Gokujō Parodius – Kako no Eikō o Motomete (Super Famicom)

Konami’s Parodius saga was nothing if not consistent. No matter which installment you pick up, you’re in for wacky horizontal shooting based on mechanics lifted straight from the company’s own Gradius and TwinBee franchises. There are a lot more sexy ladies and berserk octopuses to go around in Parodius, sure, but the fundamentals never really change. So it goes for Gokujō Parodius – Kako no Eikō o Motomete (“Fantastic Parodius – Pursue the Glory of the Past”), the 1994 Super Famicom port of the arcade game that debuted earlier that same year. As the middle child on the system, it features a larger roster of playable characters than its predecessor, Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy, and a smaller one then its successor, Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius. Apart from that, the three look, sound, and play so alike that you could swap stages around between them without a casual fan even noticing.

Whereas the arcade Gokujō Parodius offered eight “ships” to choose between, the Super Famicom cranks that up to eleven. And, no, that’s not a Spinal Tap reference. New to this release are fighting infant Upa (from Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa), Goemon (from Ganbare Goemon), and Kid Dracula (from Akumajō Special: Boku Dracula-kun). They join Parodius stalwarts like the Vic Viper, TwinBee, Pentarou the penguin, and Tako the octopus. With every character having his, her, or its own unique suite of weapons, the replay value is immense. Each hero also has an alternate version usable in the game’s two-player mode, such as Goemon’s chubby sidekick, Ebisumaru. Hell, yes. This world can always use more Ebisumaru.

There are a total of nine levels to overcome this time, although two of them are cleverly hidden and it wouldn’t surprise me if many players never managed to find them back in the day. One of these is an extended battle against a moai head-studded space battleship that can only be accessed by if you have the correct digit occupying the hundreds place in your score when you defeat specific bosses. The other, a super difficult “special stage,” is a sort of post-credits Easter egg, so make sure not to switch the power off prematurely or you’ll miss out on the the true final boss.

With that, I’m actually running out of things to say already! How’s that for a change? Lest I be accused of phoning it in this week, however, allow me to emphasize that this is the third Parodius I’ve reviewed now. It has all the strengths of its brethren: Excellent graphics, a lively soundtrack based around various classical and public domain standards, the brilliant gameplay of Gradius, and an irrepressible sense of whimsy. Similarly, it shares their Achilles’ heel in the form of significant slowdown when the action gets intense, which is often. Simply put, Gokujō Parodius is another worthy entry in the series. No more, no less. If you’ve ever wanted to fly through a colossal claw machine blowing up penguins to the tune of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” (and who hasn’t?), it’s got what you need. Nuff said.

Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy (Super Nintendo)

Despite covering Wai Wai World 2 just last week, my thirst for comical Konami mayhem is yet to be fully sated. Parodius to the rescue! These manic parodies of the developer’s own Gradius saga always make for a fun time. What’s not to love about blowing away cartoon penguins, scantily-clad ladies, and God only knows what else on your way to the final confrontation with the Great Octopus?

Today, I’ve chosen 1992’s Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy for the Super Nintendo. This is a port of the 1990 arcade shooter Parodiusu Da! Shinwa kara Owarai e (“It’s Parodius! From Myth to Laughter”), and is noteworthy for being the only Parodius game to score an official release outside Japan. In Europe, to be precise. It’s a real pity Konami didn’t take a chance on a North American version. It likely wouldn’t have sold all that great, but its characteristically Japanese sense of humor could well have led to it becoming another treasured cult classic here, similar to The Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Oh, well.

As I detailed in-depth in my earlier review of one of Non-Sense Fantasy’s sequels, Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, the concept here is as basic as it gets. Parodius games are auto-scrolling horizontal shooters functionally identical to Gradius. They differ from their parent only in their aggressively goofy tone and the addition of a few new temporary power-ups gained by collecting TwinBee style colored bells. The series as a whole is profoundly consistent in this regard; so much so that anyone who’s logged significant time with any other Gradius or Parodius title could dive right in and start enjoying this one without missing a beat. The exact level layouts and enemy patterns vary, but the core mechanics and control scheme are universal.

The primary thing separating one Parodius outing from another is the ship selection. Non-Sense Fantasy includes four protagonists: Tako the octopus (son of Takosuke from the very first Parodius), Pentarou the penguin (son of Penta from Antarctic Adventure), and the Vic Viper and TwinBee ships from Gradius and TwinBee, respectively. Each has their own unique set of weapons. Tako, for example, can equip the Ripple Laser from Life Force, Pentarou sports the Photon Torpedo and other gear from Gradius II, and so on.

While allowing for some extra replay value, these four definitely pale in comparison to the eight playable heroes provided in the next game, Gokujō Parodius – Kako no Eikō o Motomete, or the downright insane sixteen available in Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius. For this reason alone, I’d advise you to tackle the franchise in chronological order if at all possible. It’s far more satisfying to see your options expand in the sequels than it is to work backwards and feel like you’re losing out on all that variety.

Apart from their sturdy Gradius foundation, the other major reason to play any Parodius game is, of course, the gags. Non-Sense Fantasy delivers a steady stream of slapstick absurdity throughout its ten stages. Want to fly through a traditional Japanese bathhouse or a giant pachinko machine? Want to battle a pirate ship with a live kitten’s head mounted on it or a Godzilla-sized Las Vegas showgirl? This game has you covered. The soundtrack consists mainly of bizarrely orchestrated snippets from famous classical works. These compliment the crazy visuals surprisingly well, probably because I recall so many of the same pieces featuring in Looney Tunes shorts and the like back in the day.

Like its more straight-laced inspiration, Non-Sense Fantasy doesn’t hesitate to pose a stiff challenge. The slightest contact with an enemy, bullet, or environmental obstacle is usually enough to cost you a life and send you back to most recent checkpoint sans all your accumulated ship upgrades. Thankfully, those checkpoints are numerous and you benefit from unlimited continues. As long as you’re reasonably determined and patient, you should be able to squeak by any trouble spots sooner or later. It’s a fairer shake than you’ll get from most other 16-bit shooters, that’s for sure.

Simply put, Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy is a winner. In addition to being a well-designed action game with a pedigree that can’t be beat, it’s an accurate arcade port and a real charmer. Unless you happen to dislike Gradius specifically or shooters in general, I’d say you’re virtually guaranteed to get a kick out of it. The worst I can say is that it doesn’t offer nearly as much ship diversity as subsequent series entries, nor does it really do anything gameplay-wise they don’t. I suppose its English localization is also a tad rickety in spots, although seeing your character exclaim “All light now!” or “Lock me, baby!” when using the megaphone weapon is so funny in its own right that I can easily forgive this oversight.

Besides, how could I not recommend a game that lets me select an image of boobs or a crotch to accompany my initials on the high score table? Such class! How this never became the genre standard is beyond me.

Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (Famicom)

Who’s up for some more obscure Japan-exclusive Konami weirdness? 1991’s Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (“Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Castle”) for the Famicom is the one and only sequel to 1988’s Konami Wai Wai World. Wai Wai World 2 shares the same basic premise the original (which I covered back in 2017): Characters and settings from various Konami action hits of the ’80s collide in a decidedly wacky crossover event. Think of it like a platforming take on their better-known Parodius shooter series.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just more of the same, though. The first Wai Wai World was a fiercely challenging Metroid style exploratory platformer. Wai Wai World 2 takes things in an entirely different direction with its linear progression and greatly reduced difficulty. The game as a whole seems heavily inspired by the previous year’s Akumajō Special: Boku Dracula-kun (aka Kid Dracula), a cutsey spin-off of the Castlevania series. Anyone’s who’s played Kid Dracula should recognize not just this art style, but also many of the fine details of moving and attacking.

The plot involves Konami World coming under threat from a villain called Warumon. Confusingly, he seems to be no relation to Dr. Warumon, the recurring antagonist from the TwinBee games. Anyway, Warumon captures Princess Herb and her home, Parsley Castle. In response, the benevolent scientist Dr. Cinnamon dispatches his latest android creation, Rikkuru, to save the day.

In addition to his short range energy blasts and jet-powered double jump, Rikkuru can use his transformation circuit to assume the forms and powers of five different Konami heroes. You’re prompted to choose three out of these five heroes at the start of your playthrough, which limits Rikkuru’s transformation ability somewhat. This, along with a couple of branching stage paths along the way, is presumably meant to enhance the game’s replay value.

Your five potential teammates are Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Bill Rizer from Contra, Goemon from Ganbare Goemon, Getsu Fūma from Getsu Fūma Den, and Upa from Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. Each has his own signature attack. These generally either inflict more damage than Rikkuru’s regular shot, have better range, or sport some other miscellaneous special property. Upa’s magic rattle retains its ability to change enemies into helpful platforms, for example. The real standout here is Bill. His machine gun can be aimed in four directions and its bullets travel the full length of the screen. It’s clear the game as a whole was not balanced around this, as he makes mincemeat out of anything in his path, including the final boss.

The obvious power of these hero characters is limited by their temporary nature. Rikkuru must acquire a specific power-up icon before he’s able to transform. Once he does, he only has sixty seconds in which to enjoy his new abilities. Taking damage while transformed will shave five seconds off that. On the plus side, the timer can be extended by picking up the same health kits that would normally refill Rikkuru’s health meter. It’s also quite common to come across another transformation item before your first one has expired, meaning that you can simply change form again the very instant you revert. In practice, it’s easy to spend the majority of your time transformed if you so desire.

The majority of Wai Wai World 2 is made up of side-scrolling action-platforming with a heavy emphases on combat. There few surprisingly few instant death pits or other serious environmental hazards to negotiate. You mostly walk forward, blow away bad guys as they come into view, and grab any helpful goodies you can until you reach a stage boss. It’s a rudimentary take on the genre that never reaches a Mega Man, let alone Ninja Gaiden, degree of intensity. One gets the impression that this was made with younger gamers in mind, similar to many of Capcom’s Disney-licensed releases of the period.

Every area you visit is based on a specific Konami title, primarily the same ones the playable cast is drawn from. They all look great and really capture the essence of their source material. Much of the soundtrack consists of slightly tweaked versions of iconic tunes from these same games. A few levels break from the norm and adopt an entirely different mode of play. There are shooter segments based on Gradius and TwinBee, a Road Fighter-inspired overhead vehicular combat trial, some sliding block puzzles, and even an homage to arcade mainstay Frogger. Although brief, these interludes are well-made and serve their purpose by preventing the rather basic main gameplay from growing monotonous.

Wai Wai World 2 is fine for what it is: A short, simple, slight experience that pays duly gleeful homage to a host of Konami classics. It’s briskly paced, controls well, and supports two-player simultaneous play. There’s a lot to like about it. I can’t help but miss the last game’s open-ended design, however. Sure, it was rough around the edges and punishingly difficult in spots, but the player-driven progression and sprawling, secret-packed stages really made you feel like you were inhabiting all these eccentric video game realms. There was a genuine sense of adventure there, whereas the sequel comes across more like a guided tour or an on-rails amusement park thrill ride. A hypothetical third entry in the series that combined the best aspects of both its predecessors could have been an all-time Famicom great.

We never got that perfect Wai Wai World game. What we’re left with instead are two distinct, largely worthwhile takes on the same kooky concept that we’re free to enjoy on their own terms. I guess I can live with that.

Pop’n TwinBee (Super Famicom)

Yowza! Somebody get Dr. Wily there to an orthodontist, stat!

Last August, I covered Pop’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures, the unique platforming spin-off from Konami’s fondly-remembered TwinBee series of shooters. Despite its sumptuous presentation and some genuinely fun ideas, I ultimately found Rainbow Bell Adventures to be a mediocre product dragged down by its uninspired level design. A real pity. I still enjoyed the art style and characters quite a bit, though, so I figured it was about time to give the series another chance. What better place to start than with Rainbow Bell’s “sister game” on the Super Famicom, 1993’s Pop’n TwinBee? Is it a better shooter than its counterpart is a platformer? I’m pleased to report that it most certainly is, as well as being the Super Nintendo enthusiast’s single best choice for a two-player shooter experience.

First, though, a brief refresher on TwinBee as a whole. Debuting in Japanese arcades in 1985, the series primarily consists of vertically-scrolling shooters that see the player facing off against a mixture of air and ground-based enemies. The core gameplay is clearly patterned on Namco’s iconic Xevious, with the primary differences being TwinBee’s lighthearted tone, soft pastel art style, focus on simultaneous two-player action, and bell juggling power-up system. Depending on who you ask, TwinBee may or may not have been the first of the so-called “cute-‘em-ups.” Some point to Namco’s King and Balloon from 1980 instead, for example. In any case, it was indisputably one of the early pioneers of the style and would prove to be a major success for Konami domestically over the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s, branching out to include toys, manga, and even a radio drama before fizzling out (along with the shooter genre as a whole) around the turn of the century. Overseas markets were another story. Only one TwinBee game was ever officially released In North America. This was the second game, Moero TwinBee: Cinnamon-hakase o Sukue! (“Burn TwinBee: To the Rescue of Dr. Cinnamon!”), which made an unimpressive showing on the NES under the new title Stinger in 1987. Europe fared slightly better with four additional releases for various systems. Still, TwinBee never exactly became a household name outside its homeland. Was it too cute? Too Japanese? Too poorly/weakly marketed? I’ll leave that debate for another day.

Pop’n TwinBee opens with a cut scene in which Light and Pastel (the interpid pilots of the blue TwinBee and pink WinBee ships, respectively) receive a distress call while patrolling the skies of Donburi Island. The caller, a girl named Madoka, tells the pair that her normally kind grandfather Dr. Mardock was driven insane by a bonk on the head (yes, really) and has since dedicated himself to conquering the world with his army of acorn robots. Pastel and Light swiftly blast off to repel the acorn invasion and knock some sense back into the mad doctor in the process. It’s a slight and silly justification for the mayhem to come, but perfectly in keeping with the cartoonish sensibilities of the franchise. No complaints here.

The adventure ahead consists of seven stages. This isn’t a ton by genre standards. Thankfully, most of them are fairly long, so an average playthrough should take you around 40-60 minutes (depending on how often you die), which is a near ideal length for the sort of simple “pick up and play” experience that shooters are known for. It’s a fairly smooth ride, too, with much less in the way of slowdown and other performance issues than most other SNES shooters.

As mentioned above, players are tasked with defeating both air and ground enemies on the way to each stage’s end boss. Airborne targets are dispatched with your standard shot, while grounded foes are only vulnerable to the short range bombs that your anthropomorphic ship hurls down at them with its noodley Mickey Mouse arms.

That’s not all, though. When things get desperate, you can also opt to unleash a chibi attack, which functions like the screen clearing bombs from other shooters. Dozens of miniature “chibi” versions of your ship flood the screen, destroying most standard enemies outright and dealing hefty damage to bosses while also rendering you invincible for a few seconds. The downside, of course, is that your chibi attacks have a limited number of uses.

Finally, your ship can punch with its gloved fists. This attack has a very short range (naturally) and requires you to charge it up for a couple seconds by holding down the bomb button. Although risky, the punch deals heavy damage and can actually destroy some incoming enemy bullets if timed properly.

Even with all these offensive options, your craft is still quite slow and weak by default, and that’s where the (in)famous bells come in. Shooting any of the smiling clouds you fly past will dislodge a golden bell that drops down toward the bottom of the screen. You can catch these right away and be rewarded with some bonus points, but it’s almost always a better idea to “juggle” the bells by shooting them repeatedly. This will cause them to bounce back up toward the top of the screen and, after several successive shots, start to cycle through six additional colors, each one of which grants you access to a different power-up. You have blue (speed boost), green (satellite helper ships that boost your firepower), silver (a bigger, stronger main shot), purple (a triple spread shot), pink (shield), and flashing (extra chibi ammo). Like in most games of this kind, the majority of these powers are lost if you die. The silver and purple bells remain in effect even then, however, which is uncommonly forgiving for a shooter.

In fact, if there’s one phrase that describes the Pop’n TwinBee experience generally, it’s “uncommonly forgiving.” This is no arcade port, but an original title created with the Super Famicom in mind. As such, the designers opted to move away from a lot of the quarter-munching (or yen-munching) qualities that define other entries in the series. Your ship can no longer have its arms destroyed and bomb attacks disabled, for example. More dramatically, one-hit deaths have given way to a health bar and enemies drop health refilling hearts with fair frequency. Couple this with ready access to the shields provided via pink bell pickups (each of which adds another four extra hits on top of your standard health bar) and your cute little robot bee is a real juggernaut that puts the fragile spaceships from most other shooters to shame. Even the bell juggling is more forgiving in this installment, since it takes multiple shots to change a bell’s color and this means you’re less likely to do so by mistake and lose out on the specific power-up you’ve been waiting for. Experienced shooter players will find that the combination of refillable health and shields on demand makes them feel just about invincible, at least on the standard difficulty setting. Higher difficulties render things a bit more hectic, but the action never approachs arcade shooter levels of brutality. Not even close. The only potential hurdle to overcome is the fact that you don’t have extra lives. Die and you’ll have to spend one of your limited continues to restart the level from the beginning. Still, dying ain’t exactly easy.

Whether this lack of difficulty is a pro or a con is going to vary by individual. If you’re the type that plays these games strictly for the teeth-grinding challenge and bragging rights, you’ll likely get bored quick. If you’re a shooter novice looking for an entry point to the genre, you’re just as likely to be enraptured. Personally, I found myself occupying the middle ground: I never struggled with the game at any point, but I had a pleasant time just kicking back with it for a bit and basking in its loopy atmosphere.

So far, we have what amounts to a cute, colorful, rather easy vertical shooter. Not bad by any means, but what’s the big deal? Well, the real reason I was so emphatic about this being the better of the two SNES TwinBee titles is its amazing multiplayer implementation. Shooters with two-player simultaneous options are already rare enough on the system. Offhand, Taito’s Darius Twin is the only other one that comes to mind. Pop’n TwinBee easily eclipses Darius in this department thanks to no less than three meaningful gameplay enhancements exclusive to its two-player mode. By maneuvering their ships close to each other, players can swap health back and forth, allowing a stronger player to “heal” a weakened one and keep them in the fight longer. Players can also grab and toss each other around the screen in order in order to dish out heavy damage to foes. Don’t worry, though: Players that get tossed around this way are invincible until they recover.

The final multiplayer-only option, “couple mode,” might just be the best of them. While couple mode is activated, enemies will focus the majority of their attacks on player one. This allows for a less skilled player to keep pace with a more adept partner. It’s such a simple, profound gameplay tweak that I’m amazed it never caught on.

On the graphics and sound front, it’s old school Konami glitz all the way. The armada of killer acorns, walking pineapples, pandas, and baby dolls you do battle with are all packed with personality, the backgrounds are intricately detailed and work in some lovely transparency and line scrolling effects, and there are even short animated cut scenes between stages that add to the Saturday morning cartoon feel by depicting the characters engaged in various wacky situations. The soundtrack (contributed by eight separate composers!) strikes just the right balance between whimsy and intensity.

If Pop’n TwinBee has any true flaw other than the debatably lacking difficulty, it would have to be the scoring. Simply put: The points don’t matter. Most shooters will award the player extra lives or other perks upon reaching certain scoring milestones. Here, the only reason to chase those high scores is to compete, either with yourself or rival players. It’s a missed opportunity, albeit far from a deal breaking one like Rainbow Bell Adventures’ meandering, repetitive stage layouts. If you’re partial to vertical shooters, aggressively cute pixilated romps, superb multiplayer experiences, or any combination of the above, Pop’n TwinBee is a no-brainer. As an added bonus, both the Japanese version I have and the European PAL format releases are quite inexpensive at the time of this writing.

Therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee…and a lucky friend on controller two.

Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius (Super Famicom)

Nothing to see here, folks. Just your average, everyday flying baby.

There are easily dozens of Japanese video game franchises which have never seen an entry published in North America. Many are based on obscure anime and manga licenses with zero overseas recognition factor. Others might be packed with the sort of adult content that gets American moral watchdog groups up in arms or be deeply rooted in Japanese history and culture. If there’s a single such series the average retro gamer has probably at least heard of, it would have to be Konami’s Parodius line of surreal “cute-‘em’-ups.” Even as far back as the late 1990s, I can recall screenshots circulating online along with breathless descriptions of pitched battles against penguin armies, hostile corn on the cob, kitten-headed battleships, scantily clad showgirls, and more. Frankly, I’m amazed it’s taken me this long to dive into the series.

Parodius started its run on Japanese MSX home computers with Parodiusu: Tako wa Chikyū o Sukū (“Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth”) in 1988. As the name hints, Parodius is a parody of the legendary space shooter Gradius and its many sequels. This is neither the time nor the place to go into a ton of detail on the Gradius games. Suffice to say that the original Gradius from 1985 is probably the single most influential horizontally scrolling shooter ever made. Like Double Dragon, Street Fighter II, Super Mario Bros., or Doom, it wasn’t the first of its kind, but it had just the right combination of groundbreaking new features and fortuitous timing needed to become emblematic of an entire genre for decades to come. A total of five proper Parodius titles were released before the series fizzled out in 1996. The one I’m looking at today is the fourth entry, 1995’s Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius (“Chatting Parodius Live”) for the Super Famicom.

Parodius games aren’t known for their complex plots and this one is no exception. An introductory cut scene (presented in a super grave, melodramatic style right out of a Gundam anime) depicts a mob of angry chickens, moai heads, and other classic series baddies flying toward the earth while ominous music plays. In a nice touch, all the player characters from previous games that were omitted from the roster this time around have also joined up with the enemy fleet to get revenge for being snubbed by the developers. It’s up to your sixteen heroes to stop them.

You heard right: There are sixteen playable characters available here, each with their own unique suite of weapons and power-ups. In addition to series staples like the Vic Viper and Lord British ships from Gradius and the TwinBee and WinBee ships from TwinBee, you can also select from a motley crew of penguins, cats, fairies, babies, octopuses, and even dancing stick figures riding paper airplanes. Though the variety can be a tad bewildering at first, experimenting with all these different “ships” in order to suss out which best suit your personal playstyle is a big part of the fun. Genre savvy players will also notice that many of the characters have weapon loadouts intended to mimic those from other, non-Konami shooters. Mike the cat’s armaments are patterned on the ship from Taito’s Darius, for example, while infant Upa’s were inspired by Seibu Kaihatsu’s Raiden. It’s no wonder that the credits at the end of Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius enthusiastically declare “We love shooting games!”

A couple months back, I played through Konami Wai Wai World for the Famicom, a 1988 game that anticipated later crossover releases like Super Smash Bros. by combining a ton of different Konami characters and settings into a single fanservicey package. Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius is essentially the same idea, except presented as a shooter instead of a platformer. This applies not just to the playable cast, but to the game’s eight stages as well. While the stage themes in other Parodius games tended to be based on whatever wacky concepts caught the developers’ fancies, the ones in this installment are different in that they’re mostly spoofs of other Konami games and franchises. You’ll find yourself blasting your way through levels based on Ganbare Goemon (aka Legend of the Mystical Ninja), TwinBee, Gradius III, Xexex, and even the light gun shooter Lethal Enforcers and the Tokimeki Memorial high school dating simulators. The sole level that doesn’t seem to be based on a specific Konami game is the first, which instead has a penguin disco theme, complete with a rousing remix of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It)” complimenting the action.

What’s the deal with the title, though? How does live chatting factor into all this? Well, the cartridge includes a special expansion chip, the SA1. Beyond boosting the console’s processing speed considerably, the SA1 also enables data compression. It’s this latter feature that allowed the developers to cram a massive amount of digitized speech samples into the game. These take the form of a running gameplay commentary by a very excited old Japanese man. In his opening speech at the start of the game, he identifies himself as Tako, the octopus hero of the first Parodius. I’ve heard that his dialogue is mostly a mixture of gameplay hints, corny jokes, and mocking you whenever you lose a life. Personally, I can’t understand a word of it and generally turn the commentary track off in the options.

Gameplay is mostly textbook Gradius. You’ll fly from left to right, shooting down waves of enemies on the way to the stage boss and keeping your eyes peeled for the all-important power-up capsules. Collecting these cycles through the various upgrades listed on your power-up bar in turn. Once the upgrade you want is highlighted, you can cash in your capsules to equip it, which then starts the whole process over again. Getting hit and losing a life removes all your active power-ups and sends you back to a checkpoint earlier in the stage. Also present are the gold bell items from the TwinBee series. Picking these up gives you bonus points. If you shoot the bells repeatedly first, however, they’ll change to a number of different colors that each grant you a temporary boon instead. These include invincibility or a single-use screen clearing bomb attack. One last thing to watch out for are the hidden fairies, which are revealed by shooting at seemingly empty parts of each stage. There are 70 of these in total and collecting them all will unlock a stage select feature. A two player option is available, although it’s sadly not simultaneous and involves the players alternating turns whenever one of them loses a life.

These are the basics, but Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius goes above and beyond by providing the player with some very extensive option menus. In addition to customizing the button layout, you can choose how many lives you start with, whether you’ll respawn instantly when you die or be sent back to a checkpoint, and even whether you want to manage your power-up bar yourself or have the computer purchase upgrades for you automatically. Best of all are the many difficulty options. Play ranges all the way from childishly simple on the lowest settings to a downright hellish ordeal on the highest. I started out using the default settings and found it to be a very happy medium. The action was just hectic enough that I had to pay attention and focus, yet not so crazy that I had undue trouble making progress once I did. Unusually for a game of this kind, the cartridge even includes a save battery so that it can keep track of your option settings, high scores, and fairies collected between sessions. The combination of so many distinct player characters and so many meaningful ways to tweak the gameplay itself results in an unprecedented degree of replay value for a shooter of its time.

Between its sheer depth and breadth, the sterling audiovisual polish you’d expect from Konami, and the pure weirdness factor, Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius is easily the best shooter I’ve played to date on Nintendo’s 16-bit machine. The only thing that comes close to holding it back is the slowdown. Even with that SA1 chip working overtime, there’s often more action taking place on screen than the hardware can easily juggle. While the framerate doesn’t chug as often or as badly as it does in, say, Gradius III and Super R-Type, it’s still a far cry from silky smooth much of the time. Apart from that annoyance, this is a remarkable game that every classic shooter fan should experience, either in this original incarnation or via one of the later enhanced ports to the PlayStation, Saturn, or PSP.

With everything it has to offer, I know I’ll be revisiting Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius regularly to try out new characters, new strategies, and higher difficulties. Plus, it’s the only game where I can nuke a skyscraper-sized anime schoolgirl with homing missiles. So far.

Konami Wai Wai World (Famicom)

Getting high with a penguin? That’s our Goemon! *laugh track*

At long last, it’s time to take on Konami Wai Wai World! Before Marvel vs. Capcom, before Super Smash Bros., before…uh, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, I guess, there was this ambitious 1988 attempt to combine characters from no less than eight separate Konami properties into a single Famicom crossover extravaganza. The name turns out to be quite fitting when you’re dealing with so many playable characters, since “wai wai” is a Japanese onomatopoeia for the din of a loud, crowded area. I’ve been dying to play and review this one for a while, but I wanted to do the same for at least one game in each series represented here first.

Oddly enough, there was also a more obscure altered version of this game released for Japanese mobile phones in 2006 which replaced a few of the licensed characters (King Kong and Mikey) with ones actually owned by Konami. I’ll be reviewing the original Famicom release here.

As our journey begins, Dr. Cinnamon (creator of the ships from the TwinBee games) summons the superhero Konami Man and tells him Konami World is in crisis. An alien invader has kidnapped six of the land’s mightiest heroes and is holding them prisoner. Only by rescuing the six captives and joining forces with them can the day be saved. Dr. Cinnamon also sends his sexy gynoid robot creation Konami Lady along to help. Ew. Hope the old creep hosed her off real good first.

These two characters play identically, allowing for two player simultaneous action. This feature is quite rare in an open-ended game with exploration elements like this and is a big point in Wai Wai World’s favor if you happen to have a friend around who might want to join in. Your starting characters only have basic punch and kick attacks initially, but can gain the ability to shoot lasers and fly by locating special items later on in the game. If your entire party is ever wiped out, Konami Man and Konami Lady will both be revived back at the lab automatically in lieu of a game over.

Dr. Cinnamon’s lab serves as your main hub and contains three numbered doors. The doctor himself resides behind door number one. He can heal your party, dispense passwords which allow you to take a break and continue your game later, and give you tips about the various characters and their special abilities. His brother Saimon is also here and will revive your dead party members in exchange for 100 bullets each; bullets being the game’s combined currency and special weapon ammunition. If you’re playing the game in the original Japanese as I did, here’s a tip: The last two options on Dr. Cinnamon’s menu (character resurrection and password generation) are the only ones you really need to know.

The second door contains the main level select screen. Six stages are available at the start, one for each of the six kidnapped heroes. You’re not free to complete them in any order you want, though, as some stages require a specific character’s special ability to access. This seems at first like a bit of a missed opportunity for a more open, Mega Man type level structure, but the challenge does increase substantially in the latter half of the game, so it would seem to be the designers’ way of implementing a smooth difficulty curve. Fair enough. The third door leads to the final two levels. It can only be opened after you’ve rescued the entire main cast from their respective stages.

Except for the penultimate one, the various stages in Konami Wai Wai World are presented in standard side-scrolling action platforming style and each is based a different game series specific to the hero you’ll find there. The characters you’ll need to rescue (in the order I did it) are: Goemon (Ganbare Goemon), Simon Belmont (Castlevania), Mikey Walsh (The Goonies), King Kong (King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch), Getsu Fūma (Getsu Fūma Den), and Moai (Gradius). Every character except for Fūma is locked in a cage when you first encounter them, so your first task in most levels is to locate the key. These keys are usually guarded by bosses, although a couple are just laying out in the open ready to be collected.

Each character you rescue joins your party permanently, and you can switch over to controlling them at any time. They each have their own unique attacks and health meter, making this aspect of the game seem a bit like a dry run for Konami’s first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game the following year. As mentioned, dead characters can be resurrected back at home base, but this is costly and you’re far better off keeping a close eye on the life gauge and switching out to a healthier hero before your current one kicks the bucket.

In addition to a primary melee attack and a ranged sub-weapon that must be found hidden elsewhere within their respective stages, the characters also have various special abilities and quirks. Mikey, for example, can fit through small passages the other characters can’t. Kong can jump higher than the others and destroy some breakable walls with his ranged attack, but he’s too large to fit through certain tight spaces. Picking the correct character for a given section of a level can go a long way in alleviating the game’s difficulty, so be sure to familiarize yourself with how each one handles. Each character even has their own theme song that plays whenever you have them selected, so the game’s background music is tied to the character you’re controlling rather than stage you’re currently on. Pretty cool.

Beyond the sub-weapons for the eight main characters, some levels also have other important items, like armor to boost your whole party’s defense or a cape that lets Konami Man and Konami Lady fly by holding down the jump button. Some of these appear in tantalizingly unreachable locations quite early on in the game. Be sure to make note of exactly where so you can return and collect them later when you have the necessary capabilities. You should also be on the lookout for doorways in a few of the stages which will take you to optional bonus games you can play in order to hopefully garner a few extra bullets. These take the form of various games of chance involving dice, cards, and a slot machine.

Once you’ve liberated all the kidnapped heroes, you can finally open the third door in Dr. Cinnamon’s lab and take on the final two stages. Level seven is, surprisingly, an overhead shooter stage that you can choose to play through as either TwinBee or the Vic Viper ship from Gradius (or both, if there are two players). This was actually my favorite part of the whole game. The amount of work that went into just this one level must have been tremendous. There are multiple backgrounds and enemy types, an awesome boss, and a complete power-up system with shields, options, shot upgrades, and even the bell juggling mechanics from TwinBee. In essence, the designers implemented the complete framework for a competent vertical shooter game just for this one stage. The sheer excess of it all is a sight to behold.

Survive the shooter portion and you’re off to the final platforming stage for a climactic showdown with the alien invaders. I won’t spoil it for you here, but one bit of advice: Try to make sure either Konami Man or Konami Lady is still alive after the final boss fight. Their flight ability may come in handy.

Konami Wai Wai World naturally sounds like a Konami fan’s dream come true. By and large, it delivers the non-stop action and fanservice it promises, although there are some regrettable design decisions you should be aware of going in. The biggest one is the scrolling. For whatever reason, the screen in the platforming sections refuses to start moving until your character is quite close to the edge. You need to be something like 4/5ths of the way over on a given side before the scrolling kicks in. Because of this, you’re constantly encountering enemies that pop up right in your face, giving you very little time to react. Expect to eat a lot of extra damage due to this.

Echoing the later TMNT yet again, there’s also very little in the way of balance within your party. Some characters are extremely useful. Goemon’s pipe attack is swift and can strike enemies above him, King Kong’s punches hit like a speeding truck, and Simon’s whip is slow, but has great reach and his boomerang crosses can damage enemies multiple times. Poor Mikey, on the other hand, has short range on his main attack and an unremarkable sub-weapon, too. You’d never actually want to use Mikey in combat unless you were desperate and had no other choice. It’s always a pity to discover a favorite character isn’t represented particularly well in a crossover like this.

Another major annoyance is the cost to resurrect dead characters. The price (100 bullets) is pretty manageable early on when you only have a few characters on your team. If you manage to get your party wiped out in the late game, though, you’ll find out the hard way that grinding out 400-600 bullets at a stretch drags the game to a screeching halt, since enemies only drop them in increments of five.

On the plus side, the game looks very nice. The stage backgrounds and bosses in particular are phenomenal in most cases. There are also a ton of different creative enemy designs, with each stage having its own unique assortment of baddies. The music is mostly lifted whole cloth from earlier Konami titles, but with stone cold classic tracks like Castlevania’s “Vampire Killer” and the overworld theme from Getsu Fūma Den, you’re not likely to mind all that much.

Konami Wai Wai world isn’t the most balanced game around and the shoddy scrolling and occasional bouts of forced currency grinding can try your patience at times. For old school Konami fans, though, it’s absolutely worth checking out. This is a game where Mikey Walsh can battle demons in hell and Simon Belmont can jump into the cockpit of the Vic Viper and blast off to fight aliens. I just can’t stay mad at a game like that, even if some of the more obnoxious bits do make me scratch my head and ask: Why? Why?

Pop’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures (Super Famicom)

You can ring my beeeeeeell. Ring my bell.

In 1985, Konami released the first TwinBee game to arcades. As far back as the first entry in the genre, 1962’s Space War, shooter video games almost invariably featured science fiction or military themes and tended to be presented in as realistic a fashion as the hardware would allow. TwinBee broke with convention by opting for a cartoon aesthetic, embracing bright pastel colors, adorable little spaceships with white-gloved Mickey Mouse arms, and a whimsical power-up system that involved juggling and collecting colored bells. The game was a huge hit, mainly in Japan, and would inspire numerous direct sequels as well as its own sub-genre of lighthearted shooters (“cute-’em-ups”), which also includes Sega’s Fantasy Zone and Success’ Cotton.

By 1994, though, the arcade style shooter’s mainstream popularity was on the decline. What was hot? Mascot platformers! Mario and Sonic were raking in cash at an astonishing rate and it seems like everyone wanted in on that action. Since the robot bee ships from TwinBee already had tons of personality, a colorful world to inhabit, and even the requisite limbs needed for platforming, it must have seemed like a natural fit to someone at Konami because they released Pop’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures that same year in Japan and Europe.

I played the Japanese version, since I don’t have the necessary equipment to run European PAL video format games properly. I understand that the publisher opted to remove all the game’s dialogue rather than translating it from Japanese for the international release, however, so at least I’m not missing out on anything in that department.

The story of Rainbow Bell Adventures may leave you with a bit of deja vu. The maniacal Dr. Warumon is attacking with his army of EvilBee robots. His good guy counterpart Dr. Cinnamon must fight off the invasion with his own TwinBee ships, piloted by his youthful assistants Light, Pastel, and Mint. So yeah, it’s pretty much Mega Man. Dr. Warumon even looks just like Dr. Wily in a Halloween vampire cape. But it’s just an excuse to zip around collecting bells, so I’ll give it a pass.

The first thing you’ll notice when starting up the game is that it represents the colorful TwinBee style well. The graphics are crisp and bright, the music is bouncy, and everything is just as cute as can be. There are even high-pitched anime style voice clips for your ship. Everything has that impeccable polish you would expect from ’90s Konami. Rainbow Bell Adventures is not a perfect game overall by any means, but I can find no real flaws at all in the art and music.

You start out by picking between three characters. You have TwinBee (the blue one), WinBee (the pink one), and GwinBee (the green one). They’re differentiated by two factors: Rocket charge time and punch charge time. Your rocket will launch you forward when fully charged, a mechanic which seems to have been lifted directly from Konami’s own Rocket Knight Adventures, and your charged punch takes the form of a projectile attack which will deal huge damage to enemies and is mostly useful against bosses, since common enemies just don’t require that much damage to take out. WinBee has a fast rocket charge and a slow punch charge, GwinBee has the inverse, and TwinBee is the default character with equal charge times for both. In practice, I found WinBee’s quick rocket boosts made her the best character for traversing standard stages and GwinBee’s fast punches made him a natural boss wrecker. I didn’t end up using poor TwinBee much, since he fell into the common “jack of all trades, master of none” category. You’re able to change characters each time you die and lives are unlimited, so there’s no need to worry about being stuck with a setup that doesn’t suit you.

The platforming itself is fairly standard, aside from the rocket dynamic. You can kill most enemies by jumping on them or by punching them. Being a TwinBee game, you still power up by collecting colored bells from defeated foes. These will grant abilities like melee weapons to extend your punch range, a gun for attacking distant targets, temporary invincibility, and more. Your collected bells fly up into the air and scatter whenever you take a hit, but you’re able to re-collect a few of them if you’re quick about it, similar to how you can recover some of your dropped rings in Sonic the Hedgehog.

Bosses are large and impressive looking, but not too tough to deal with. Just dodging their simple attack patterns and landing four or five charge punches will send even the final boss packing in short order. They’re a bit tougher than your standard Mario or Sonic opponents, but not by much at all.

One interesting option is two-player simultaneous play. The bad news here is that it’s kind of a mess. The game’s camera will only track player one, so player two has to stick close by or do their best to fumble around until they finally find their way back onto the screen or die trying. More fun is the battle mode, which is certainly no replacement for Street Fighter II or Mario Kart in terms of competitive play on the Super Nintendo, but is amusing enough in short bursts.

The goal in each of the main game’s 35 stages is either to reach the exit or to defeat a boss. Taking a cue from Super Mario World, many of the levels have multiple exits, each leading to a different stage. Unlike in Mario World, all exits are shown on the map screen you can access by pausing the game, so these branching paths don’t constitute secrets in the traditional sense.

Unfortunately, the design of these levels is Rainbow Bell Adventures’ fatal flaw. They’re sprawling, frequently labyrinthine, and wrap around themselves in Pac-Man fashion. Rather than conveying any true sense of place, they come off as bland abstract mazes cobbled together in an arbitrary manner from the same handful of background tiles. They’re formless, aimless, and lack the big “set piece” moments levels in other Konami platformers of the period were known for, like the swinging chandeliers and rotating rooms of Super Castlevania IV or Contra III’s insane missile riding sequence. There are a few different stage themes (ice, cave, water, and so on), but only a few and each repeats often. To make matters worse, enemy variety is pretty lacking and most enemy types appear in most levels. The end result of all this is that the stages in Rainbow Bell Adventures just sort of blur together into an inchoate mass with all the flavor of a bowl of cold oatmeal. It looks great and controls acceptably, but it’s really tough to recommend a platformer with such weak level design. That’s the linchpin of the whole genre, after all!

Rainbow Bell Adventures isn’t a truly awful title. Rather, it’s a lot like another Super Famicom platformer I played recently that never came out here in North America: Super Back to the Future Part II. Plenty of surface charm masking a thoroughly average game. Konami made a good call by not bringing this one over. Rainbow Bell Adventures simply isn’t up to the nearly superhuman standards of their other 16-bit releases on the Super Nintendo around this time. Or the Sega Genesis, for that matter. If you can get it cheap or you’re an obsessive TwinBee superfan, you might as well give Rainbow Bell Adventures a try. General audiences can do much better.