Opinions on poorly documented imports

[celerystalker]

I've never heard of this game before, but I do like adventure games so I'd want to look into this game at some point. A quick search on google shows that it's also available on the PC with a DOS version, while this seems rarer and more expensive to find than the CD-i version, it doesn't require owning a CD-i console so that's probably the route I would take to play this.

I do appreciate these posts you're making with obscure games. I may not play every game you document but they're still interesting to read about.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I'd love to hear your thoughts on Secret Mission if you play it. It's a bit slow, but I really liked the story quite a bit, and I've never gotten to talk to anyone else who's played it!

[celerystalker]

Muscle Ranking, or Kinniku Banzuke vol. 1, may sound familiar to folks who watched G4TV about 20 years ago. There was a localized version of the game show we saw as "Unbeatable Banzuke," in which contestants would attempt various ridiculous athletic physical challenges. This is a video game adaptation of that program, featuring 8 challenges to determine... um... how our muscles rank?


Given the format of the TV show, one would expect a collection of mini-games, and, well, yeah. That is exactly what we get with Muscle Ranking vol. 1. The good news is, this was put out by Konami, whose Track & Field series provides a nice template for athletic mini games, which is precisely what happened. You can compete in each of the 8 challenges in practice mode, a la carte, or all together as your primary game mode. You can select from a group of pre-existing characters, based on real contestants and Japanese celebrities, or design your own character to compete alone or head to head against the CPU or another player. So the real question comes down to a simple, "what are the events, and are they fun?"


The events include:
Struck Out, a pitching game in which you try to knock out 9 tiles before accruing 4 misses.
Daruma, where you try to smack out circular sections of a stack with a hammer without knocking them over.
Hustler, a billiard trick shot challenge.
Monster Box, a sort of high jump game where you jump off of a spring board in attempt to clear the increasigly high box without damaging your genitals.
Tug of War, which should speak for itself.
Kick Target, where you kick a soccer ball at targets to hit as many as possible before too many misses.
Shot Gun Touch, where you run, launch a ball into the air, and try to touch it before it hits the ground.
Brain Panic, a quiz of sorts where a group of numbers is flashed on screen for a few seconds, and you have to try to list them in order from memory.


The "are they fun" part comes with a pretty solid "yes" on my end. The games have clear, easy to follow instructions both on the loading screens and in a separate menu, and more importantly, are never convoluted or overly button mashing-centric. Most games utilize a couple of meters, not unlike a golf or bowling game, which I personally find greatly preferable to wearing my hands out smashing my controller. There are a couple of events that do require some quick mashing, but the duration expected is graciously very brief. Monster Box, for example, only demands about 2 seconds of mashing per attempt, and controls pretty much exactly like the long jump event in classic Track & Field. Shot Gun Touch requires mashing, but lets you hit multiple buttons at once to greatly increase your meter quickly without having to alternate, and only for a total of about one full second. Brain Panic, which at first concerned me in thinking it may be a Japanese-language quiz, thankfully is only numbers to copy, so even it is easily accessible to western players. Hustler, the billiard game, is by far my least favorite, as you can't rotate your view, making lining up those trick shots needlessly difficult.



The menus in Muscle Ranking are both in English and Japanese, the controls are simple and easy to comprehend, and the presentation with silly, overly enthusiastic hosts and simple, colorful graphics works nicely. It's not on the level of Sega's Decathlete, but if you enjoy the world of silly Japanese game shows, Muscle Ranking is good fun and dirt cheap, but definitely more fun with friends. It has a sequel based on the follow-up program to Kinniku Banzuke as well, Sasuke (Ninja Warrior), but I'll leave that for another time. Anyone play this or have memories of the show?

[Aussie2B]

Huh, and here I had been assuming that Kinniku Banzuke = Ninja Warrior. I never knew Ninja Warrior was just a spin-off. It probably doesn't help that I do have a copy of Kinniku Banzuke: Road to Sasuke but none of the other Kinniku Banzuke games. And I somehow missed Unbeatable Banzuke back in the day but did watch Ninja Warrior, which I really liked (but American Ninja Warrior doesn't appeal me to at all).

[celerystalker]

Huh, and here I had been assuming that Kinniku Banzuke = Ninja Warrior. I never knew Ninja Warrior was just a spin-off. It probably doesn't help that I do have a copy of Kinniku Banzuke: Road to Sasuke but none of the other Kinniku Banzuke games. And I somehow missed Unbeatable Banzuke back in the day but did watch Ninja Warrior, which I really liked (but American Ninja Warrior doesn't appeal me to at all).

I loved watching Ninja Warrior (the Japanese one) with my dad back in my 20s. It was a lot of fun rootung for some of the regulars like Nagano Makoto or the squid fisherman guy who pretty much never cleared the first obstacle. My brother and I used to watch Unbeatable Banzuke and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (the western edit of Takeshi's Castle), and it was a lot of fun as well. Those shows are the whole reason I own Kinniku Banzuke games, as it was just a fun time as a young adult, and then I'd find myself watching Code Monkeys or something after... back before the world got so serious about everything.

As a game, Road to Sasuke is probably better overall, as it has a bit more to do. I like the sillier takes on Track & Field like these, Crash 'n The Boys, Daiundoukai, etc. It makes it easier in a group to laugh at yourself when you mess up instead of getting frustrated.

[celerystalker]

Years ago, my love of playing Twinkle Star Sprites with friends prompted me to start searching for similar head to head experiences. I tried stuff like WarTech: Senko no Ronde, Calcolo, and more chasing after new intriguing competitive shooting experiences. One of the games I ended up grabbing to try was Dolucky no Puzzle Tour '94 for the Super Famicom, which from what I could find at the time, looked promising. How did it turn out?



Dolucky is a beefy little cat who served as a mascot for ImagineerZoom in Japan, and had at least three Super Famicom games in which he starred. Two were silly sports games, but Puzzle Tour '94 is actually a fairly unique little head to head, uh, puzzle game... but it has some shooting elements and power-ups that lend a little bit of that Twinkle Star Sprites magic to the proceedings. You go head to head against the CPU or another player, trying to cause them to be knocked out first... but this is no falling block game.



Where things may look similar to your Bust A Moves or Puyo Puyos, things immediately turn in that your screen scrolls vertically like a shooter instead of staying static. There are three colors of blocks that you will approach, and matching 5 or more will cause them to disappear. You get to throw your blocks forward to make these chains, but you can scroll through which color you throw with A and Y, and throw with B. You're never waiting for the game to feed you the color you need. You can also force faster scrolling by holding the D-pad, allowing you to make chains and clear the area. The first player to have a block touch their boundary loses.



Sounds like a puzzle game, but this starts to feel more like a shooter with the way you attack your opponent. You don't clear chains and cause garbage to appear on the other side. No, instead you want to find question mark blocks, and open them by a chain touching the block. This will release a power-up, such as stopping scrolling for you (aside from manually doing so), causing your opponent to throw garbage instead of blocks for a short time, feezing your opponent in ice temporarily, or causing a bird to swoop down and try to carry them off- screen for a few seconds. Couple these attacks with stone blocks that must be broken by chains touching them, and you get a game centered around picking your spot, aggressively clearing your screen, and watching for a good moment to try to trigger an attack. In a final shooter moment, you also start each round with a bomb (and can find more in said power-up boxes) to clear your screen in a pinch.



All of this comes together as something in between shooter and puzzler, but leaning more heavily toward puzzler. The pace is fast and the gameplay feels good and fun, but it's not perfect. The power-ups I named are literally all of them. More variety would have definitely made the game less predictable, which would've been a plus. Secondly, power-up blocks are not quite frequent enough to keep things truly frantic, and if both players are conservative in their play style, rounds can last a little too long to be truly intense. Sure, you can play for high score, but in a game like this, who cares about score? You want to win by knocking your opponent out. The graphics are colorful, the sound is decent, and control is spot-on... there's a lot of fun to be had here. It just never quite hits those same highs as Twinkle Star Sprites, and isn't as frantic as Calcolo. I'd still recommend it as a great change of pace that might even feel better to players with more of a puzzle leaning than shooter, and it's given my friends and me a few great evenings.