Data load? I guess I can save in this version. Let's see if there's a save file already:
Not on the disk, I guess.
Not on the PAC, either. That's the Panasonic Pana Amusement Cartridge, which contains 4K of SRAM for saving games. Thanks, Google!
Enough messing around! Let's hit start!
Oh. The SMS version didn't have this. Incidentally, I never managed to get this far in the Japanese version because I couldn't read the menu and it also puts up a confirmation prompt when you click start.
Here we go! World 1!
I try out Lucia's basic abilities. Jump and fire both work. I also have access to Shield right off the bat. You might notice a flickering row of pixels - I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to be there, and I found a way to get rid of it just in time for the last .gif of this update, at which point I wasn't going to go back and redo all the earlier ones. Let's check out this ladder:
Woah! Vertical scrolling! The SMS version didn't have that. What's up here, anyway?
As she collects a Shield power-up, the clouds part to reveal the lands before Lucia. Let's get a look at a still shot:
This is the world map, as seen on the back of the box. At the bottom right is the first stage, the river-crossed plains. Looks like the volcano is to the left of that, the ice field above the plains, and the pyramid up top. If the fortress is on here I don't recognise it (maybe the middle left?), and there's some other stuff we'll have to figure out as we get to it.
Heading back down I notice that this version doesn't have transparency on the Psy-cannon.
The opening of the stage proper is pretty much identical to the SMS version. Maybe I won't have to document many changes? One change that is on show here is to the running. Instead of automatically starting to run after a few seconds, on MSX you start moving, then release and repress the key to run. I haven't really adjusted to it yet, but in theory having control over that will make things easier. Also of note in this gif is the smooth horizontal scrolling, something the MSX2 isn't really known for. I'll talk more about that later.
The lava is new. Barely touches Lucia's health bar, though. Speaking of which, the health and ESP bars are a bit fancier in this version. They even have shadows! They look pretty good, but I find them a little harder to read while I'm playing than the simple bars on SMS.
Carrying on I fight a few more enemies, and get a B Block, the first I've seen so far. Unlike on SMS, not every enemy drops something in this version. In the last panel I come across what looks like a hole in the ground:
And indeed that's what it is. A little health boost won't go astray.
I pick it up and head topside. The screen Lucia comes up on is the same one she would have reached had she skipped the hole. This gif demonstrates my difficulty with the new way of running, with Lucia taking some lava damage as a result.
Like on SMS, this version has running water that drags you along. Whee!
Here's something I mentioned during the SMS game: Lucia's hair part is on the same side (screen left, her right) whichever way she's facing in this version. It's the little things, you know?
The flower is back, and it's basically the same fight. The power up immediately doubles the size of Psy-cannon to hit high and middle. At this point on SMS it was doubled in power but just hitting at middle height.
I reach another hole, this one containing the Teleport power.
I give it a go. I'm finding the power select a bit harder to activate in this version, not that I was great at it on master system. Teleport on MSX only takes Lucia back to the river area, rather than the start of the stage.
This is where the flower was before. It's still gone, so I can't grind for Psy-cannon upgrades like I could on Sega.
Up ahead is a dead end with another hole, containing another flower. It's arguably easier than the first because you can jump on the upper platform to avoid the root attack, plus your firepower is doubled. On the other hand, it's harder to dodge the flower attack. Beating it gets Lucia a Shield upgrade.
It took me quite a while just now to figure out why I'd made this gif, but I got there: I cross over 10,000 points and get an ESP refill. Doesn't look like Lucia got it all back, though.
Carrying on we find these floating platforms. They turn regularly, and the hot side will cause injury.
The sky ominously darkens as Lucia continues onwards. This next gif is spoilerpopped for flashing lights:
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It's the Super Chimera! Just like on SMS it rises from the ground and throws fireballs at Lucia, though this time they come from different angles. A little more dodging is required, but it's about as easy as the other version. Lucia gets Hydro-wave for her troubles.
And that's the stage!
I save to disk, because I don't know if I have a PAC.
Next time:
Lava Zone.
This is an ESP amplifier. Use it and read this bonus material!!
What extra things do I have for you this time?
TALK mode:
Pressing F4 on the opening screen allows you to change the game mode, and with it Lucia's clothing colour. According to the readme, MAXUP mode gives more HP and ESP, POWER mode allows you to use keys 1-9 to select the psychic powers (sounds useful), EXTRA mode allows you to get TALK mode by pressing F5, and TALK mode lets you speak to enemies. NOMAL mode is just normal mode. TALK sounds pretty interesting, let's check it out:
You have to take a hit to get it to activate. There seem to be three phrases which repeat. I don't have any Japanese, so I spent far too long with a hiragana and a katakana table and google translate to produce the following:
Panel 1:
Hiragana: きやん
Roman letters: Kiyan
?English: Cancellation
Pretty sure I have this wrong, since the character I took as や is different from the first character in the second panel which is more clearly や. This pixel font is a bit hard to make out, especially for a novice like me. Still, I can sort of imagine "Cancellation" as a curse.
Dracula:
Kyan! = Generic, feminine cry of annoyance or displeasure. Basically "EEK!"
Panel 2:
H: やめてよもあ
R: Yameteyomoa
?E: Stop it
This one makes a lot of sense.
Dracula:
Yameteyo moo = "Stop it already!"
Panel 3 & 4:
H: しんじわら でしよ !
R: Shinjiwara deshiyo !
?E: I am at it!
This sort of makes sense.
Dracula:
"Shinjatto desho!" = "I'm done for!"
I'm not actually sure about this one.
Sensenic:
She's saying "Shinjau desho!" = "I might die!"
It's... really cute, though, she's basically "scolding" the monster, as in "Don't hit me any more, I could die, you know!"
Panel 1:
H: いたいよあ
R: Itaiyoa
E?: You look (or "Hurts Joah")
"Hurts" sounds right, dunno about "Joah" or "You look"
Dracula:
Itaiyoo = "Ooouch!"
Panel 2:
H: ばりわあ
Bariwaa
Knowledge
This came up as I activated Shield, so "Knowledge" sort of makes sense as Lucia uses her ESP knowledge. Dunno. Speaking of shield, look at my HP! I rushed through the level pretty carelessly, and I was deliberately taking hits to capture the dialogue, so I'm almost dead. That's a worry.
Dracula:
Bariaa! = "BARRIER!"
Two things of note here: Lucia can't damage the flower from behind, and Excharge isn't working! It did work when I played through on normal mode. Is this part of TALK mode? Am I going to have to git gud to capture all the talky bits? This might not work out.
As it turns out, the problem was that although Lucia starts with Shield, she can't Excharge at its lowest level. On my main run, I went up the ladder at the start and got the first upgrade. On the TALK run I skipped that, to my chagrin. Note that the Shield icon changes colour and gains an outline when I pick up this power-up after the second flower.
There's a brief conversation before the boss:
Panel 1:
H: あなたは だあれ?
R: Anataha daare?
?E: You are?
Panel 2:
H: わたしが
R: Watashiga
?E: -
Google translate didn't get me anything for this, even though I'm probably more confident I got the right characters here than in any other image. Maybe this is the boss's given name? Googling "Watashiga" it looks like it just means "I am" or something like that.
Panel 3:
Katakana: ス-パ- キマイラ . G
R: Su ichi pa ichi kimaira . G
?E: Scan one path one Chimera G
I tried to get too clever here, mistaking the dashes for the Japanese numeral for 1. Katakana is often used for loanwords, so I should have tried saying it aloud. It's "su-pa kimaira G" - Super Chimera G. No idea what the G is for.
Sensenic:
Design document: Grand Chimera (Super Chimera Giant)
MSX poster: Boss of the plains Super Chimera G (Giant)
MSX dialog: Super Chimera G
Panel 4:
H: だよん
R: Dayon
?E: Tavern
I have very little faith in this translation. Again one of the characters (the one I've taken as よ) looks about right, but the pixel font has another character that looks like the same one (see the second (and fourth) panel of the first talking image above).
So the complete dialogue, best as I can do:
Lucia: Who are you?
Boss: I am The Super Chimera, G.
Dracula:
"Who the heck are you?"
"I...am SUPER CHIMERA G!"
(the "dayon" at the end of this just adds emphasis and also sounds a little bit comedic. Kinda like adding "....obviously.")
Sensenic:
It appears all solemnly and it announces its name in bolded, hard edged katakana... and then finishes with a cute/silly "dayon!"
Oh, and also, on the cutesy aspect, she's definitely not saying "Who the heck are you", but that elongated "a" in "daare" denotes, again, a singing or childish tone: "Who aaare you?"
It is all being played very silly, childish and cutesy - the English word "Barrier" being written in hiragana (the first syllabary children, and new Japanese students, learn to read & write) is also a clue.
I hadn't realised at this point that I could excharge, so I died here. The text is one of the same phrases as earlier hits, but goes off the edge of the screen and appears on the opposite side, with a few characters lost over the edge (more on that later).
Picking up the boss's drop gets one more phrase:
H: やつたあ !
R: Yatsutaa!
?E: I did it!
Google translate didn't get this one, but I thought it sounded familiar so I did a normal google search on it and found some forum posts. I think this (skip to 1:10, don't have your volume too high) was where I'd heard it before.
Dracula:
"Yattaa!" = "I did it!"
Anyway, obviously my success in figuring out what's being said has been limited. I'm hoping someone reading can help me out? I'm planning to keep the TALK mode run going in parallel, so I expect there'll be at least a boss dialogue per stage.
muteKi:
The short answer for what you're doing wrong with hiragana identification is that there are 'small' versions of a few characters that are used to produce dipthong-like sounds (the small や ('ya') is meant to affect the 'ki' next to it so it's more like kya -- I think 'kyan' isn't supposed to be anything more than an interjection of pain) or to double-up certain sounds (I think that's actually an お ('o') in yameteomoo, meaning the o is held for an extra 'beat' or syllable; the つ ('tsu') in やつたあ should be small too, since it's meant to provide a doubled-consonant (a bit like a glottal stop) sound between the ya and ta, more like yat-ta)
Some of these characters are really hard to make out though and I don't blame you being confused by it
Yimothy:
That makes a lot of sense. I did notice that the tsu was smaller than the other characters, but in my near-total ignorance of Japanese and how it’s written I didn’t realise that was significant. Thanks!
OK, what else?
Scrolling:
This version of the game features vertical scrolling, which the SMS version did not, along with horizontal scrolling (which it did). The vertical is kind of annoying for me, actually, since scrolling greatly increases the size of gif files so more of it makes it harder to keep them down. The horizontal seems unremarkable, but actually this is one of the few MSX2 games to manage it so smoothly. I'm not very familiar with the platform, but as I understand it, the MSX is bad at any kind of scrolling. The MSX2 has hardware support for vertical scrolling (maybe for vertical shmups?), but not for horizontal. As a result, a lot of games scroll in chunks, like this. So what's Psycho World doing?
It turns out the game isn't using all of the screen's real estate. Eight pixels on each side of the screen are blocked out by black sprites (I've been cropping this dead space out). This is actually kind of like how the SMS does scrolling - games with horizontal scrolling run at a horizontal resolution of 248 pixels instead of 256, the other eight being hidden by the system and used for scrolling. Unlike the SMS though, this isn't a planned feature of the MSX2, so Hertz had to be more clever. There is actually a limited facility for hardware scrolling in the system: the image can be moved left or right up to sixteen pixels to compensate for analogue displays that might not project centrally. This is supposed to be set by the user if needed, but Psycho World uses that function to scroll one pixel at a time, shifting the whole image back eight pixels at the end of each tile. This obviously looks ridiculous, so the edges of the screen are obscured with black sprites, cutting into how many can be displayed on screen at a time. In the image above, I've turned off sprites, causing Lucia to disappear and the edges to appear.
Let's check out the scrolling with the sprites gone:
It's pretty clever, even if it does eat a bit of the sprite budget. I mentioned earlier that when text is near the edge it wraps to the other side with a couple of characters lost - I think they're under the black sprites. I tried to get text to appear with the sprites off, but they didn't show. Must be sprites as well.
Sensenic:
Regarding the scroll, now the last paragraph (the previous ones are just a narration of the intro) in the back of the poster makes more sense - Didn't translate it before because I was missing a couple of words (and I was at work, that too, natch) but here it goes (again, being overly literal here, just for the sake of comprehension, not trying to adapt anything):
"Many worlds that spread along a screen with a smooth horizontal scroll! Its breathtaking story that you wouldn't believe an action game to have and its animation will surely leave you wonderstruck!"
Truly the Scrolling was a big selling point!
And no, after hyping the story that much the animation does not have any kind of qualifier, it's just that, "the animation". Surely this wasn't the only MSX with animated sprites in it?
Incidentally, it appears that Lucia's shots are not sprites. Maybe that's why their background isn't transparent.
While I have the sprites off, here's the map appearing and disappearing without any pesky sprites in the way.
Concept art:
Here's Lucia's sprite on paper. I noticed that, although this implies that the body is just mirrored with a different head to change facing, there's an extra pixel at the bottom right of the left facing sprite that isn't on the right facing one. I had another look at the in-game sprites:
Check it out! When she's standing at least, Lucia's shadow is cast to the right whichever way she's facing. Good stuff, Hertz. On SMS, the shadow is behind her, whichever way she's facing.
Sensenic:
I also noticed that when she shoots the shadow goes to her back - the flash she's producing makes her project a shadow backwards! Oh, and when she's facing left the shadow doesn't switch. It IS made on purpose.
Despite that difference, I mostly like the look of the SMS version better. That's gotta be at least in part because that's the version I played as a kid, but there are also some technical differences. I think the MSX version tends to have more detail, probably because of more storage capacity, as seen in the much bigger intro cutscene images, but also in the clouds and mountains in this first stage. On the other hand, the MSX has 16 simultaneous colours to the SMS's 32, and I think it shows. Here's SMS Lucia:
Her belt is more detailed, her boots are a different colour to her dress, and there's more colour in the headband. I think the MSX has pretty strict restrictions on sprite colours. Still, it's not a bad looking game, and I look forward to seeing the rest of it.
That's it for today!
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