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Ninja Jajamaru: Ginga Daisakusen
Jan. 2nd, 2021 09:28 pm76 days until the vernal equinox
In other news, vaccine distribution is going slower than hoped but they say they're working as fast as they can so I don't know if that was just officials being overly optimistic.
I found an advertisement for a Hellraiser video game that supposedly had one million worlds and it was the largest game for Nintendo. As soon as I saw that, I wanted to play it for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms.
The thing is this: it doesn't actually exist.
I read that it used the Wolfenstein 3D engine but Wolfenstein 3D didn't exist then and the NES didn't have anywhere near the processing power to render something like Wolfenstein 3D so they tried to put a processor on the cartridge (chances are they couldn't get it to function properly) and I can't expect anything good given Color Dreams' track record.
Which means "Ninja Jajamaru: Galactic Battle."
In Japanese and Chinese, the word for galaxy is a compound word formed from "silver" and "river," not "milk."
In various northern European and Asian cultures, it's called the path of the birds.
This was supposed to be released in America as Squash, with the characters renamed Maru and Cori and with a lot of terrible vegetable puns. There are rumors that Nintendo was responsible for this because it’s too similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. I don’t believe it because Nintendo allowed M.C. Kids which is equally Super Mario esque. If Nintendo is responsible, it’s probably because their policy on exporting a lot of games is similar to that of the Japanese music industry: non-Japanese are filthy gaijin so we can’t have them listening to our music, while the Japanese people living there have turned their back on the motherland and can not be allowed to listen to our music.
Nintendo had this tendency of generating hype and then pulling the rug out from under us. You know, Moon Crystal. Final Fantasy V. It's not like they left Moon Crystal a secret to everybody and a decade later, we learn that "oh, hey, there's this game that's Japan-only but someone translated it and it's really good." No. They had advertisements in Gamepro and everything.
The intro must be done by the Coach's Hotline guys.
In said abandoned American version, this was, instaed of being a spaceship, an unidentified flying onion.
Lettuce check it out, he says. I am not making that up.
Somehow, the text moves both too quickly and too slowly at the same time.
He's called King Kale in the American version.
Destroyda becomes Vegetron.
They probably meant Sakura
And they've been transposed from feudal Japan to outer space.
It seems like each character plays the same exact way.
Putting on a space suit gives you an extra hit.
I think I'm ducking here.
Oh no! It's Mac Tonight!
You have to make a high jump to get into the portal. To do that, you hold the B button to start running in place but not so long that you end up doing a spin attack.
17 minutes later, although some of that time was spent screenshotting the intro movie.
You can spell things with J A and S but I have no idea how that mechanic works.
You can also turn into a giant mechanical frog.
The music is rather good.
The first boss spends most of his time moving around the arena. Just jump on him four times and he'll explode into a Mega Man death but with smiley faces. Bosses kill you in one hit even when you have a space suit and I don't know if that's intentional or some sort of programming mistake and I think that little green alien has something to do with those letters you've collected.
You rescue the king.
And he gives you a hint... about pipes. Unlike Mario 3, his hints are actually relevant for the next level. I'm still not over the fact that the king of the 6th world is the one to tell you about the Magic Whistle and it's ambiguous enough to sound like it's in Water Land and not in stage 1-3. Or the fact that they kept Goomba's Japanese name.
Those guys hop out of pits in order to knock you out of the air.
If you jump on that guy, you'll only get to a platform.
You have to do wall climbing. Jumping off the walls is incredibly fickle. You have to hold the direction towards the wall while climbing it and when you jump off, you have to change direction in midair.
27 minutes later. I may have taken a short break.
They all say "Thanks, earthling. You've done well." No idea why I screenshotted every one of them.
The fire planet is in fact a giant Bomb from Final Fantasy.
Good thing there's a stage select code. You know, in case I forgot to take a screenshot of the fire planet.
This, amazingly, is the one I kept. After this is a rather annoying elevator segment.
Instead of jumping on the boss, you have to jump on the buttons to make him take damage but you have to do it really quickly.
And we've rescued the nutcracker.
Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1.
This level is an autoscroller and a pretty fast one at that, with small platforms that drift away from each other. It doesn’t help that the start key only pauses if you’re holding it down. And I don’t know if that’s a dick move by the creator or a game bug or an emulation bug.
And in here we run into Ghostface.
Note: this game in fact predates Scream.
And Cthulhu.
And, uh, I don't know what those are.
Oh, boy, a portal maze!
it’s a jumping puzzle. In a maze. I hate both of those things. I can not jumping puzzle. A maze with a time limit. A jumping puzzle with required precision.
12 minutes later…
Thankfully, the boss is easy as piss. A portal appears, moves around a lot, and spits out Cthulhu, who spits out some acid or whatever.
The pattern on his body and face looks like the pattern on the level introduction screen.
That's no moon, that's a Lego knockoff.
That guy looks like a Mega Man enemy.
Even the clouds are rectangles. Strong Mad was wrong when he said that Cubeland is not a real place.
The enemies detach their heads from their bodies.
You can throw boomerangs or star bombs at those traps.
He hits the ground with his hammer, some blocks fly out of the ground, and then you stunlock him into oblivion.
I ended up in front of the king of the robots.
I like the aesthetics of this place.
Not the ice physics, though.
The pirates take two hits. One smashes them into the ground and their heads waddle about, and the next one removes them from the game.
It's another autoscroller but it's not as hard as the first one.
Conveyor belts are annoying.
Oh no! It's time for the hardest boss in the game!
He's so hard, in fact, that I couldn't beat him legitimately.
To get past him, I had to use the stage select code.
Just kidding!
There was no boss fight.
This planet is so polluted that you can walk on the clouds.
They're still using propellor planes.
Looks like a walrus.
It looks like you have enough height to get over this platform, but you don't.
It really does look like I have enough height to make it. You can’t jump and turn in midair and make it and you can’t land on the cloud either. You can’t run up the ramp.
Nine minutes later.
There's a Gravity Man upside down gimmick here.
If you ignore a few rather annoying jumping puzzles, this is actually a pretty good game.
Destroyda is the hardest boss in the game but that's not saying much. You can't stand on the pipe things. You have to dash jump when he comes down, and that's a question of timing, but you probably won't get hurt if you're on the sides of the screen.
I can't tell if it's Fu Manchu or a Stormtrooper riding a giant smiling Octorok.
Four hits later, you get the ending. Yay!
That isn't a typo, I just hit the screenshot button prematurely.
I don't know what a Data Man does or what his power that Mega Man gets from him is.
I assume this is the music composer.
In other news, vaccine distribution is going slower than hoped but they say they're working as fast as they can so I don't know if that was just officials being overly optimistic.
I found an advertisement for a Hellraiser video game that supposedly had one million worlds and it was the largest game for Nintendo. As soon as I saw that, I wanted to play it for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms.
The thing is this: it doesn't actually exist.
I read that it used the Wolfenstein 3D engine but Wolfenstein 3D didn't exist then and the NES didn't have anywhere near the processing power to render something like Wolfenstein 3D so they tried to put a processor on the cartridge (chances are they couldn't get it to function properly) and I can't expect anything good given Color Dreams' track record.
Which means "Ninja Jajamaru: Galactic Battle."
In Japanese and Chinese, the word for galaxy is a compound word formed from "silver" and "river," not "milk."
In various northern European and Asian cultures, it's called the path of the birds.
This was supposed to be released in America as Squash, with the characters renamed Maru and Cori and with a lot of terrible vegetable puns. There are rumors that Nintendo was responsible for this because it’s too similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. I don’t believe it because Nintendo allowed M.C. Kids which is equally Super Mario esque. If Nintendo is responsible, it’s probably because their policy on exporting a lot of games is similar to that of the Japanese music industry: non-Japanese are filthy gaijin so we can’t have them listening to our music, while the Japanese people living there have turned their back on the motherland and can not be allowed to listen to our music.
Nintendo had this tendency of generating hype and then pulling the rug out from under us. You know, Moon Crystal. Final Fantasy V. It's not like they left Moon Crystal a secret to everybody and a decade later, we learn that "oh, hey, there's this game that's Japan-only but someone translated it and it's really good." No. They had advertisements in Gamepro and everything.
The intro must be done by the Coach's Hotline guys.
In said abandoned American version, this was, instaed of being a spaceship, an unidentified flying onion.
Lettuce check it out, he says. I am not making that up.
Somehow, the text moves both too quickly and too slowly at the same time.
He's called King Kale in the American version.
Destroyda becomes Vegetron.
They probably meant Sakura
And they've been transposed from feudal Japan to outer space.
It seems like each character plays the same exact way.
Putting on a space suit gives you an extra hit.
I think I'm ducking here.
Oh no! It's Mac Tonight!
You have to make a high jump to get into the portal. To do that, you hold the B button to start running in place but not so long that you end up doing a spin attack.
17 minutes later, although some of that time was spent screenshotting the intro movie.
You can spell things with J A and S but I have no idea how that mechanic works.
You can also turn into a giant mechanical frog.
The music is rather good.
The first boss spends most of his time moving around the arena. Just jump on him four times and he'll explode into a Mega Man death but with smiley faces. Bosses kill you in one hit even when you have a space suit and I don't know if that's intentional or some sort of programming mistake and I think that little green alien has something to do with those letters you've collected.
You rescue the king.
And he gives you a hint... about pipes. Unlike Mario 3, his hints are actually relevant for the next level. I'm still not over the fact that the king of the 6th world is the one to tell you about the Magic Whistle and it's ambiguous enough to sound like it's in Water Land and not in stage 1-3. Or the fact that they kept Goomba's Japanese name.
Those guys hop out of pits in order to knock you out of the air.
If you jump on that guy, you'll only get to a platform.
You have to do wall climbing. Jumping off the walls is incredibly fickle. You have to hold the direction towards the wall while climbing it and when you jump off, you have to change direction in midair.
27 minutes later. I may have taken a short break.
They all say "Thanks, earthling. You've done well." No idea why I screenshotted every one of them.
The fire planet is in fact a giant Bomb from Final Fantasy.
Good thing there's a stage select code. You know, in case I forgot to take a screenshot of the fire planet.
This, amazingly, is the one I kept. After this is a rather annoying elevator segment.
Instead of jumping on the boss, you have to jump on the buttons to make him take damage but you have to do it really quickly.
And we've rescued the nutcracker.
Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1.
This level is an autoscroller and a pretty fast one at that, with small platforms that drift away from each other. It doesn’t help that the start key only pauses if you’re holding it down. And I don’t know if that’s a dick move by the creator or a game bug or an emulation bug.
And in here we run into Ghostface.
Note: this game in fact predates Scream.
And Cthulhu.
And, uh, I don't know what those are.
Oh, boy, a portal maze!
it’s a jumping puzzle. In a maze. I hate both of those things. I can not jumping puzzle. A maze with a time limit. A jumping puzzle with required precision.
12 minutes later…
Thankfully, the boss is easy as piss. A portal appears, moves around a lot, and spits out Cthulhu, who spits out some acid or whatever.
The pattern on his body and face looks like the pattern on the level introduction screen.
That's no moon, that's a Lego knockoff.
That guy looks like a Mega Man enemy.
Even the clouds are rectangles. Strong Mad was wrong when he said that Cubeland is not a real place.
The enemies detach their heads from their bodies.
You can throw boomerangs or star bombs at those traps.
He hits the ground with his hammer, some blocks fly out of the ground, and then you stunlock him into oblivion.
I ended up in front of the king of the robots.
I like the aesthetics of this place.
Not the ice physics, though.
The pirates take two hits. One smashes them into the ground and their heads waddle about, and the next one removes them from the game.
It's another autoscroller but it's not as hard as the first one.
Conveyor belts are annoying.
Oh no! It's time for the hardest boss in the game!
He's so hard, in fact, that I couldn't beat him legitimately.
To get past him, I had to use the stage select code.
Just kidding!
There was no boss fight.
This planet is so polluted that you can walk on the clouds.
They're still using propellor planes.
Looks like a walrus.
It looks like you have enough height to get over this platform, but you don't.
It really does look like I have enough height to make it. You can’t jump and turn in midair and make it and you can’t land on the cloud either. You can’t run up the ramp.
Nine minutes later.
There's a Gravity Man upside down gimmick here.
If you ignore a few rather annoying jumping puzzles, this is actually a pretty good game.
Destroyda is the hardest boss in the game but that's not saying much. You can't stand on the pipe things. You have to dash jump when he comes down, and that's a question of timing, but you probably won't get hurt if you're on the sides of the screen.
I can't tell if it's Fu Manchu or a Stormtrooper riding a giant smiling Octorok.
Four hits later, you get the ending. Yay!
That isn't a typo, I just hit the screenshot button prematurely.
I don't know what a Data Man does or what his power that Mega Man gets from him is.
I assume this is the music composer.
