Rad stuff

Adventures in Doujin Land: How I Self-Published a Book About an Incredibly Obscure Video Game at a Japanese Convention (and so can you!)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Doujinshi, General, Rad stuff, Retro •   0

It’s been quiet here lately, I’m afraid. It’s due to a combination of things: one is that I have been having some health issues as of late. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but still enough to put a dent in my activity. I have some surgery scheduled for early December so it should be taken care of soon.

The other thing that’s been eating up my time, if you’ve paid attention to my Twitter or Patreon feeds, is that I published a book. A doujinshi, to be precise.

Yes, I finally turned my decades-long dream of doujin publishing into a reality! Some people want to write gaming books to sell on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but me? I want to sell directly to my core audience: the hugest nerds on Planet Earth who absolutely love obscure stuff, and that’s exactly what Japan’s doujinshi scene offers. If you can dream it, you can sell it.

But how did this go from pipe-dream to reality? Well, it was a long and interesting journey, that’s for sure. But I know I’m not the only Westerner with Japanese doujin dreams, so I’d like to share my adventure so that others may learn from it and embark on their own self-publishing endeavors.

Part 1: Getting the idea off the ground

Part 2: Printing a book overseas (Coming soon!)

Part 3: The Game Legend experience

The Amazing, Unrecognized World of Japanese Arcade Quiz Games

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Rad stuff, Retro •   3

Quiz games. They’re one of the most basic forms of game out there, going a long, long way back to the days of game shows on radio and television, persisting to this very day. They’ve also been a part of videogaming from the early days: as soon as ROM chips could feasibly hold a decent amount of text, quiz games started to appear in arcades and on consoles.

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Nowadays, when you think of arcade quiz games, you probably think of something like the multiplayer setups you see at trivia nights in a local bar. This is the direction Western quiz games evolved in: they never really eschewed a game-show/board-game style format, and evolved to implement either real-money gambling mechanics or large-scale multiplayer, competitive functionality.

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In Japan, however, things played out very differently. Arcade quiz games started to appear there in the mid-late 80s, through companies like Sega and Nichibutsu. As the 90s came along, a renaissance of quiz-game development created a unique, fascinating genre with an abundance of different thematic elements.

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The genre first saw significant advancement through games like Adventure Quiz: Capcom World, a trivia game loaded with 80s Capcom fanservice, and Mitchell’s Quiz Sangokushi, which melded the question-and-answer format with strategic, territory-conquering gameplay. These games utilized elements of visual novels and strategy games to make the quiz experience more appealing and engaging. Other games put quiz elements into fun new genres: Taito’s Quiz Chikyuu Boueigun (“Quiz Earth Defense Force,” no relation to the current Earth Defense Force games by D3 Publisher) has you saving the planet in a story that’s chock-full of classic sci-fi parodies, while SNK’s Quiz Daisousasen (“Quiz Big Criminal Investigation”) is a detective story that morphs into a weird sci-fi/horror thing at the end. You still had game-show style quiz games too, but they were quickly losing ground to more ambitious efforts.

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In some cases, publishers adapted existing properties but added a quiz-game twist, hoping the familiar name would draw in customers. This is how we got games like Saurus’s Quiz King of Fighters and Taito’s Quiz HQ, which combined existing game properties with a quiz-game element. As time passed, however, more and more experimentation happened. The mid-late 90s were really a golden age for arcade quiz games, resulting in a stunning variety of thematic and gameplay genres mixing in with traditional quiz elements.

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Interestingly, quiz games tend to be very lengthy, sometimes taking an hour or more to complete from start to finish… which, in theory, goes against the short, focused play experiences arcades want to offer. You want to get people off that machine as quickly as possible, right? However, with these new thematic ideas, players became more committed to seeing the games through to the end. It doesn’t hurt as much to abandon a gameshow you feel like you’re not doing well in, but when you’re in the middle of a story about saving the universe? Hell yes you’re going to brute-force your way through with yen! Add a second player into the mix and watch earnings double!

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Unfortunately, most the appeal of these games is lost on the West. Japanese quiz games might be the most culturally impenetrable games out there: not only do you have to be fluent in the language, you also have to be fluent in a variety of cultural elements. Sure, you might know the multiple readings of thousands and thousands of kanji, but unless you lived in Japan during the early 1990s and remember which popular talent of the time appeared in a specific ad campaign, you’re probably not going to get very far. That is, unless you cheat. Thankfully, emulating most of these games allows you to cheat through the quiz portions, making the games somewhat more accessible… though it does result in the game losing a big part of its inherent charm. (Plus, even if you do cheat, if you don’t speak the language you can find yourself making very poor choices.)

You don’t hear a lot about quiz games nowadays — the genre saw a sharp decline in development and interest after the 1990s. Currently, the big name (and basically the only name) in Japanese quiz games is Konami’s Harry Potter-inspired Quiz Magic Academy, which has a new arcade version releasing soon (along with a mobile version that is no doubt raking in plenty of money). Right now, it’s practically the only arcade quiz game in town, unless your local game center has an older game installed in a cabinet somewhere.

But where does someone who doesn’t know anything about Japanese arcade quiz games go to get a good sampling of what the genre has to offer? Well, that’s why I’ve taken the time to write this. Today, we’re going to take a look at some noteworthy Japanese-style arcade quiz games: One that, against all odds, got a localized release, and three others that showcase some very interesting experiences. Continue reading →

INTERVIEW: Hideo Yoshizawa and Keiji Yamagishi

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews, Rad stuff, Retro •   4

Few games are as fondly remembered by NES kids as the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these games put the small publisher Tecmo on the map and set a high bar for many action games going forward. Of course, part of the reson why these games were so good was the talented staff behind their production, which included director Hideo Yoshizawa and composer Keiji Yamagishi. But their exemplary work in games continues far beyond the adventures of Ryu Hayabusa: Yoshizawa has helped in the creation of fan favorites like Klonoa and Mr. Driller, while Yamagishi is involved with game music production company Brave Wave.

I was given the opportunity to interview both Yoshizawa and Yamagishi at MAGfest 2018, and was eager to get some insight on the creation of these games. I was joined in this interview by the wonderful Jonathan Wheeler, alias ProtonJon, who is one of the biggest classic Ninja Gaiden fans I know. (His questions are notated by italics.) Read on to learn plenty of surprising details about the origins of some of the most beloved games of all time (and a few notable obscurities)! (I also suggest watching the official panel they had at MAGfest, too!)

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The difficult, unending hunt for good gaming T-shirts

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Rad stuff, Retro •   1

I don’t think of myself as a particularly fashionable person. I’m completely out of the loop when it comes to “mainstream” fashion trends, and my knowledge of high fashion is limited to the supporting cast of Jojo Part 6. Even a lot of counter-culture fashion goes right over my head: I just don’t see the appeal.

But there’s one article of clothing I genuinely love: T-shirts! I have a closet and a dresser full of various tees in a rainbow of colors, all emblazoned with printed imagery. I’m never wanting for something nice to wear on my torso.

In the past couple decades, the image of a T-shirt as something cheap and lazy to toss on when you don’t want to wear your good or even your “business casual” clothes has begun to change, thanks in part to designers who have taken the idea of a printed image on a shirt to new artistic heights. It’s great for us nerdy types: there’s a wealth of tees out there that let us express our passions and interests to the world at large — and T-shirts are typically more affordable than most other types of fashion, which means we can enjoy them without breaking the bank too much.

There’s still one big problem though: A lot of nerdy T-shirts are terrible. And this goes doubly for gaming T-shirts. Many widely available gaming tees offer up a level of cringeyness that few other poorly-conceived tees can even hope to match.

I don’t think it’s possible to see this and not immediately want to punch the person wearing it

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Inexplicably memorable EGM ads of the early-mid 90s (Part one)

• by Heidi Kemps • In General, Rad stuff, Retro •   3

The first non-Nintendo Power game magazine I subscribed to was Electronic Gaming Monthly. I was never a GamePro fan, Game Players had atrocious layouts until about 1995, and Gamefan didn’t get distribution in my neck of the woods until around 1995ish, so EGM was the go-to multiplatform magazine I’d buy on newsstands and take to school with me to read with classmates. Eventually, I convinced my parents to get me a subscription for Christmas of 1992.

Let me tell you, being an EGM subscriber in 1993 was an amazing thing. Every month, you’d get this humongous catalog-sized magazine dropped off in your mailbox, filled with screens and info on games for every platform under the sun, along with all the juicy details on the still-far-off 32-bit revolution and the vaporware SNES CD. Yes, the screenshots were generally terrible — I’m pretty sure their initial Mortal Kombat 2 screens were taken with a Polaroid and scanned in — but we all loved them regardless.

But with those gigantic issues came ads. Loads and loads of ads. For many games and peripherals, magazine ads were the best way to get the word out — TV ads were expensive, and they knew there were plenty of kids like me taking their magazines to read at recess with everyone else, so a national magazine ad purchase was an extremely smart buy.

Every so often, I pop onto archive.org’s collection of game magazines and go looking for old ads that I remembered. I’m still utterly mystified by what my brain has chosen to retain memories of, as some of the ads I remember very clearly are, in retrospect, not the sort of things that would likely worm their way into an easily impressionable pre-teen brain.

I want to share some of these with you, readers. They’re not the best ads of the era, nor are they the worst. But somehow, in EGM issues packed to the gills with screaming neon 90s ads that didn’t garner a second thought from me, they left such a lasting impression that I can still recall them.

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Arcade Road Trip: Anata no Warehouse (Kawasaki Warehouse)

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Rad stuff, Retro •   6

If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably aware that I went to Japan again over the holidays. My trip was a good one: I went to Comiket with a bunch of cool people from Lab Zero, went to the annual Fighting Vipers 2 crew bounenkai, dropped by Osaka to see rad folks and acquire a Raimais PCB, and somehow wound up in two different Sega-themed cafes over the course of my visit. Among other things!

Of course, I made sure to swing by a few arcades in the process. Much to my anger and disappointment, Akihabara HEY stopped selling its most recent round of exclusive merch the day before I got to go there, but I still managed to bring ANN’s Mike Toole inside and inspire a column in the process. TRF in Nakano was another stop, and it’s still as full of beautiful poverty fighting games as it ever was — though they seem to have brought in some Magician’s Dead machines as of late.1 And, of course, I swung by Mikado to do some work there (stay tuned for more on that).

There was one arcade I had to go to this time around, though. Last year, I saw pics a buddy took of a place referred to as the “Kawasaki Warehouse.” What I saw looked incredibly bizarre: an arcade modeled after the infamous Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong, filled with decaying signs, dim lights, and musty, decrepit structures that appeared to be falling apart. Among all of this was a swath of arcade machines: white cabinets, bright screens, and colorful lights standing out starkly against the tarnished brown and gray of the surroundings. I knew this was something I’d have to see for myself.

That’s exactly what I did. And now, I come back to you with pictures in hand of what might be the coolest “theme” arcade I’ve ever been to, Anata no Warehouse.

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  1. As a friend put it, “Given what gets played at TRF, if Magician’s Dead is there, that means it probably bombed everywhere else.” ↩

Interview: Taka Maekawa of Natsume-Atari

• by Heidi Kemps • In Interviews, Rad stuff, Retro •   0

It’s undeniable that there’s been renewed interest in certain retro genres as of late, but there’s one old-school arcade genre that rarely sees any modern-day love: the third-person crosshair shooter. The likes of Cabal, Blood Brothers, and NAM-1975 simply aren’t being made anymore in any format, and that’s extremely unfortunate.

So when Natsume announced that Wild Guns – a SNES game that served as both a loving tribute to the genre and one of its last great examples in the past few decades – was getting a revised an enhanced PS4 reissue as Wild Guns Reloaded… well, I knew that Gaming.moe would have to do something involving the game. This site is built on love for classic gaming genres and underappreciated gaming gems, after all! Even more exciting was the news that original development staff from Natsume-Atari was working on the game. Not only were they going to adapt the game for a new platform, but they planned to add all-new levels and characters as well! My hype was officially through the roof, and I doggedly pursued the chance to interview the game’s creators for a rare look into the creation of a true modern retro revival.

Thanks to the help of Mika and other great folks over at Natsume, we were able to arrange a discussion with Mr. Taka Maekawa, the game’s producer over at Natsume-Atari in Osaka. Please enjoy this exclusive interview about the creation of Wild Guns Reloaded — which, by the way, is now available on PSN and in a limited physical release!

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Review/Build: Sega Astro City 1/12 cabinet model by WAVE

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Figures, Rad stuff, Retro, Reviews •   1

“Candy cabinets.” It’s a catch-all English term to refer to Japanese-style sit-down arcade cabinets where you can fairly easily switch the games contained within. There seems to be a bit of speculation as to where the term came from… though I’d wager the most obvious source is the Neo Candy cabinets, which commonly housed Neo-Geo MVS units.

There are a lot of different models of “candy cabs” out there, but to many, the de facto candy cabinet is the Sega Astro City, a model you’ll still see around many a Japanese arcade in this day and age. Countless matches of Virtua Fighter 2 were played on these machines back in the day, and their versatility and adaptability have made them a popular choice for retrogaming setups to this day.

Yes, the Astro City is practically synonymous with arcade games to many Japanese arcade fans. Which is why we all exploded with glee when we found out that model maker Wave, who had previously made replicas of modern Vewlix cabinets and the riding Hang-On cabinet, was going to make an Astro City model.  This was gonna be great!

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And yes, it is a pretty spectacular kit! It’s not too tough to build for the beginner, but offers a lot of potential for customization if you really, really want to create the miniature arcade machine of your dreams. In my case, I wanted to put a very particular game inside one of these cabinets. But I wanted to build it together with you, my dear readers – and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today!

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Gamest’s Favorite Character Rankings from 1987 to 1991

• by Heidi Kemps • In Arcades, Rad stuff, Retro •   0

Hey guys, it’s almost election day!

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Yeah, that’s more or less my reaction to the shitshow of US politics, too. But instead of depressing ourselves, let’s look at the polls of yesteryear that truly mattered. I am, of course, talking about the favorite character polls published in seminal Japanese arcade gaming journal Gamest from 1987 through 1991.

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Gamest, for those unfamiliar, was an early Japanese game magazine whose focus was almost entirely on the culture of arcade gaming. The magazine was founded in 1986 and enjoyed plenty of success, going from bimonthly to monthly issues fairly quickly thanks to strong fan response. When Street Fighter II rolled around and became a phenomenon, however, the magazine became even bigger, eventually going biweekly at the height of the fighting game boom. Bolstered by the strength of arcades in the mid-90s, the publisher, Shinseisha, expanded briefly into spinoffs like Gamest EX (console games) and Comic Gamest, and even had a store focused on selling arcade game-related merchandise called Marugeya. But everything ended rather abruptly in 1999 with Shinseisha’s bankruptcy, killing off the magazine and other business operations tied to it. (Several former Gamest staff migrated to publisher Enterbrain to create Arcadia magazine as a successor, which would encounter its own abrupt death many years later.)

The magazine had a ton of passionate, talented writers throughout the years: as the Japanese Wikipedia article on the magazine notes, many of Gamest’s early writers came from VG2 and VG3, early arcade gaming doujinshi publications that were the contemporaries of Satoshi Tajiri and his Game Freak doujinshi. Graphic artist Han, who’s best known for his work at Treasure, was part of their writing staff at one point, and artist Mine Yoshizaki cut his teeth doing various art pieces for the magazine.

Amongst all of the strategy guides, interviews, reports, high score tables, and special features, however, every Gamest issue would contain a section called “Gamest Island,” which was dedicated to reader submissions. In early 1992, Gamest collected all of its Island sections up to that point into one giant book, called Gamest Island Mokushiroku.

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One of my current fixations is trying to snag cheap Gamest issues when they pop up for media preservation purposes, as the Japanese arcade scene of the 80s and 90s is a fascinating subculture that the West knows next to nothing about. When I saw this book for a good price, I jumped on it — and when I got it, I wasn’t disappointed in the content. This tome has 500-some pages of reader submissions that give a candid look into the Japanese arcade culture of the late 80s and early 90s from the very people who were the most passionate about it. There’s tons of art, plenty of letters, lots of terrible jokes, a bunch of reader-made “How much of a gamer are you” polls, parody game ideas, and even odd bits like someone’s Night Striker fanfiction. There are early memes and trends that show up, heated opinions (you start seeing some anti-Street Fighter II art and sentiment after the game blows up in popularity), and even in-column conversations between readers: one issue features a woman writing in to complain about men treating her badly at the arcade, the next issue has a guy sending in a drawing he did to support her, and the issue after that has her replying with more art as a thank-you. (It really seems charming and quaint compared to internet interactions today, especially since nobody got called a beta cuck.)

Every year Gamest would also hold reader polls on various subjects — and among them were various “favorite character” polls. From 1987 onwards, Gamest would have a reader-voted “favorite character” poll, along with rotating sub-polls in various other character categories. The results of each of these are also published in this book, and how the votes played out is pretty amusing: there are clear winners, some head-scratchers, and some utterly bizarre picks that appear to be ancient memes and jokes from a bygone era in Japanese gaming. Let’s take a look at how the polls went!

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Book Review: Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin

• by Heidi Kemps • In Rad stuff, Reviews •   0

I should preface this with, perhaps, an admission of potential bias: I think Fangamer is one of the raddest “nerd stuff” companies out there. Their merchandise is clever and classy, their clothing is nicely designed and high-quality, and they’re just a nice collection of really cool folks selling cool gear. They don’t put out books quite as often as clothing and accessories, but when they do, they’re usually pretty fantastic.1 So when Clyde Mandelin, well-known fan and pro translator, announced that he was going to expand on some of the material of his Legends of Localization site in book form, I was pretty hyped!

Though, I have to admit, I wasn’t horribly enthused by the initial choice of focusing on Zelda I. There really wasn’t a whole lot of text to the game, after all – how could you possibly fill up a 200-page book about it? As it turns out, however, there’s a lot of interesting ground to cover in localization that extends beyond just in-game text, and Mandelin’s book goes into all of it in great detail.

So, let’s get right to it – here’s a review of Legends of Localization, Book 1!

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Images used in this piece are a combination of my own and promotional images from Fangamer’s website. The latter should be easy to distinguish with the watermarks!

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  1. With the noted exception of SMB3 Brick by Brick, which I was so disappointed by that I vowed to start reviewing gaming books – and here I am! ↩