NES Works Gaiden

Pinning down a proper "first" in video game history can be a challenging proposition. The medium didn't evolve in rigid steps with clearly defined milestones; it shifted gradually, in strange and hard-to-classify fits and starts. But I feel confident in dropping a pin here, with the Epoch Cassette Vision, as the "first" proper console to emerge from Japan. Several Japanese manufacturers had produced dedicated consoles for years before Cassette Vision came along, and Bandai even manufactured one that accepted cartridges that worked like the jumper cards Magnavox included with the original Odyssey. However, with Cassette Vision, Epoch produced the first game system to have been built from the ground-up in Japan that offered distinct software on standalone carts. It arrived a full two years before Nintendo's Famicom and Sega's SG-1000, and it presented a compelling mix of dated-but-entertaining games at a highly competitive price. The Japanese console games industry got its true start h

Epoch's post-launch titles for Cassette Vision maintain the momentum of its launch releases. That is to say, we have one game that involves swiping the creation of an arcade manufacturer, and one game that repurposes an earlier Epoch-made standalone console. But this time, each game comes with its own diabolical twist! For one thing, the unlicensed Galaxian may obviously steal its title (quite brazenly) from a Namco arcade hit, but it actually swipes its content from a completely different game by a different publisher! And while Big Sports 12 owes its existence to the Epoch System 10 dedicated console, its story goes a little deeper than that and ties into the very core of the Cassette Vision's being. You WILL believe a man can talk for nearly 20 minutes about two 1981 games that mostly consist of boxes moving around the screen.

Welcome to the shadows of the annual Castlevania-themed episode. I'm sort of running low on relevant Castlevaniae to talk about here, at least in terms of games I don't intend to cover in their own right someday as part of Works, so it's a good thing that patron Joseph Wawzonek requested I tackle Konami Wai Wai World, huh? Wai Wai World is technically only about 1/7 Castlevania by biomass, but realistically speaking, Castlevania is one of the few levels you can defeat without acquiring certain character skills or bulking up your team to soak up abuse from the bad guys. So for most of us, it's basically "that one Castlevania game that also has a lot of other dudes in it." An interesting game bursting with good ideas, but definitely one that falls into line with Konami's ambitious-but-flawed (not to mention wildly unbalanced) NES titles like Castlevania II and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles... games with which it shares a lot of creative concepts in common.

While Nintendo and Sega were in the process of entering the programmable console market, Epoch kept churning out Cassette Vision games... slowly. As per usual, these games should look fairly familiar to fans of classic arcade games, being slightly tilted renditions of popular hits. Business as usual, really. To Epoch's credit, their Donkey Kong knockoff beat the release of Nintendo's actual Donkey Kong conversion by several months. To their detriment, it wasn't nearly as good as the real thing. But, all things considered, while neither of these unofficial adaptations will go down in history as all-time classics, they do pretty impressive things with Epoch's very humble and dated hardware. That's something, right?

Not two but three—THREE!—games this episode. This might be exciting if not for the fact that one of those amounts to a barely tweaked version of a game we've seen before, which originally debuted years before Cassette Vision existed. Props to Epoch for scraping as much content out of that one bit of program code as possible, I suppose. Far more exciting are the non-baseball titles here, Battle Vader and PakPak Monster. While both blatantly rip off popular arcade games, both also demonstrate that distinctive Epoch quirkiness, compensating for the console's lack of horsepower by introducing some unconventional gameplay tweaks. Both games also have deep roots in Epoch's own pre-Cassette Vision history. Well, maybe not "deep," exactly. But notable.

Another system complete! With this episode, our look at Epoch's Cassette Vision comes to an end. Ah, but don't worry—this system's retirement doesn't even begin to signal the company's intention to depart from the console race. As Monster Block and Elevator Panic perform the Cassette Vision's funeral rites, not one but two new systems would emerge from Epoch's mad think tank.... As for the games themselves, Monster Block offers a pretty obvious riff on Sega's Pengo that uses an added score mechanic to really test the ol' noggin. And Elevator Panic combines a whole lot of different influences while building on Monster Mansion's framework. I realize now that I forgot to cite the most obvious influence here—Universal's Space Panic—but honestly there are only so many "homage" citations I can fit into one of these episodes. Anyway, thank you for following me on this brief jaunt into an esoteric corner of Japanese console history. And thanks once again to Christa Lee for performing the mod