Only in Japan: Hi no Tori Gaou no Bouken

Hi no Tori is without a doubt one of my favorite Famicom games. I really don`t understand why it was never ported to the NES as it is one of the best platformers ever made for the system.

This is one of the games that I acquired early in my Famicom collecting days about 3 years ago. My wife had it when she was a kid and I bought it on her recommendation (back then I hadn`t devoted myself to acquiring every Famicom cart ever made and would only but the good ones).

There is a pretty good write up on the game at Strategy Wiki, so I won`t repeat too much of what is already out there.

Well, OK maybe I`ll repeat a bit of what is already out there. It is a side scrolling platformer based on a comic by Osamu Tezuka. You control Gaou, the hero of the game, as he progresses through multiple levels doing all the typical 8-bit side scrolling platformer type stuff (shooting enemies, jumping over stuff, etc). There are some unique actions that set this one apart though. Gaou can, for example, shoot (throw?) stone blocks. He can use these to build staircases, which are sometimes necessary to climb over gaping bits of scenery that are too big to jump across or what have you.

I still haven`t actually finished the game yet, my wife is better at it than I am. I bought a boxed copy (pictured above) of it recently for 500 yen, which was a really good bargain. It still has the original department store price tag on it for 4770 yen. I love it when game stuff still has original tags on it. This one was purchased at the Daimaru Department store, which is located downtown. I was there just a couple of weeks ago doing some Christmas shopping:
This is what it looked like for Christmas 2011. I wonder what it looked like for Christmas 1987 when this game may have been originally purchased. The building it is currently in looks like it was built since then, so I`m guessing it looked completely different back then.

Anyway, that tangent in this blog post, complete with its tengential photograph, was brought to you by Famicomblog`s new sponsor, the Daimaru Department store. Daimaru: in Japanese the name just means `big circle`.

Related Posts:
- Only in Japan: Spelunker and Spelunker 2 Yuuja he no Chousen

Only in Japan: Spelunker and Spelunker 2 Yuuja he no Chousen

For a while now I`ve been thinking of doing some posts on Famicom games that were only released in Japan. I recently picked up a copy of Spelunker II, which gives me the whole Spelunker series of two carts. A fitting place to start I guess.

The first Spelunker is a game that for some reason remains quite popular in Japan. My wife played it when she was a kid and has a lot of fond memories of it.
It is, however, massively difficult and frustrating. You are a miner in an underground series of tunnels armed with a drill. Touch anything and you die. Time that jump wrong and you die. Fall off even the tiniest of ledges? You guessed it. You die.

I turned it on just to see how far I`d get before writing this piece. I didn`t make it past the first level. I can never get those jumps timed right.
Spelunker 2 I had never played before today and I just plugged it in not really knowing anything about it. It is nothing like the first Spelunker.
The first thing I noticed is that you don`t die instantly whenever you mistime a jump or touch an enemy. You have a power metre that is quite forgiving.
The gameplay is quite different too. Instead of the drill you have in the first Spelunker, in this one you have a sword. You have to go around and collect various things, which probably do something, though I didn`t get far enough to find out what. Some of the game is underground, some of it on the surface and you can explore around quite a bit.

In my game, a few snakes in the first underground level weakened me a lot and a pair of wild boars on a surface level finished me off after 3 or 4 minutes of play. Relative to how long I usually last when playing the first Spelunker, that seemed like an eternity.

Anyway, these are pretty interesting games, particularly to any of you who like frustrating, awful gaming experiences (at least in the case of the first Spelunker). I rather like the carts themselves. Those early Irem carts with the red LED quite appeal to me. The artwork on the labels, especially the pink ghost on the first Spelunker, really won me over.