| paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Laser_Disc; reg=JPN] |
| | | Combo port pack of two interactive laser-disc anime cartoon arcade games in which you input a stick direction or button press every few seconds based on on-screen hints to keep the hero (or heroine) alive, Dragon's Lair style. But while Dragon's Lair gave very few hints and almost no time to react, forcing you to rely on memory but allowing you to hold an action command down in advance, these two games give clear action instructions and allow a decent reaction time, but don't let you hold an action in advance. This makes them much more twitch action games than memory games, which to my mind is a very good thing.
Time Gal is a giggly futuristic babe with a time-travel pendant, when she's in big trouble she presses it to activate a "Time Stop," then you choose from one of three options for you next move while the action is paused for a few seconds. Two of the three choices lead to instant death, of course, but the death animations for each scene in these games are rather amusing and worth seeing at least once. Time Gal's pendant for some reason takes her to a seemingly random time period, but they all have this in common: something will try to kill her within five seconds of her arrival. Poor Time Gal!
Actually, the scene sequence in Arcade mode is semi-random in both of these games, but you can change this as well as other options (enabling continues, extends, changing lives, hint style, etc) in a "dip-switch" menu. The only annoying thing about the dip-switch menu is that the only way I can find to get back to it is to reset the system. Hm.
Anyway, Time Gal is an immensely appealing character, so cute the way she keeps up a constant patter of laughter and commentary, particularly when she happens to burst out with a heavily-accented English word. Animation quality is high, with most scenes involving the whole background shifting radically in perspective.
Oh, also with both games the video plays back fullscreen, very smooth, with some compression artifacting but nothing that obscures the artwork. Good stuff.
Ninja Hayate, a rather bumbling assassin, complicates the gameplay with diagonal movements, but there's no way he can be as cute as Time Gal and the animation by comparison seems pretty cut-rate, with largely static backgrounds and a heck of a lot of repetition (for instance, in a giant clockworks you dodge a revolving gear once... then again with the same animation).
Both games will sometimes flip the scene horizontally to juggle things up. Although in terms of animation and sound quality they don't rival the Dragon's Lair or Space Ace games, they're much more playable and humorous. Shame they don't use the memory card so you could save your high scores or something. |
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| | | I'm kind of scared that I seem to have thought the prompts for the inputs were intuitive and the input windows were generous, because coming back to the games after all these years, they both seem both *unintuitive* and really strict on their input timing! : o
I also noted originally that you can't "hold an action in advance"; but I think you *can* just input an action repeatedly in anticipation of the prompt--so yeah, that along with memorization from death scene after painful death scene would probably be the way through.
I just have to admit to myself that I really can't play these games! : o My reactions aren't up to it, and anyway I get so distracted watching the gorgeous animation that I'm in no way ready to read and react to the action prompts when they come up. Jeepers!
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Time Gal in DuckStation
Had to resort to save-stating nearly from the start 'cause the input windows are so narrow, even on the easiest "Level" "1"--higher levels do stuff like remove the hint arrows, and may narrow the input timing window even more...although it's so tiny to start with that it's hard to tell if it's getting even smaller.
There seem to be pretty frequent checkpoint even within each single, relatively brief time period scene. I was still quite capable of missing every single super-fast input prompt though! It seems like you're meant to play it more as a memorization game than a reaction game. Maybe this was because they feared the actual animation running time was quite short. I'm quite capable even of missing the brief input window on a memorized input that I'm MASHing here! ; D
The animation that is there IS nice, even in this low-res and somewhat compressed and grainy reproduction--the stylishly nonsensical anime action still comes through. Time Gal laughs, giggles, and chatters to herself nearly non-stop while evading (or not) cascades of ridiculous deadly threats (there's a "subtitles" option but it just seems to print the names of the...monsters, or something?).
In retrospect, I actually got to watch more of the animation here while playing then in the Dragon's Lair and Space Ace games; this seems unintuitive because the input timing was far tighter here--but actually, BECAUSE it was so nearly impossible to succeed on initial reaction, and you fall back on memory after (multiple) failures, you're not so much needing to hyper-focus on the input hints, so you can watch more of the full screen; also, since I died at least once on probably over 90% of the input prompts, I probably saw each little animation segment more frequently than in those other games--or at least, more immediately repeated, thanks to being able to use DuckStation's quick save state saving and loading, which I have bound to L3 and R3 on my DualSense pad.
Still, I'm pretty sure I far prefer the Dragon's Lair / Space Ace style of being able to play largely on reaction rather than memorization! I can see myself playing through those games again--Time Gal doesn't feel nearly as tempting to replay, I suppose because I incline toward (re)action games.
Even the flashing animation objects that--not counting the optional hint arrows and button--tell you what input to press aren't always quite accurate, time-wise; some, like the one at 33.10, flash to indicate an input well BEFORE the input is accepted--so if you enter it then, nothing happens, and you somehow have to know when AFTER that it will work--so, some trial and error too.
More trial and error: some scenes end with a three-option multiple-choice text prompt (thank goodness for the English text option!) on what action to take next, rather than a timed input; two out of three lead to a quick death--and which one doesn't isn't always obviously logical, so maybe this was a way to get a few deaths out of new players who were freakishly good at the timed inputs. : P
There are continues you can enable but you have to remember to use SELECT to give yourself up to 9 credits BEFORE pressing START--the second time--to start the actual LaserDisc-style gameplay. Pressing SELECT after that doesn't make the credit-entering sound, so as far as I can tell, nine credits is all you get.
These games were LaserDisc-based arcade games, originally; anime production house Toei Animation produced the animation sequences. |
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| | | | ^ Oh huh last time I played Time Gal for the YouTube channel--years ago--I got copyright claims on music in a few early (all I made it through ; D) scenes; didn't get any this time! So wait copyright claims on game music can actually get BETTER with time??? = D (Or was it just because I was talking this time and obscuring the music? ^ _^) |
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| | | (Ninja Hayate was known as "Revenge of the Ninja" in a Western port for Sega CD!)
Ninja Hayate in DuckStation
Ninja Hayate is WAAAAAY more generous on inputs than Time Gal; in Time Gal, I felt like I barely had time to react to most input indicators as I tried playing through--pretty much died on almost every one at least once--whereas here, I COULD play on reaction to the on-screen indicator; heck, it felt more generous even than the games in Dragon's Lair Trilogy (PC/Steam) in terms of time; not only that, a few times here I DEFINITELY accidentally clicked the action button (Circle) instead of a direction on the d-pad--but it passed the input check anyway and let me keep playing! = oo
There's a slight quirk with this earlier indicator, though--usually, input isn't accepted until a bit of time AFTER the indicator appears, so very often I'd do the input when the indicator appeared, but nothing would happen; then, I would generally just do it again, and the second time would be the RIGHT time or something and it would work; I tended to forget to mash away at the newfangled DIAGONAL directional inputs for some reason, so stumbled more with those, but eventually sorta got the hang of it.
Another thing that seems to work better even than the DLT games is the arrow/button indicator placement, where the button appears in the center of the screen, and the arrows appear toward the matching side, instead of in a cluster in the lower middle as in DLT; and the arrows might also be a bit larger than in DLT. Combined with the more limited, less flashy animation here, it was actually possible to watch the animated scenes! Whereas in DLT, I had to laser-focus on the guide cluster UI, and any animation I was able to see was only out of the corners of my eyes, and was often so flashy it was pretty distracting!
(Note that on the default, ACTION, setting for the "SIGN" option, the only indicator for roughly when you need to make an input is the word "ACTION" appearing in the middle of the screen. : P I played with "SIGN" set to "ARROW.")
So, gotta be the easiest play-through of these LaserDisc game ports I've played, even WITH the additional, diagonal inputs, which I did have a bit more trouble with than the regular ones--but no I do not feel tempted to try the harder difficulty settings. ^ _^ It's a relatively light jaunt here and while I like the animation quality of the Bluth games more, and find the characters and situations more engaging in those, Ninja Hayate is SUPER playable and I can see myself blasting through it again for fun some time. : )
(There's also a "3-MISS" option here that wasn't in Time Gal: when enabled--and it is by default--and will be every time you boot up since like Time Gal the game doesn't use memory cards--if you die three times at the same spot, you get a little message saying it's skipping you to the next scene (this can be a sub-section of a longer scene, if you get what I'm saying)--and then it does, so you wouldn't get stuck for too long at any one point. I wanted to see everything I could though so I turned that option off.) |
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| | | | A viewer pointed out that as with Ninja Hayate, Time Gal also came out in the West on Sega CD! |
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