing going on, where the levels were on a world-map, but had different entrances and exits that would take you on different paths. Hey and there's Decap Attack, THAT one actually made it onto the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection that came out on 360 a few years back. But is it truly considered an Ultimate Genesis game? Certainly it was one of the lesser known in that anthology. And by "lesser known", I do mean "starred a mummy" - but he's a good mummy. From here, we're only going to get more obscure.

Past that pack of popular platformers players probably precognize, ol' Vicky T. is notable for one other thing: a bunch of games dangerously derivative of far more famous fredecessors. Mega Man, Mario, Sonic - Tokai has copied from the best of the best, and they do little to hide it. Ever looked through the video store or Netflix and seen those fake-out movies that are intended to trick consumers into believing they're related to their more famous counterparts? Transmorphers, Almighty Thor, The Terminators, Snakes on a Train - just look through the IMDB for The Asylum and you'll find a litany of these shameless ripoffs. Well, that's what Vic Tokai was up to in the video game industry of the early '90s. Maybe their replicas weren't as much mean-spirited cash-ins as uninspired filler, but you've got to chuckle as soon as you power on The Krion Conquest, Kid Kool, or Socket (aka Time Dominator). And maybe it's what you would expect from a cable company feigning to be a game developer. Anyway, grab some popcorn (ugh) and check these out. Try to guess what classic each copies from! (Hint: you'll know immediately)

Check back later for Part 2, where I'll discuss some of VT's original games in a little more depth. And feel free to make a marijuana pun at your leisure; I'm not going to because I didn't drop out of high school to work at Home Depot.