I only put this here because, admittedly, there's nowhere else for it. If this isn't the proper place for it, then feel free to remove it.
So I went out to celebrate my birthday with friends and family, and my brother got me some relatively sweet booze. Allegedly, Takeshi Kitano came up with the idea of Takeshi's Challenge (Takeshi no Chousenjou for you Japanophiles) while he was intoxicated, and seemingly enough this idea was also born from having a bit too much to drink, so maybe great ideas come from intoxicated minds.
Anyway, one of the things I like to do is watch videos, more specifically, a series of videos called Chrontendo wherein a person by the alias of Dr. Sparkle decides to play through every single NES/Famicom game ever made. And most of the games featured are a bunch of innocuous games that often had something to do with mahjong, baseball, or horse racing, all developed by no-name developers whose entire existence was to churn these games out. I was watching the latest episode, episode 48, and he was playing a Famicom game based on some Japanese movie about a woman investigating a tax fraud. The English title of this movie was "A Taxing Woman", and this game was apparently developed by Capcom. One of the things Dr. Sparkle said about this game is how it was based on something that wouldn't lend itself very well to a video game. He even said that the American equivalent of such a game would be "Hannah and her Sisters: The Video Game", and thus inspiration struck.
Now as we all know, NES games, particularly Famicom games, were very hit or miss, where most of them were playable but forgettable, so I wish to design a game (be an actual game or a "throwback") that seeks to recapture that feeling of excitement that quickly is replaced with remorse. So what better way to do that other than to make a game that's derivative off whatever was popular at the time, combined with corporate meddling in the publisher's attempt to maximize sales and profit? For starters, I was imagining this game to have a shoehorned license so that it has a boost in sales, in this case, Hannah and her Sisters. And how does the game start out? The only way you could start a game of proportions as epic as this, by having a NES-ified rendition of Woody Allen's character telling the player that "Hannah and her Sisters have been kidnapped by Ninjas". Of course, what is a Famicom game without Ninjas? Why were there so many Ninja games? Is it more than a coincidence that Ninja and Nintendo start with the same three letters?
So once you see Woody Allen tell you what the plot of the game is, the game will burrow nothing else from the license it is based on, and start you in the middle of a Dragon Quest-like overworld that's supposed to be a depiction of the USA, that is if the majority of the USA was a green field with a skyscraper icon on the map to symbolize a city. I don't know what you'd do in the city, probably still walk around DQ style (naw, what about everyone's favorite, the classic first person dungeon crawler?) and talk to unimportant NPCs, and then walk around some more across the USA. Eventually, you will come across several bosses, wherein you must do battle in a turn based... game of Mahjong? And to determine who will play first, each turn will have both players play a game of rock paper scissors, although played similarly to slots (each hand is a scrolling background that rolls like roulette). The characters will use money as a form of LP, and will essentially gamble their LP away.
However, gambling and mahjong won't be the only activities in this fun filled game! You will also go to an obligatory Pachinko parlor and play a few rounds of Pachinko, as dictated by Japanese law, before you are free to progress. And then you will also have to bet on horse races, but with a catch once again. You actually are controlling the racer and his horse, and you have to fight off a whole group of ninjas riding on horses, that explode when killed. And what is a wonderful Japanese kusoge without a mention of Japan's favorite sport, baseball? My inner Takeshi Kitano was channeled and had the great idea of forcing the player to sit through an ENTIRE game of baseball, played out entirely by the computer. And the player has to bet on the winning team, and the winning team is never the same. But you can't just let the game run for 3 hours without input, now that would be too smart. Every now and then, the game will ask for the player's input, and when you fail, the NPCs will think the character has died and it will be Game Over. Finally, the final part of the game will have the player fly in an airplane from NYC to Washington DC, where allegedly the Ninjas have made their hideout, and of course this stage is a shooter section, and is arguably the most polished part of the entire game. Once you beat this stage, the game will have a digitized version of Hannah and her Sister's ending scene, which is odd since the game had absolutely nothing to do with the movie other than the title and ending.
I apologize if my phrasing is a bit weird, I'm a bit tipsy and about to hit the sack. And I apologize if the essay is a bit tl;dr in areas. That said, let me know what you think; would this have been a fondly remembered game? Or would it have been forgotten in the sea of Famicom kusoge? Thank you for reading.
So I went out to celebrate my birthday with friends and family, and my brother got me some relatively sweet booze. Allegedly, Takeshi Kitano came up with the idea of Takeshi's Challenge (Takeshi no Chousenjou for you Japanophiles) while he was intoxicated, and seemingly enough this idea was also born from having a bit too much to drink, so maybe great ideas come from intoxicated minds.
Anyway, one of the things I like to do is watch videos, more specifically, a series of videos called Chrontendo wherein a person by the alias of Dr. Sparkle decides to play through every single NES/Famicom game ever made. And most of the games featured are a bunch of innocuous games that often had something to do with mahjong, baseball, or horse racing, all developed by no-name developers whose entire existence was to churn these games out. I was watching the latest episode, episode 48, and he was playing a Famicom game based on some Japanese movie about a woman investigating a tax fraud. The English title of this movie was "A Taxing Woman", and this game was apparently developed by Capcom. One of the things Dr. Sparkle said about this game is how it was based on something that wouldn't lend itself very well to a video game. He even said that the American equivalent of such a game would be "Hannah and her Sisters: The Video Game", and thus inspiration struck.
Now as we all know, NES games, particularly Famicom games, were very hit or miss, where most of them were playable but forgettable, so I wish to design a game (be an actual game or a "throwback") that seeks to recapture that feeling of excitement that quickly is replaced with remorse. So what better way to do that other than to make a game that's derivative off whatever was popular at the time, combined with corporate meddling in the publisher's attempt to maximize sales and profit? For starters, I was imagining this game to have a shoehorned license so that it has a boost in sales, in this case, Hannah and her Sisters. And how does the game start out? The only way you could start a game of proportions as epic as this, by having a NES-ified rendition of Woody Allen's character telling the player that "Hannah and her Sisters have been kidnapped by Ninjas". Of course, what is a Famicom game without Ninjas? Why were there so many Ninja games? Is it more than a coincidence that Ninja and Nintendo start with the same three letters?
So once you see Woody Allen tell you what the plot of the game is, the game will burrow nothing else from the license it is based on, and start you in the middle of a Dragon Quest-like overworld that's supposed to be a depiction of the USA, that is if the majority of the USA was a green field with a skyscraper icon on the map to symbolize a city. I don't know what you'd do in the city, probably still walk around DQ style (naw, what about everyone's favorite, the classic first person dungeon crawler?) and talk to unimportant NPCs, and then walk around some more across the USA. Eventually, you will come across several bosses, wherein you must do battle in a turn based... game of Mahjong? And to determine who will play first, each turn will have both players play a game of rock paper scissors, although played similarly to slots (each hand is a scrolling background that rolls like roulette). The characters will use money as a form of LP, and will essentially gamble their LP away.
However, gambling and mahjong won't be the only activities in this fun filled game! You will also go to an obligatory Pachinko parlor and play a few rounds of Pachinko, as dictated by Japanese law, before you are free to progress. And then you will also have to bet on horse races, but with a catch once again. You actually are controlling the racer and his horse, and you have to fight off a whole group of ninjas riding on horses, that explode when killed. And what is a wonderful Japanese kusoge without a mention of Japan's favorite sport, baseball? My inner Takeshi Kitano was channeled and had the great idea of forcing the player to sit through an ENTIRE game of baseball, played out entirely by the computer. And the player has to bet on the winning team, and the winning team is never the same. But you can't just let the game run for 3 hours without input, now that would be too smart. Every now and then, the game will ask for the player's input, and when you fail, the NPCs will think the character has died and it will be Game Over. Finally, the final part of the game will have the player fly in an airplane from NYC to Washington DC, where allegedly the Ninjas have made their hideout, and of course this stage is a shooter section, and is arguably the most polished part of the entire game. Once you beat this stage, the game will have a digitized version of Hannah and her Sister's ending scene, which is odd since the game had absolutely nothing to do with the movie other than the title and ending.
I apologize if my phrasing is a bit weird, I'm a bit tipsy and about to hit the sack. And I apologize if the essay is a bit tl;dr in areas. That said, let me know what you think; would this have been a fondly remembered game? Or would it have been forgotten in the sea of Famicom kusoge? Thank you for reading.