| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Platformer; reg=UC] |
| | | Steam version of what is currently a $200 cart-only Famicom (and EU NES) game, developed and published in an emulated thingy by City Connection.
Oh man a NES/FC jump-on-things platformer, this could be my kind of jam so I've tried it.
It runs the game smoothly full-screen or windowed, unfiltered by default. The controls work fine, although you're stuck with a few pre-configured button arrangements–but at least one puts Jump on the bottom face button and the other action on the left face button–you could rearrange them more with Steam Input, of course.
There seems to be a bug currently where the game came up with the menus in Japanese; I found clicking the Japanese text line above the unclickable "< English >" in the menu toggled to English. I reported the apparent defaulting to Japanese as a bug in the developer's official bug reporting thread on the Steam forum. They've already had one small patch to fix a couple things that were brought up there, including one involving some menu items that hadn't been translated; maybe that led to this defaulting to Japanese thing somehow.
The Famicom game text itself appears to be entirely in Japanese…unless this is some other bug. Kind of surprised if it hasn't been translated here, since with a ROM you could apply the English fan translation, harumph. I wedged a question about whether or not it's supposed to be coming up in English into my bug report mentioned above, but I'm not holding my breath.
You can pick from what look like probably 4:3 and NTSC play-screen-area aspect ratios, which is a nice option to have. And I like the cute border area art options.
Like a lot of NES/FC games–SMB3 for instance–the tiles on the left and right edges of the screen are prone to flickering when scrolling left/right. In an emulator such as Mesen I would use the emulator's graphic controls to hide the edge areas to keep the flickering off my dumb eyeballs. Can't do that here; on the Steam forum, I've tried suggesting adding it as an option.
At this point I would have just got the FC version off eBay but oh it's nearly $200 cart-only, ah well.
A lot like Mario in terms of basic control except you have to hold DOWN on a jump to squish a baddie, otherwise you get hit. That's gonna take getting used to. Then the other button picks up the squished baddie and you can throw them. ... Like you can do easier with turtles in Mario. ; )
So yeah yeah I should probably just get Mario and dump it to play in Mesen, but I've developed a thing about Mario/Nintendo games now and I don't want to. Anyway this is $10, not $25 like Felix the overpriced Cat (not even on Steam! sheesh). |
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| | | | Oh I see, you get a non-real-time translation eventually via unlocked "Special Snap" screenshots. Huh. ; ) |
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Checking out the new HEBEREKE Enjoy Edition port of Famicom game Hebereke (PAL territories: "UfouRia: The Saga"), the Steam version played on PC!
The PAL region name "UfouRia" might've come from having four characters? Wikipedia: "the North American [NES] localization was cancelled after Sunsoft of America did not approve the game due to its quirky character designs." (What did they think their business model actually was??)
The PAL sprites are different! And I don't think as good--like, PAL main character wears a jacket & beanie, & has huge pupil-less goggle eyes, while the J main character sprite is a cute baby chick in a winter pom-pom hat! & the 2nd character I met was a kid in a cat(?) suit, whereas in PAL they're a young dinosaur (I mean an actual bipedal animal, not a human in a costume--I think?) w/ massive dead staring eyes. (I guess it was likely these versions of the sprites that Sunsoft of America saw & rejected, sheesh.)
The English translation PAL territories got was...well, you can see it & the sprites alongside the new(?) translation in Enjoy Edition: looks like the PAL translation threw out the Japanese script & made up its own story, diverging about as possible from the Japanese text, at least as shown side-by-side in Enjoy. In PAL, the first character meeting needed that #1 ol' writer's crutch, amnesia, to explain why they fought; the Japanese text, in the Enjoy translation, did not.
Wikipedia summarizes:
"In the original Japanese [...] Hebe [seeks] his colleagues [...] who fell into time and space during a large-scale war, in order to fight an alien [...] and return to their homeworlds. In the western localization, Bop-Louie [...] stumbles upon a crater, into which his friends fall. Bop-Louie climbs in, but suddenly blanks out. He finds out that he must find [...] his other friends, all of which suffer from amnesia and take on Bop-Louie as a threat."
The version played here is JP (eBay $200 cart-only), with delightful interactions. The 2 boss battles I've had so far have been full of character & creative & challenging gameplay.
You can pick what looks like 4:3 or NTSC aspect, unfiltered (sharp) by default, but the L/R screen edges flash when scrolling, w/ no option to hide them. The optional sidebar art options are pretty nice.
You hold DOWN while jumping on baddies to hit them, which takes some getting used to--but you also find more abilities as you go along.
Oh, O-chan (cat suit) is a girl! ( https://city-connection.co.jp/hebereke/en/ )
When I first ran the game, the main menu came up in Japanese--I had to click the Japanese menu item ABOVE the "- ENGLISH -" line to switch it to English.
In the default "Type FC" control layout, Famicom button B is on the bottom face button, & FC button A is on the right face button--which is CLEARLY sick & wrong; everybody knows Jump goes on the bottom face button, which means THAT's got to be Famicom A, & then the LEFT face button has to be Famicom B--because to make Mario run and jump you hold B with the tip of your right thumb to run, then press A with the base of your right thumb to jump while still holding B--& you can't do that if "A" is on the right face button, higher up than "B," unless you're gonna turn your thumb halfway upside-down!
Reported as a bug. Mario is rolling over in his grave.
I don't get why--even if they didn't want to or couldn't for some reason edit the translation into the Famicom ROM itself, like the fan translation (probably?) does--they didn't just show the translation live in the right-hand sidebar while the conversation happens, rather than making you go look it up in the sidebar of a screenshot afterwards.
Looking the game's story translation up in the menus as "Special Snap" simulated screenshots that unlock with annoying notifications sometimes before, sometimes during, or sometimes after you sit through an in-game conversation in Japanese text for the first time is a pain & takes away from the immediate impact of the conversations. Bizarre!
& it feels deceptive that the Steam store page does not clearly say that the in-game text has been left in Japanese; the videos they show show Japanese text in the port's menu so you figure oh well that's just the Japanese release of Enjoy Edition, of course the English one will be showing English in those animating text balloons--but it doesn't. |
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I *think* the mama bird part didn't quite make sense? And the thing under thing I would totally never would even have thought of looking for without the FAQ. Well I don't know, more likely they're perfectly good puzzles and I'm just awful at Metroidvanias (pretty sure on that second part, anyway ; D).
Also I get really tired of character swapping so that didn't help.
And the triple jumps over lava were just masochistically tight, jeez! And it sounds like on one of them you might actually have to take significant damage--enough to kill instantly unless the player has ground their HP up really high, which they wouldn't really know they needed to do or that it would save them from instant death in this case!
This would'a....man it would'a taken way more patience and skill than I've got to figure this game out and survive it without save states (and a FAQ for at least one or two bits). |
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