These are the kind of games I remember. All of them used to come on the knock off multicarts my mom would bring home from China in the early 90s. Filled with stuff like mappy and devil world and little ghost qtaro.
@@MapleMilk you know, in a world where there's a Famicom Detective Club remake at full price on the Switch, nothing makes sense anymore as far as what comes back
@@MCastleberry1980 That's true, but I think it's warranted for a remake Might as well remake a game that's classic and we never got, too instead of Mario 3 again, right? Honestly, remaking rebooting Urban Champion into a urban styled traditional 2D fighting game would be better than just porting it again Nintendo, steal that idea
Also, fun tip about Mappy - if you collect one of the items, the other instance of it in the level will begin to flash. Collecting the flashing one will give you double the points! I played this game way too much on Namco Museum DS, lol
I got curious and pulled out my copy of SNK 40th Anniversary, with its "Museum" of all of SNK's old arcade games. But it also only says "1984" for Jumping Cross's release date, without further info. That said, the games are arranged in order of release, and Jumping Cross was apparently the 4th of 5 games released in 1984 - suggesting it was probably later in the year, rather than earlier.
When I played Mappy as a kid I was confident that I am playing an elephant. The memory is so strong I still get surprised whenever someone talks about a mouse.
My cousin owned one of those pirated 41-in-one Famicom cartridges with the NES converter thing attached to it, and it's why Mappy was one of my favourite games as a kid, despite it not getting a North American release. I didn't realize it was Japan-only until I started writing about NES games as an adult. I guess I was pretty lucky that I got to play it.
Urban champion like Karate Champ could be fun with a friend. Of course mist things are more fun with a friend especially back in its hay-day when there just wasn’t that much to compare it to.
I wonder if Namco tried to impliment elevators before using trampolines in Mappy? be fun to crush/hit enemies with a moving elevator, but I guess it would have slowed the pacing down considerably. Waiting for a lift in elevator action is pure torture.
Mappy-Land was one of the handful of NES games I had as a kid. I loved it because it was fast-paced, pretty easy, and had great music. It seems to be pretty similar to this original Mappy.
Not even played Mappy very much at all but I've been listening to the Haroumi Hosono arranged melody from his 1984 album Video Game Music pretty intensively these past few weeks.
"Mappy has become a favorite among Japanese gamers and Western furries" How dare you call me out accurately 😛 Though in all seriousness, a neat thing about Mappy is that Mappy and Nyamco started out as experimental robot by Namco in the late 70s to show off algorithms for solving mazes programmatically.
Super Mario Bros. was practically a generational shift for video games, but the more arcade-style pre-SMB games on Famicom have something to offer, too. Not a lot of sprawling epics from then, but a few of these games are some of my favourites.
@@LorenHelgeson Ah, I see what you mean :) The Arcade version of Mappy is superior, I agree with that. The Famicom version of Mappy is impressively really good, especially for an early Famcom game, but the original Arcade version of Mappy is still the best version of the game. Cool to know you also really enjoy Mappy :) I really enjoy the game as well. I always find Mappy to be an under-appreciated masterpiece. It's a really great and extremely fun game, but unfortunately it's also criminally underrated. Mappy definately deserves more love and recognition.
The first time I ever even heard of Clu Clu Land was by unlocking it in Animal Crossing on the GameCube. It was the first NES game item I unlocked, unaware that was even a thing. Given the rather strange nature of Animal Crossing and Clu Clu Land, I thought this little playable game item was original to Animal Crossing. The vibe of Clu Clu Land fit so perfectly (to little kid me) with things like the collectable "gyroids" that I never thought to question Clu Clu Land as anything other than an in-universe NES game for the little talking animal world. By contrast, I had never seen the actual game Mappy in motion until the late 2000s, but was well aware of its existence. It wasn't until the mid-90s I learned about Mappy and the titular character with it sort of spoken highly as a "common sense classic", one that it seemed everyone knew about and loved. At least, that was the impression magazine articles or ads conveyed at the time. Mappy seemed to be front and center in articles about, say, the PS1 NAMCO Museum collection titles. Right up there with PAC-MAN as if everyone was supposed to be well aware of the character with no need to explain what their game was even about. Only seeing screenshots for most of my life, I had no idea what Mappy even was for the longest time. And never before this video did I even learn what mechanics it had or even the goal of the game was. So, thank you Mr. Parish. You answered a life-long question I always wanted answered, but never thought to actually ask.
Clu Clu Land has always struck me as one of the most unfortunately localized titles. The Japanese name, Kuru Kuru Land - "Round and Round Land" - conveys something of what the game is about and flows phonetically within its native language. The title Clu Clu Land not only communicates nothing and sounds awkward and odd, it sounds reminiscent of Ku Ku Klan to a lot of ears.
@@Pikachu132 The box shows the way it's written in Japanese, which is as I described it. It doesn't feature the Clu Clu rendering. Given that Japanese doesn't have a proper 'L' sound, it's highly doubtful that Nintendo's intention was for early 1980s Japanese kids to be saying "Clu Clu." The title screen is best interpreted as a clumsy transliteration, something very, very common during this period. The title screens of most of their early games are rendered in the Roman alphabet A) because it was trendy at the time, and B) so it wouldn't need to be reprogrammed for foreign markets.
@@philmason9653 Yes, that's... what I said. It's a stylized spelling made for the Japanese title screen because it looks cool. Most other Famicom games do the same - Japanese characters on the box, latin letters on the title screen. No, they didn't intend for Japanese kids to literally say "Clu Clu Land", but they didn't intend for them to say "Soccer" or "Excitebike" either. The Japanese characters are there to provide the pronunciation.
Wow, this is going on hiatus. Still was a super fun batch of compilation episodes though~ really loved learning more about gems on the SG1000 and the Famicom's third party library! Hoping that video works at least shifts to another platform in the meantime while on this break, but if not, that's fair. And hehe, I did find the comment about Mappy being loved by Furries to be amusing, as it's true!
I love the Mappy games, but am not a furry. I am a fan however of great video games, and Mappy is one of those. Can still sort of remember Mappy in arcades in my childhood.
@@retrofan4963 oh I definitely didn't mean that at all, and I agree! they're great fun. I just noted that a lot of furries i know tend to enjoy the series, including myself, due to the cute cast of characters and being one of the earliest characters in that regard.
Clu Clu Land is great. It's a perfect little step up from pure arcade action to something that needs a little more thought. If you liked old-school action games but wanted something with more depth than "collect things and avoid baddies", it could have been a good little shake up.
Wait a minute, the same Kris Straub responsible for Local 58 also produced web content based on old Namco properties at one point? This is unexpected but not unwelcome news to me.
@@1HomuLeo1 He wrote the original short story for it, yeah. Kris Straub and Neil Cicierega are both internet champions of "Wait, he's also the guy who did that?". Kris's work on Blamimations (which is what spawned the Namco stuff) is also some top tier stuff.
Long long ago I had an idea for a sidescrolling racing game (with a spaceship theme) back on the Commodore 64. Nothing came of it, but it got me thinking about the unique nature of video racing games, especially those without player-centric turning (akin to Asteroids, or basically all first-person racers) A racing game, ideally, converts the player's skill to a time for the course, right? The better the player plays, the better their time, right? Think about that for a moment, in a world where all you have to do is press an accelerator button, and even steering is completely digital. If you hold the accelerator the whole time, and don't collide with anything, logically you will always get the best time! "Perfect" play is easy to accomplish without complicating issues, so in essence, Excitebike is about its complications: its bumpy course, how well you jump and stick landings off of those bumps, how well you avoid the randomized opponents (which play no other role than to get in your way), and especially, its "Turbo" gimmick, which adds just enough uncertainty (the frame timing with which you release and press the button) to randomize finish times slightly, and making the digital certainty of its play just slightly less obvious. Long, long ago, as a bored kid, I managed to play Urban Champion through to R=99. I can confirm, there is no ending.
Jumping Cross seems like hidden gem - a time-attack racing with bumper car physics and a counter for how many opponents you manage to take out? If not good, it's atleast a really unique concept.
I love this video series so much. Because I'm discovering all these famicom exclusives I've never played before. I have a "full" NES rom set. But that doesn't include Japanese famicom games. So I have to download all these famicom exclusive games whenever I hear about them. Or really I should just find a Famicom Japan full rom set, and add it to the NES folder It's a bit crazy how many famicom games there are. There seems to be like a thousand more games than the NES in the west got. So many games. It was the same for the super famicom also
How could they change Nyamco to Goro when Nameow was right there, guys?! Mildly unrelated, but man I wish I could have been there for ShiftyLook's hay day :/
@@Pikachu132 There were two different games known as VS. Excitebike: an arcade game and a Famicom Disk System game. Here's the Famicom Disk System game re-released for the Wii U: www.nintendo.com/games/detail/vs-excitebike-wii-u/ Here's the VS. System arcade version re-released for the Switch: www.nintendo.com/games/detail/arcade-archives-excitebike-switch/
So are the main works series (NES, SNES, and Gameboy) coming back now? seeing what came out in Japan is interesting bt I would like to see more of what came to the US and it feels like a long time since there has been a non-gaiden episode.
Since I get videos early, the next video is considered a main works series video (Metroidvania Works) and the one after that is a Gaiden episode on the 7800 catching it up to Summer 1988 where NES Works is planned to resume soon. Patron Requests also going to be fulfilled.
It was covered in the Excitebike episode of NES Works a while back. I'm trying to provide new context for these games in these quick looks but don't want to re-litigate material I've already covered in detail.
Mappy honestly deserves to be more successful and recognition than what it recieved here in the States to be honest. Mappy is a really great game, out of all the Arcade games, Mappy is the game I enjoy the most, even more than Namco more popular games like Galaga, Pacman and Dig Dug. I honestly find Pacman and Dig Dug just alright, not bad, but not really great either in my opinion. Mappy click with me the most with its great and addicting gameplay. Mappy has a very great difficulty balancing, it's not easy but not frustrating and the Gameplay and strategy behind it is really fun, rewarding and satisfying. Not to mention it also has a really great and memorable soundtrack. Mappy is always my go to when it comes to having a great and fun time with a video game. Galaga, Pacman, and Dig Dug didn't do it for me the same way as Mappy.
You talking 'bout Mappy over here? In the before times I somehow managed to get a work leaderboard going for the game on our office MAME cabinet. Good times, good game.
I wasted so much time playing Clu Clu Land on Animal Crossing. It was just kinda neat to have collected the game, in-game, especially one I had never played before.
“You know what they say about cops” That they have excessive use of civil forfeiture which is probably why you’re collecting what looks like stereos and computers. Although the last time I went to the met they had gunpla on display so it might be an industrial design exhibit.
I'm a big fan of Mappy. The arcade game is the perfect blend of easy to grasp what you need to do yet challenging to make it entertaining. The Famicom conversion is without a doubt one of the best arcade home ports on the platform thanks to its smooth scrolling and reproduction of all the sprite animation. Like with Donkey Kong, the switch from a tate 3:4 vertical monitor setup to the standard 4:3 for Famicom isn't actually that big of a deal here thanks to clever reworking of the design. Mappy is also highly memerable for it's soundtrack by Nobuyuki Ohnogi which used FM synthesis for its original arcade version that still sounds impressive today. Mappy is a game I frequently play on mame. Urban Champion is....not awful, but it's also not great. My main beef with its re-releases on digital platforms is that it wasn't priced lower than other higher quality games. When Virtual Console NES games were $5 and you could get Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, why on earth would anyone spend the $5 for Urban Champion? That never made sense to me. Nintendo should've charged $1 for Urban Champion. Clu Clu Land is a game I never really understood how to play as a kid. I never owned it, but I did play it at friends houses. It's more of a puzzle game than it is an arcade maze game but is it underrated? I don't think so. It's for sure b-tier Nintendo stuff. ExciteBike is a game I have many fond memories of as a child, as I was really into the concept of motobikes in the 80s. I was exciced (no pun intended) when the Wii got a semi sequel in ExciteTruck. I'd like to see Excitebike get a modern remake on Switch, with custom tracks that you can share via the internet.
I think the VC pricing makes sense. Not only does a flat fee like that even the playing field, it prevents the games from getting devalued in the eyes of the customers. A lot of companies release huge complilations of their games for relatively tiny prices, essentially reducing them to pieces of massive collections where you try each game for 5 minutes just to see what they're like. Nintendo has never wanted their classic library treated that way, but would rather sell their games individually for a decent price to people that actually WANT the game rather than the people who might play it if they got it alongside a slew of other games but otherwise wouldn't miss it if it was gone from the collection. If you wouldn't pay $5 for Urban Champion (which is understandable, I wouldn't either), you probably don't care enough about Urban Champion to actually care whether or not Nintendo put it up on the Virtual Console at all.
0:11 OK, that’s creepy. I finished reading ‘Dune Messiah’ this morning, and was just listening to the Dune soundtrack before I saw you uploaded. How the hell did you know?! Have you been on the melange again?
@@JeremyParish At 14 seconds the title card shows Excite Bike and then immediately after that we get the Clu Clu Land Title screen before jumping into Mappy. It was a little jarring?
This is not the first time I've included a title screen from a title appearing later in the video because it was more interesting than the title screen for the episode's first game.
@@abrahm8025 do you not understand what the intro to all these videos is meant to be? He makes it look like you're flicking through channels on an old CRT TV, so sometimes it lands on a movie clip, sometimes it lands on a game, then the next channel is another game, etc Why is it such a big deal to you that he makes a video talking about Clu Clu Land, and then shows a clip of Clu Clu Land at the beginning? What about this is confusing to you? When people talk about games, they show footage of the game they're talking about. That's how videos work.
I went to a store with my friend when his parents were buying him a new NES game back in the day. I think I helped lean him toward buying Urban Champion over another game. I hope he has forgiven me.
Atari had some classic arcade games back in the 70s that feel a bit like distant proto-Excitebikes. Stunt Cycle from 1976 has the player time jumps off ramps on a motorcycle on a 2D plane (with the cycle's angle being entirely controlled by its speed, so it's a lot more about timing precision than Excitebike, where you can angle your bike in the air), while Steeplechase from 1975 is a 2D competitive racing game where you need to time jumps over a series of obstacles to hopefully reach the goal before your opponents. Mash them together and you more or less have Excitebike.
I see people hate on Urban Champion like it's awful and unpleasant to play. It's fun, but only for 5 minutes, and then you have nothing left to experience. It's marginally more fun than Rock'em Sock'em Robots. But it's not like it's a bad concept or clunky execution or it handles poorly. It just doesn't hold up to repetition like other games of that era. I won't try to say it's even particularly good, but I don't see why it gets such vitriol.
There are a couple of fun ideas in Urban Champion, such as the falling flower pots and passing police cars, but it really needed more variety to hold players' interest for longer. The arcade version of Urban Champion is a bit different because the music is livelier, the colour of your opponents' skin, hair, and clothing changes, and the colour of the sky changes as time passes from day to night.
I'm really looking forward to the future Famicom games where the various mapper chips start coming into play. I I think it was in 85 or 86 they started to appear as pretty much everyone needed more than 64 kbit of ROM space!
The first real expansion was in Ghosts ’N Goblins, I believe, and that was mid ’86. Within a year of the Disk System's launch, carts grew expansive enough that the storage advantage of the Disk System became completely moot.
Nope. I was going to spend some time covering NES releases this summer, but I was only doing that because the NES episodes perform a lot better. I'm not in this for the clicks, so I'm going to carry Famicom coverage through the NES launch and Sega 8-bit coverage up through the point NES Works has reached before merging back in with the main series.
@@JeremyParish Personally I'm really enjoying the 8-bit Sega coverage! It's an era I'm entirely unfamiliar with, and it's super cool to see where some legends got their start. The poetic musings on the Girl's Garden segment were pure eloquence as well.
You should really do a Nes Works at least once a month. That's what I personally like the most. This "side story" should remain occasional. Bit it's Just my opinion and anyway your work here Is great! I LOVE nes woks, but I still also like all this gaidens...
...may I ask where the hate for Urban Champion is suddently coming from? Not from this channel in particular, but... I only recently noticed people talking down on Urban Champion. Personally, I think it's an okay game. Not a terrific classic juggernaut like Donkey Kong or Duck Hunt, mind you, but a perfectly cromulant game that's fun for a bit.
Urban Champion was one of the first NES games I ever played, when I rented a NES back in the day. I was not impressed. Thankfully, the other game I rented was Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.
A competent competitor in 84 (sit back down Atari) could have really capitalized on the Nintendo/Namco(t)s feud, given how important Namco was to the Famicom in the beginning…. It is really interesting looking back at the system, back when it was just a really nice looking Golden age arcade port machine, knowing Super Mario is still a year away from release
"Gorogoro" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat purring, which may explain the name Goro.
Good info, thanks!
I always thought a Namcot was where you went to lie down after working long hours at Namco.
Dad?
Something something Nappyland.
That's where British kids get their diapers I think
Vietnamese cot company?
Hearing Jeremy Parish say things like “Meowkies” and “Nyamco” makes me chuckle and have a silly smile on my face.
Aah, Mappy, how nostalgic, I was born in 1995 but we had a NES at home and I still played Mappy a lot.
These are the kind of games I remember. All of them used to come on the knock off multicarts my mom would bring home from China in the early 90s. Filled with stuff like mappy and devil world and little ghost qtaro.
"Can we get a Mother collection?"
Nintendo: "You get a re-relese of Urban Champion and you'll like it"
No seriously, this comment really illustrated my problem with Nintendo's legacy content quite well
Urban Champion isn't even fun, what the heck!
@@MapleMilk you know, in a world where there's a Famicom Detective Club remake at full price on the Switch, nothing makes sense anymore as far as what comes back
@@MCastleberry1980 That's true, but I think it's warranted for a remake
Might as well remake a game that's classic and we never got, too instead of Mario 3 again, right?
Honestly, remaking rebooting Urban Champion into a urban styled traditional 2D fighting game would be better than just porting it again
Nintendo, steal that idea
@@MapleMilk There should have been an Urban Champion stage in Super Smash Bros.
Also, fun tip about Mappy - if you collect one of the items, the other instance of it in the level will begin to flash. Collecting the flashing one will give you double the points!
I played this game way too much on Namco Museum DS, lol
Yes, if you are playing for points, there's a lot of strategy about the order in which you pick up items
I got curious and pulled out my copy of SNK 40th Anniversary, with its "Museum" of all of SNK's old arcade games. But it also only says "1984" for Jumping Cross's release date, without further info. That said, the games are arranged in order of release, and Jumping Cross was apparently the 4th of 5 games released in 1984 - suggesting it was probably later in the year, rather than earlier.
I used to play Mappy all the time on a bootleg cart as a kid, i absolutely love that game
Mappy is a really great game :)
When I played Mappy as a kid I was confident that I am playing an elephant. The memory is so strong I still get surprised whenever someone talks about a mouse.
My cousin owned one of those pirated 41-in-one Famicom cartridges with the NES converter thing attached to it, and it's why Mappy was one of my favourite games as a kid, despite it not getting a North American release. I didn't realize it was Japan-only until I started writing about NES games as an adult. I guess I was pretty lucky that I got to play it.
Same here. Mappy was a lot of fun on that cart.
Mappy is honestly my favorite game of all time :) I love the Arcade Version and NES version of Mappy.
Urban champion like Karate Champ could be fun with a friend. Of course mist things are more fun with a friend especially back in its hay-day when there just wasn’t that much to compare it to.
I wonder if Namco tried to impliment elevators before using trampolines in Mappy? be fun to crush/hit enemies with a moving elevator, but I guess it would have slowed the pacing down considerably. Waiting for a lift in elevator action is pure torture.
How's a mouse going to reach the elevator call button though? :)
Taito already had the monopoly on elevator themed action games
@@alex_-yz9to Activision would like to protest that claim
Makes sense if that's the case. The trampolines functions like an elevator in Mappy.
I wish trampolines were used more in public buildings.
Congrats on completing 1984! Love the series in its various forms.
excitebike is my favorite out of these, played that game a lot in the past
Your channel only continues to get better. Even when the games covered aren't so great (Urban Champion), its still interesting.
your videos are so clever man thank you for producing these
Shiftylook Mappy was AMAZING.
You are a wonderful writer. Thanks for all of these and I hope to maybe see some even earlier reviews.
Earlier as in Atari? Check out Atari Archive for that. You CAN watch a five-part series on Epoch Cassette Vision by subscribing to my Patreon, though.
Whenever I see a CRT on its side (like you have in frame on the left), I can't help but hear in my head Joe from Game Sack yelling "TATE MODE!!!"
I picture him doing that when making TATEr tots, too.
Mappy-Land was one of the handful of NES games I had as a kid. I loved it because it was fast-paced, pretty easy, and had great music. It seems to be pretty similar to this original Mappy.
Not even played Mappy very much at all but I've been listening to the Haroumi Hosono arranged melody from his 1984 album Video Game Music pretty intensively these past few weeks.
I'm terrible at Excitebike, but I still really like it.
"Mappy has become a favorite among Japanese gamers and Western furries"
How dare you call me out accurately 😛
Though in all seriousness, a neat thing about Mappy is that Mappy and Nyamco started out as experimental robot by Namco in the late 70s to show off algorithms for solving mazes programmatically.
Gotta love the CHG shoutout to Urban Champion in the form of toy boxing.
man, 1984 was such a great year for famicon, i have the impression that this pre-super mario bros age is underrated
Super Mario Bros. was practically a generational shift for video games, but the more arcade-style pre-SMB games on Famicom have something to offer, too. Not a lot of sprawling epics from then, but a few of these games are some of my favourites.
@@rowtow13 Mappy is one of the epic ones in pre-Super Mario Bros Famicom games.
Bought Mappy about a week ago. For a Famicom port, it's pretty decent.
Decent? Mappy is a really great game.
@@retrofan4963 it is. But I play a lot of the arcade version, and the weaker Famicom hardware holds up pretty well by comparison.
@@LorenHelgeson Ah, I see what you mean :) The Arcade version of Mappy is superior, I agree with that. The Famicom version of Mappy is impressively really good, especially for an early Famcom game, but the original Arcade version of Mappy is still the best version of the game. Cool to know you also really enjoy Mappy :) I really enjoy the game as well. I always find Mappy to be an under-appreciated masterpiece. It's a really great and extremely fun game, but unfortunately it's also criminally underrated. Mappy definately deserves more love and recognition.
The first time I ever even heard of Clu Clu Land was by unlocking it in Animal Crossing on the GameCube. It was the first NES game item I unlocked, unaware that was even a thing. Given the rather strange nature of Animal Crossing and Clu Clu Land, I thought this little playable game item was original to Animal Crossing. The vibe of Clu Clu Land fit so perfectly (to little kid me) with things like the collectable "gyroids" that I never thought to question Clu Clu Land as anything other than an in-universe NES game for the little talking animal world.
By contrast, I had never seen the actual game Mappy in motion until the late 2000s, but was well aware of its existence. It wasn't until the mid-90s I learned about Mappy and the titular character with it sort of spoken highly as a "common sense classic", one that it seemed everyone knew about and loved. At least, that was the impression magazine articles or ads conveyed at the time. Mappy seemed to be front and center in articles about, say, the PS1 NAMCO Museum collection titles. Right up there with PAC-MAN as if everyone was supposed to be well aware of the character with no need to explain what their game was even about.
Only seeing screenshots for most of my life, I had no idea what Mappy even was for the longest time. And never before this video did I even learn what mechanics it had or even the goal of the game was. So, thank you Mr. Parish. You answered a life-long question I always wanted answered, but never thought to actually ask.
Can I just say, the ACAB line during the Mappy segment is the greatest thing I've ever heard on RUclips.
Clu Clu Land has always struck me as one of the most unfortunately localized titles. The Japanese name, Kuru Kuru Land - "Round and Round Land" - conveys something of what the game is about and flows phonetically within its native language. The title Clu Clu Land not only communicates nothing and sounds awkward and odd, it sounds reminiscent of Ku Ku Klan to a lot of ears.
Also odd that the word "Land" is in the title when the characters in the game are supposed to be sea creatures.
Clu Clu Land isn't a localization, it's a stylized spelling. It's called this in Japan too, Jeremy showed the original Japanese title screen.
@@Pikachu132 The box shows the way it's written in Japanese, which is as I described it. It doesn't feature the Clu Clu rendering. Given that Japanese doesn't have a proper 'L' sound, it's highly doubtful that Nintendo's intention was for early 1980s Japanese kids to be saying "Clu Clu." The title screen is best interpreted as a clumsy transliteration, something very, very common during this period. The title screens of most of their early games are rendered in the Roman alphabet A) because it was trendy at the time, and B) so it wouldn't need to be reprogrammed for foreign markets.
@@philmason9653 Yes, that's... what I said. It's a stylized spelling made for the Japanese title screen because it looks cool. Most other Famicom games do the same - Japanese characters on the box, latin letters on the title screen. No, they didn't intend for Japanese kids to literally say "Clu Clu Land", but they didn't intend for them to say "Soccer" or "Excitebike" either. The Japanese characters are there to provide the pronunciation.
If I get an Evercade, I'll have to try Mappy Kids in it's Namco Collection cart. Anyway, a good finish to 1984 for Famicom.
Wow, this is going on hiatus. Still was a super fun batch of compilation episodes though~ really loved learning more about gems on the SG1000 and the Famicom's third party library! Hoping that video works at least shifts to another platform in the meantime while on this break, but if not, that's fair.
And hehe, I did find the comment about Mappy being loved by Furries to be amusing, as it's true!
I love the Mappy games, but am not a furry. I am a fan however of great video games, and Mappy is one of those. Can still sort of remember Mappy in arcades in my childhood.
I've loved Mappy since before I was a furry. Cute games are just part of my tastes.
You don't have to be a furry to enjoy the Mappy games since they're really great games and can be enjoyed by anyone.
@@retrofan4963 oh I definitely didn't mean that at all, and I agree! they're great fun. I just noted that a lot of furries i know tend to enjoy the series, including myself, due to the cute cast of characters and being one of the earliest characters in that regard.
@@Seafoamgaming Oh, I see what you mean :) Yeah, that's true. It's news to me lot of furries enjoy the Mappy series. Admittedly, I'm a furry myself :)
at around 1:30 the Mappy footage is side-ways
Is that intentional?
Just Premiere doing its usual stupid thing where it undoes some sort of edit I've made during rendering.
@@JeremyParish Ah. Thought you'd accidentally captured some rare cocktail machine footage.
I was worried my phone was broken for a hot second
The Mappy web cartoon was so amazing.
Clu Clu Land is great. It's a perfect little step up from pure arcade action to something that needs a little more thought. If you liked old-school action games but wanted something with more depth than "collect things and avoid baddies", it could have been a good little shake up.
Wait a minute, the same Kris Straub responsible for Local 58 also produced web content based on old Namco properties at one point? This is unexpected but not unwelcome news to me.
I think he also did Candle Cove, but I might be mistaken
Kris Straub is one of the most underappreciated creators on the internet. Everything he does or has participated in is gold.
@@1HomuLeo1 He wrote the original short story for it, yeah. Kris Straub and Neil Cicierega are both internet champions of "Wait, he's also the guy who did that?". Kris's work on Blamimations (which is what spawned the Namco stuff) is also some top tier stuff.
Long long ago I had an idea for a sidescrolling racing game (with a spaceship theme) back on the Commodore 64. Nothing came of it, but it got me thinking about the unique nature of video racing games, especially those without player-centric turning (akin to Asteroids, or basically all first-person racers)
A racing game, ideally, converts the player's skill to a time for the course, right? The better the player plays, the better their time, right? Think about that for a moment, in a world where all you have to do is press an accelerator button, and even steering is completely digital. If you hold the accelerator the whole time, and don't collide with anything, logically you will always get the best time! "Perfect" play is easy to accomplish without complicating issues, so in essence, Excitebike is about its complications: its bumpy course, how well you jump and stick landings off of those bumps, how well you avoid the randomized opponents (which play no other role than to get in your way), and especially, its "Turbo" gimmick, which adds just enough uncertainty (the frame timing with which you release and press the button) to randomize finish times slightly, and making the digital certainty of its play just slightly less obvious.
Long, long ago, as a bored kid, I managed to play Urban Champion through to R=99. I can confirm, there is no ending.
Jumping Cross seems like hidden gem - a time-attack racing with bumper car physics and a counter for how many opponents you manage to take out? If not good, it's atleast a really unique concept.
I love this video series so much. Because I'm discovering all these famicom exclusives I've never played before. I have a "full" NES rom set. But that doesn't include Japanese famicom games. So I have to download all these famicom exclusive games whenever I hear about them. Or really I should just find a Famicom Japan full rom set, and add it to the NES folder
It's a bit crazy how many famicom games there are. There seems to be like a thousand more games than the NES in the west got. So many games. It was the same for the super famicom also
I LOVE me some Mappy!
How could they change Nyamco to Goro when Nameow was right there, guys?!
Mildly unrelated, but man I wish I could have been there for ShiftyLook's hay day :/
It cannot be overstated how eternally cool Excitebike will be to me
Vs. Excitebike for the Famicom Disk System is even better. It's available through the Wii U Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online.
@@Ginormousaurus The VS games were arcade games, not FDS games.
@@Pikachu132 There were two different games known as VS. Excitebike: an arcade game and a Famicom Disk System game.
Here's the Famicom Disk System game re-released for the Wii U: www.nintendo.com/games/detail/vs-excitebike-wii-u/
Here's the VS. System arcade version re-released for the Switch: www.nintendo.com/games/detail/arcade-archives-excitebike-switch/
Ah man Zelda 2 is the unofficial urban champion 2.
So are the main works series (NES, SNES, and Gameboy) coming back now? seeing what came out in Japan is interesting bt I would like to see more of what came to the US and it feels like a long time since there has been a non-gaiden episode.
Since I get videos early, the next video is considered a main works series video (Metroidvania Works) and the one after that is a Gaiden episode on the 7800 catching it up to Summer 1988 where NES Works is planned to resume soon. Patron Requests also going to be fulfilled.
Thanks
Great info as always. Kinda surprised you didn’t talk about the track editor in Excite Bike. Seems like the kind of thing you would be into.
It was covered in the Excitebike episode of NES Works a while back. I'm trying to provide new context for these games in these quick looks but don't want to re-litigate material I've already covered in detail.
Love the Mac Davis Lubbock Texas rear view reference
Mappy honestly deserves to be more successful and recognition than what it recieved here in the States to be honest. Mappy is a really great game, out of all the Arcade games, Mappy is the game I enjoy the most, even more than Namco more popular games like Galaga, Pacman and Dig Dug. I honestly find Pacman and Dig Dug just alright, not bad, but not really great either in my opinion. Mappy click with me the most with its great and addicting gameplay. Mappy has a very great difficulty balancing, it's not easy but not frustrating and the Gameplay and strategy behind it is really fun, rewarding and satisfying. Not to mention it also has a really great and memorable soundtrack. Mappy is always my go to when it comes to having a great and fun time with a video game. Galaga, Pacman, and Dig Dug didn't do it for me the same way as Mappy.
I'm sad this is how I learned Shiftylook is no longer watchable online.
You talking 'bout Mappy over here? In the before times I somehow managed to get a work leaderboard going for the game on our office MAME cabinet. Good times, good game.
I wasted so much time playing Clu Clu Land on Animal Crossing. It was just kinda neat to have collected the game, in-game, especially one I had never played before.
“You know what they say about cops”
That they have excessive use of civil forfeiture which is probably why you’re collecting what looks like stereos and computers. Although the last time I went to the met they had gunpla on display so it might be an industrial design exhibit.
I'm a big fan of Mappy. The arcade game is the perfect blend of easy to grasp what you need to do yet challenging to make it entertaining. The Famicom conversion is without a doubt one of the best arcade home ports on the platform thanks to its smooth scrolling and reproduction of all the sprite animation. Like with Donkey Kong, the switch from a tate 3:4 vertical monitor setup to the standard 4:3 for Famicom isn't actually that big of a deal here thanks to clever reworking of the design.
Mappy is also highly memerable for it's soundtrack by Nobuyuki Ohnogi which used FM synthesis for its original arcade version that still sounds impressive today. Mappy is a game I frequently play on mame.
Urban Champion is....not awful, but it's also not great. My main beef with its re-releases on digital platforms is that it wasn't priced lower than other higher quality games. When Virtual Console NES games were $5 and you could get Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, why on earth would anyone spend the $5 for Urban Champion? That never made sense to me. Nintendo should've charged $1 for Urban Champion.
Clu Clu Land is a game I never really understood how to play as a kid. I never owned it, but I did play it at friends houses. It's more of a puzzle game than it is an arcade maze game but is it underrated? I don't think so. It's for sure b-tier Nintendo stuff.
ExciteBike is a game I have many fond memories of as a child, as I was really into the concept of motobikes in the 80s. I was exciced (no pun intended) when the Wii got a semi sequel in ExciteTruck. I'd like to see Excitebike get a modern remake on Switch, with custom tracks that you can share via the internet.
I think the VC pricing makes sense. Not only does a flat fee like that even the playing field, it prevents the games from getting devalued in the eyes of the customers. A lot of companies release huge complilations of their games for relatively tiny prices, essentially reducing them to pieces of massive collections where you try each game for 5 minutes just to see what they're like. Nintendo has never wanted their classic library treated that way, but would rather sell their games individually for a decent price to people that actually WANT the game rather than the people who might play it if they got it alongside a slew of other games but otherwise wouldn't miss it if it was gone from the collection.
If you wouldn't pay $5 for Urban Champion (which is understandable, I wouldn't either), you probably don't care enough about Urban Champion to actually care whether or not Nintendo put it up on the Virtual Console at all.
"..and he'll know...that it is I, Baron Vladimir Harkkonen that encompasses his doom!"
Goro is the name of some weird Claymation dude....... and the lord of the night of Sotenbori :)
Excitebike started in 2nd gear.
see also: Stunt Cycle Atari 1976
I have never played Mappy yet somehow I know it
Try it out, Mappy is a really fun game in my opinion.
Nintendo should have released mappy it's a good idea. 😀👍🎮
I highly agree.
0:11 OK, that’s creepy. I finished reading ‘Dune Messiah’ this morning, and was just listening to the Dune soundtrack before I saw you uploaded. How the hell did you know?! Have you been on the melange again?
Perhaps because someone who had two-week early access to the video via Patreon told you to do just that. xD
Pat had no idea
The video begins with Mappy, but leads off with the Clu Clu Land title. Not sure if that was intended. Either way, keep up the great work!
?
@@JeremyParish At 14 seconds the title card shows Excite Bike and then immediately after that we get the Clu Clu Land Title screen before jumping into Mappy. It was a little jarring?
This is not the first time I've included a title screen from a title appearing later in the video because it was more interesting than the title screen for the episode's first game.
@@abrahm8025 do you not understand what the intro to all these videos is meant to be? He makes it look like you're flicking through channels on an old CRT TV, so sometimes it lands on a movie clip, sometimes it lands on a game, then the next channel is another game, etc
Why is it such a big deal to you that he makes a video talking about Clu Clu Land, and then shows a clip of Clu Clu Land at the beginning? What about this is confusing to you? When people talk about games, they show footage of the game they're talking about. That's how videos work.
I went to a store with my friend when his parents were buying him a new NES game back in the day. I think I helped lean him toward buying Urban Champion over another game. I hope he has forgiven me.
A cab in play
"Gordo" would have been a good name. Either as Spanish for "fat", combining "fat cat" imagery with gang boss cliches, or simply Canadian.
And here I am thinking “Namcot” is French, you don’t pronounce the “t!”
Namcaeux
Are you eventually going to run out of things to cut to at the beginning?
So is that a Trinatron in Tate' mode, and is it hooked up to some manner of board?
It’s connected to a MiSTer.
Atari had some classic arcade games back in the 70s that feel a bit like distant proto-Excitebikes. Stunt Cycle from 1976 has the player time jumps off ramps on a motorcycle on a 2D plane (with the cycle's angle being entirely controlled by its speed, so it's a lot more about timing precision than Excitebike, where you can angle your bike in the air), while Steeplechase from 1975 is a 2D competitive racing game where you need to time jumps over a series of obstacles to hopefully reach the goal before your opponents. Mash them together and you more or less have Excitebike.
I see people hate on Urban Champion like it's awful and unpleasant to play. It's fun, but only for 5 minutes, and then you have nothing left to experience. It's marginally more fun than Rock'em Sock'em Robots. But it's not like it's a bad concept or clunky execution or it handles poorly. It just doesn't hold up to repetition like other games of that era. I won't try to say it's even particularly good, but I don't see why it gets such vitriol.
There are a couple of fun ideas in Urban Champion, such as the falling flower pots and passing police cars, but it really needed more variety to hold players' interest for longer. The arcade version of Urban Champion is a bit different because the music is livelier, the colour of your opponents' skin, hair, and clothing changes, and the colour of the sky changes as time passes from day to night.
"...and you know what they say about cops..."😂😂😂
I'm really looking forward to the future Famicom games where the various mapper chips start coming into play. I I think it was in 85 or 86 they started to appear as pretty much everyone needed more than 64 kbit of ROM space!
The first real expansion was in Ghosts ’N Goblins, I believe, and that was mid ’86. Within a year of the Disk System's launch, carts grew expansive enough that the storage advantage of the Disk System became completely moot.
The Atari stuntcycle is very derivative of excitebike
Stunt Cycle predates Excitebike by almost 10 years.
So can we expect a return to the mainline series soon?
Nope. I was going to spend some time covering NES releases this summer, but I was only doing that because the NES episodes perform a lot better. I'm not in this for the clicks, so I'm going to carry Famicom coverage through the NES launch and Sega 8-bit coverage up through the point NES Works has reached before merging back in with the main series.
@@JeremyParish Personally I'm really enjoying the 8-bit Sega coverage! It's an era I'm entirely unfamiliar with, and it's super cool to see where some legends got their start. The poetic musings on the Girl's Garden segment were pure eloquence as well.
Girl’s Garden was a high watermark for this channel for sure
You should really do a Nes Works at least once a month. That's what I personally like the most. This "side story" should remain occasional. Bit it's Just my opinion and anyway your work here Is great! I LOVE nes woks, but I still also like all this gaidens...
Based
Living dangerously with the ACAB reference! I laughed, though.
💜💜💜
!And you know what they say about all cops...speaking of bastards.." Nailed it!
Damn. You beat me to it.
...may I ask where the hate for Urban Champion is suddently coming from?
Not from this channel in particular, but... I only recently noticed people talking down on Urban Champion.
Personally, I think it's an okay game. Not a terrific classic juggernaut like Donkey Kong or Duck Hunt, mind you, but a perfectly cromulant game that's fun for a bit.
I’m no Johnny Come Lately, man. My disdain is established canon. Check UC’s Wikipedia page!
Urban Champion was one of the first NES games I ever played, when I rented a NES back in the day. I was not impressed. Thankfully, the other game I rented was Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.
A competent competitor in 84 (sit back down Atari) could have really capitalized on the Nintendo/Namco(t)s feud, given how important Namco was to the Famicom in the beginning….
It is really interesting looking back at the system, back when it was just a really nice looking Golden age arcade port machine, knowing Super Mario is still a year away from release
I wonder how public the disagreement was. These are Japanese companies, and those tend to keep disputes pretty mum.
So I am a "furry" because Mappy is one of my favorite old arcade games? What does that make you who go on reviewing such?
Pop a chill pill, sparky. That’s not what I said.
ACAB, even Mappy!