Games of the Abstract: Oyaji Hunter Mahjong (1995)

Developer: Warp Inc.

Publisher: Warp Inc.

One Player

Originally for: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

Warp and its founder Kenji Eno are unsung indie heroes of nineties video games, but tragically their legacy is marked by little of it being available officially. We can only be thankful D (1995), their most well known game, got ports on everything to the point Night Dive Studios, a retro game preservation developer, re-released the PC port, but Warp are a cult studio in a medium where preservation is still an issue with video game distribution. It neither helps Warp's legacy was backing the cult machines, not the winners, of the fifth and sixth generations of video game consoles. D, a really inspired attempt at an interactive movie that yet had an attitude to puzzles that I feel was more accessible, was a big hit but it was ironically Sony, the winner of the fifth and sixth generation with the Playstation One and Two, which under published copies and annoyed Eno so much he deliberately revealed he would jump to the Sega Saturn at a Sony press even with Enemy Zero (1996)¹, a full motion video sci-fi horror game. There is D2 (1999), sadly on the Sega Dreamcast, Sega's last hardware, and an unsung machine for arcade ports and experimental works. It would also be the last project under the Warp name even if Eno worked afterwards. More obscure is most of the work which helped Warp come to be. Those would be the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console games, which is a very unpreserved console for any game which was not ported from or to the PC.

With hindsight, this console doomed by how expensive it was among other factors, such as a lack fof a mainstream killer app, was innovative and its figurehead Trip Hawkins deserves lionisation for. The founder of Electronic Arts in 1982, he spearheaded an idiosyncratic and bold console, taking a really un-mainstream attitude to a machine at the time where the hardware was not unique, and could have a variety of different versions created by outsourcing to electronics companies, had no censorship which allowed for adult games to be made for it officially, and had no region locking. The cost to develop for the CD based software was a lot less expensive too, which leads into how even next to Microsoft, a huge company who struggled to get the Xbox over twice in Japan, the 3DO managed to have an easier time, just from the exclusives, in that country, and even in South Korea which had exclusive games too. Kenji Eno was an admirer of Hawkins because of these aspects², and it was clear the model, whilst not a successful console, allowed Warp to exist. Knowing one of the variety of games they made for the 3DO, the block puzzle game Trip'd (1995), was clearly named after Trip Hawkins shows the company were grateful for the machine.

Among the obscurest is Oyaji Hutner Mahjong, which comes from Kenji Eno seeing all the erotic mahjong games including for the arcade, where beating female players leads to them taking their clothes off, and being sick of them, thus imagining a game where a male superhero exists to protect women from perverts³. It is a fun premise, and you have to respect someone even if not a serious satire playing with gender stereotypes in this genre. Innately, I do not see anything inherently amiss with the idea of strip mahjong games, but if they are all clearly designed for a heterosexual male audience, with the female players always the ones meant to lose, then you see an accidental issue of objectification this game rightly parodies. It is not perfect itself, and it would have been cool to see a female heroine fight the sex pests, but our lead the Oyaji Hunter does stand out in a funny way. With women even having a way to turn on his own equivalent of the Bat Signal in the sky to call him, be it by Hunter Yo-Yo to the face or the Hunter Beam, the Oyaji Hunter is there to beat up and force wrong-uns to apologise for acting like pigs. Like the man in just women's underwear and a trench coat terrorising a schoolgirl for an underskirt shot with a camera for the first opponent, he will beat these men up and then humiliate them in a game of mahjong.

It is a mahjong game, with it explicit these villains or the Oyaji Hunter himself the first to challenge the other to the game, even the later having to bring out a game board for a last ditch attempt against the big bad of the game, in a giant tall building sized robot, which is funny for a broad slapstick comedy. You still have to play mahjong, specifically Japanese (riichi) mahjong rules, to which this was my first encounter with mahjong in a competitive form than mahjong solitaire. As a result, I cannot attempt an expert opinion, but I will call Oyaji Hunter Mahjong a good example of experimentation in what I would call "ephemeral" video game genres, those which exist throughout video game history but are always doomed to be replaced by new version for new consoles and machines. Mahjong games have always been made for video game consoles, and even the strip adult ones are replaced by new versions, making this a case of one where the personality is its advantage of being remembered. Sadly despite the desire for electronic versions of such games, as is the case for soccer or golf, they can be replaced with ease, making those which are really idiosyncratic or openly distort the rules some of the more memorable even if in bad ways as well as good.

The game itself here is not that radically altered in mind to this. Attempting to explain rules as a new player, the goal is to match tiles in threes (and fours if lucky) by matching images or orders from a variety of different sets like the Sō bamboo tiles.  You can only do this if the tile an opponent discards is the one you need, and you can also win if you have a full hand (or what remains from those you still have) when the next tile you pick up for your round, especially the last one, can complete a set of tiles which all match or connect in a certain way. This raises the innate issue here of random choice, but you can win either by making full sets clearing as many as possible, or if you can manage to have a "fully concealed" hand, a full set of matching/ordered titles only revealed to the opponent when you have won the round instantly.

There is more to this game's rules though, as you both have life bars, the numbered states which are the equivalent of betting with money, yours always at "5000" and jumping into higher numbers over the five opponents for theirs, which have to be knocked down. If you are lucky, each time the opponent sacrifices their life points for a bet, believing they have a perfect hand, and you screw them over, you can still chip at this number, but you are advised to win hands so they cannot, especially as this leads to the one new factor for this game for whoever wins. If they win, you hope to choose the randomly shuffled card that leads to them miss a blow, or the one which only causes the least damage, as they can use a special attack like in a comedy anime story, such as saying a pun so bad it hurts, which can be destructive to your chances of winning. This is more an issue as the score they get for how they win is used for the initial attack damage, something you thankfully have as an advantage if you win. The Oyaji Hunter, if he wins that round, can through a roulette wheel kick, punch or use one of his attacks which have bigger multipliers, 5x for the hunter boomerang, or the Hunter Beam itself, which is a 10x and can decimate enemies in one shot if you won by a big point hand. Or you can miss entirely too and feel like a tool.

This presents an obvious issue with the game whenever you bring random choice. Mahjong has a strategy, but random choice is as much a factor here even with strategy involved, rather than the full ability to win by master planning, or puzzle games where you are previewed what the next item you will receive will look like. This reminds of another curiosity, the type Kenji Eno was satirising, Sega Saturn's Haunted Casino (1996), a bizarre erotic gambling game for that console which however envisioned a full video ghostly mansion to explore. It felt like it was a game in the mould of Myst (1993), if instead of puzzles you played Western style games like poker against cat girl card dealers. It also had the issue that you could be grinding through rounds in games, or that if the A.I. got good hands over and over, you are doomed. Random choice is innately difficult with games, as it is not due to you having made a mistake, and Oyaji Mahjong Hunter is affected by this.

Which is a shame, as it is a compellingly odd project. For a low budget production too, it is still ambitious, as Warp brought in Ichirō Itano as the director of the animated cut scenes, a huge name in Japanese animation. In fact, as an animator, he is legendary, a huge figure for his art form especially for the likes of the Macross series. This is even seen here with his trademark "Itano Circus" where at one point, with the final opponent's giant robot, the individual missiles they fire at the Oyaji Hunter, as they were in the Macross series from robot/fighter plane hybrids, take different (individually drawn) trajectories whilst in the air. As a director, this is probably the most abrupt yet wholesome work for a notorious animation director, Ichirō Itano's work some of the most controversial and nihilistic you can find. His entry in the three Violence Jack  episodes, made between 1986 and 1990, was not readily found uncut and would make some edge lords green; Angel Cop (1989-1994) is notoriously an ultra-violent jingoistic sci-fi action work which, infamously if the English subtitles for the Japanese dub were not censored, sadly fell into actual anti-Semitism for its final plot twists; even a television series Gantz (2004) had befittingly a director suitable for its nihilistic and very violent premise, of resurrected people who died forced to kill aliens in death match-like scenarios, which had to be censored for the gore and sexual content for its television broadcasts. It is quite perverse, in a sick humoured way, he fully committed to this comedic project and created some playful cut scenes in spite of this record of accomplishment for controversial, problematic and not necessarily well regarded anime as a director which violently contrasts his justifiable legacy as a talented animator.

As a story, this game has one which is far from perfect, but I was not expecting a profound tale of gender politics here considering the type of game this is set up as, a silly parody. After the first opponent, the dirty mac photographer, you get a man in BDSM gear trying to tie up and drip hot wax on a female biker, one who eventually gets revenge by revealing he accidentally targeted a Queen Dominatrix. The third is a man trying to grope a geisha, forgiven by her when you win, especially when revealed from then on the men are being brainwashed and cannot remember their actions. The fourth is an odd duck, using his bald head as a forfeit attack in its shininess, trying to force cooked meat products down a poor air stewardess' throat while saying bad food puns, getting his comeuppance when she turns out to be a talented chef who decides to however use ultra hot wasabi, part of the goofy cartoon tone. The big bad, the fifth and final opponent, is human Gollum getting revenge for being mocked for his short stature by wrecking havoc with a giant robot. His conclusion may disappoint, as he is forgiven by the women involved despite using a beam himself to briefly remove all their clothes and his comments on their gender's laziness. However, literally looking like a wizened Benjamin Button baby when defeated and humiliated, I again think the project was always a knockabout farce parodying erotic mahjong games, a proper video game satire tackling gender politics left to be created and worth trying one day.

The sense of where this came in Warp production is found in how, by accident, this has a compelling historical footnote for the company. There is little in the way of extra options, but the one you get, set up as an elevator with multiple floors for the options, allows players to try demos of other games from the company and has previews, one being an original tease for D2. D became their most successful game in terms of sales, but sadly, their company found themselves always on the wrong side of history afterwards. This version of D2 sets up what did happen in the Dreamcast game, only with the fact our lead Laura rather than just being the "virtual actor", Kenji Eno pioneering the idea with "Laura", a blonde Western female lead, playing different characters per game, is still playing the same one from the original D in that game's aftermath.

She is on an airplane, and whilst she is not pregnant as this trailer has her, the airplane crash that sets up D2 as it became is established here. D2's trajectory shows the unfortunate history for Warp, with Eno's untimely passing in 2013 happening long after that name did not exist as a developer. D2 was to follow Laura's son, warped into a medieval dungeon setting after the set up on the airplane leading to Laura's death⁴. It was being created for the M2, what was supposed to be the follow up console to the 3DO which never came, despite games being created for it. D2 as we got, which is effectively a re-telling of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) that kept Laura alive and surviving an airplane crash in the Canadian wilderness, tragically found itself on a console which only lasted for three years and led to Sega stepping down from being a hardware powerhouse to just being a software publisher. Oyaji Hunter Mahjong by pure accident presents a tantalising piece of their legacy, and whilst not a perfect game, this game itself is unique as a production, so odd and full of charm you can forgive its game play mechanics, a real testament to the studio even as a lesser title for trying to make interesting work.

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1) Kenji Eno, Japan's Maverick Game Creator, Dead at 42, written by Chris Kohler for WIRED and published January 14th 2015. Archived on March 8th 2017.

2) CoreGamers Interview and Profile of Kenji Eno (Part 2), written for CoreGamers and published August 21st 2008. Archived from the original November 20th 2015.

3) Saving Women by Crushing Perverted Old Men at Mahjong – Oyaji Hunter (3DO), written by Snowyaria and published on their Kusoge Coffeehouse blog on April 15th 2021.

4) D2 [M2 – Cancelled ], written and published for Unseen 64 on April 7th 2008.

Mr. Bones (1996)

 

Developer: Zono

Publisher: Sega

One Player

Sega Saturn

 

In horror, skeletons force one to concede our mortality. Take away the flesh, even if one is spiritual or religious and believe in the immortal soul, and the bones are left on the earth which once kept a person up right when mortally alive. In pop culture however, this sobering thought is constantly undercut by the uncanny and sometimes humorous absurdity of skeletons on t-shirts riding motorcycles on fire or even dancing in synchronized choreography, as made iconic by the 1929 Disney animated short The Skeleton Dance, which was a short produced back in black and white where a group jauntily partake in dance in a cemetery. In scientific medicine, bones cannot move in the human body (or in other species) without the muscles connected to them, muscles to pull and relax to allow one to fold an arm up to the chest and to flex straight again. As a result, skeletons in mythology and pop culture are innately uncanny for their ability to overcome this rational issue and gleefully swing swords in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), through the work of Ray Harryhausen, sing as Jack Skeleton does in A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) without seemingly a tongue let alone vocal cords, and here rock out blue guitar riffs in Mr. Bones.

Mr. Bones is a damn good representation of the Sega Saturn as a console, one tragically doomed to failure all but in the Japanese market, at the wrong time in trends in the West, not helped by the storm Sony with the Playstation had, and to not be well preserved in retro releases despite the fact that it is full of idiosyncratic games. One of the titles Sega hoped would sell the system and promote a new joy pad was Nights into Dreams (1996), which was as atypical as you could get next to Crash Bandicoot (1996) on the Playstation, a surreal flying game with a non-binary lead in a game openly based on Jungian psychology. That was one of the games that got a release in the West, and between the cult games and those only kept in Japan, you have some curiosities. From Haunted Casino (1996), strip erotic card and gambling games based on Western casinos and horror iconography, to Enemy Zero (1996), Kenji Eno’s take on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a full motion game with invisible enemies you have to detect by sound, horror and games suitable for Halloween alone are really idiosyncratic from the Saturn’s back catalogue even if a small selection, and Mr. Bones among them had enough personality and weirdness just by itself to stand out.

Mr. Bones comes to us from Ed Annunziata and Zono. Annunziata came to Sega by 1990 and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, the most prominent contribution in his career being the Ecco the Dolphin series, an environmentally conscious franchise which had games after the Mega Drive/Genesis but really had its largest run of entries back for that console and the Sega CD. Mr. Bones was one of two titles Annunziata worked on for the Sega Saturn, but this was developed by Zono, part of a strange era for Sega in the 32-bit console period where iconic licenses of theirs never came to the Saturn despite being popular in the 16 bit one, or came in curious ways. Even for those which did arrive, we got a Shinobi game, Shinobi X/Legions (1995), with digitized actors, and Streets of Rage and Golden Axe were taken from the beat-em-up genres and made into one-on-one fighting games. We, notoriously, never got an official Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Saturn, only tie-ins, and those said to be in production like Eternal Champions were cancelled or never came to be. Some idiosyncratic characters were made for the Saturn sadly left in the dust, from Bug! (1995) to Clockwork Knight (1994), and Ed Annunziata attempted it twice over the Saturn, full of personality just in their leads let alone their curious gameplay styles. Even Three Dirty Dwarves (1996) however, developed by Hungarian developer Appaloosa Interactive seems more “conventional” next to the two as it is still a quirky take on the beat-em-up which briefly gets into a baseball mini-game among other stages, whilst Mr. Bones, based on an original premise by Annunziata, is a mass of various genres.

One night, vampire magician DaGoulian with his occult drum set summons a skeleton army from the dead, brainwashed to let him take over the world, only to have that one percent issue to compromise his plan transpired, that one skeleton (voiced by Fitz Houston) was resurrected and still has his freewill intact. Before he can process his new un-life, the titular Bones in the first levels has to escape from the skeleton army sent after him, beginning with a pursuit scene running from said red eyed skeletons, jumping over tomb stones and ducking rocks being lobbed his way. You do have to describe the game, with spoilers, to even begin to explain what happens throughout as countless genres and gameplay styles like a mini-game compilation are put together here to tell the tale of this skeleton with a heart of gold and a taste for blue music. This does admittedly present the one aspect too that could put people at arm’s length from Mr. Bones, in that these levels vary in tone and some are frustrating to actually play, even if you unlock them in level select, and can try them again to beat them and progress the story.

It also becomes exceptionally quirkier as it goes alone, making sense at first having escape the skeletons only to be trapped on top of a mausoleum roof, dodging your bony-like, and then a platforming section which enforces one of the key aspects found throughout the levels regardless of gameplay style, that with more damage you take, Mr. Bones loses limbs with greater ease until you are a head on a spine. This can be prevented by increasing your level of “skeletism”, the force that brought him to life and can be acquired as health through various cosmic blue entities of the spirit world, usually butterflies, and be able to reattach limbs with the greater sense of them remaining attached. Things take a curveball when you encounter a blind man in a cabin, evoking the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in how, alongside its iconic central figure, one aspect which thankfully was brought back in the Universal films, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and continued from the novel in countless films is the blind man in the cabin who can help the monster without their appearance bringing forth a barrier. (Even a non-horror Alfred Hitchcock film, Saboteur (1942), had this trope of all things at one point in its thriller plotline). In this case, Mr. Bones is taught the power of electric blues guitar, providing one of its best virtues of the music.

One of the more idiosyncratic aspects of this era is the amount of people from legendary bands who went into video game composition. Former member of The Police Stewart Copeland, who had already a long score composer career at that point, working on the original Spyro the Dragon games, to the Sega Saturn, where sadly mostly in Japanese only releases this transpired: John Petrucci of Dream Theatre working on Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996), a game tragically never released in the West as a pinball game based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner working on Wachenröder (1998), a steampunk based JRPG. One which thankfully came to the West is Mr. Bones, where Ronnie Montrose composed the score. The late Ronnie Montrose, before his solo career where this score came within, is likely to be known for Montrose, also known as the band where Sammy Hager was the lead singer early in his career before his own solo career and the Van Hager era. This is a sumptuous blues rock soundtrack in dire need of re-assessment, spoken as a heavy metal and rock fan that yet, growing his music tastes over the decades even beyond guitar music, came to appreciate blues music early on not as a genre appropriated by dull white vocalists but full of vibrancy. Instead it was legendary figures from John Lee Hooker to Muddy Waters, and when it was appropriated, it was figures like ZZ Top to Stevie Ray Vaughan who made good blues rock music, which Mr. Bones score fully commits to. Here, it is fun seeing a skeleton stop other skeletons from fighting through an admittedly confusing (but thankfully not difficult) rhythm guitar section by the power of electric blues riffs, to the point the audience finds lighters to lift up despite the issue of not having pockets.

Platforming is the basic meat of many levels, following a triptych of levels where, with accursed bats stealing your limbs if given the chance, and giant lumberjacks to avoid, you need to get around and reach goals where you may need just one arm to pass, a button on the Saturn controller allowing you to implode. Yes, there is also the ill-advised ability to connect your arms back on without a rib cage, which looks wrong even if you exist as a skeleton able to still move. The platforming can be awkward, but it is a series of levels which are sufficient enough without taking too much of your time. This also presents, not a negative of the game, but the fascinating circumstances of this being a work you can beat in less than two hours over the two discs it is contained on, effectively a 16 bit game brought into the full motion video era, be it where you see the old tropes of throwing a lot of obstacles over these three levels, or how this culminates in forcing one to run away from rolling timber set to southern banjos. Again you get rhythm gaming with access to the infernal drum kit, not with sticks but hand drums, which is a case of catching up with the right one indicated.

It is after this I will argue, before the disc change, Mr. Bones knocks out the best levels, and where I came to admire this game, when it gets existential, emotional and deliciously weird. The platforming level over broken shards in space may annoy some, but set to a spoken word piece set to blues riffs, about the meaning behind blues music as an expression of emotion, is a beautiful moment in a game that is entirely for the most part over the top, before it gets to the cherry on top, a legitimately great level in the history of gaming, where you play a game of bouncing yourself off your own skull. The reason the game is two discs long is that gameplay scenes do use FMV for them, as well as in the cut scenes, and this is an example where this is used to a great advantage, where having to bounce yourself using yourself (and not knock your “ball”, curled up, off-screen) to collect parts back, when you collect the item for that section, you having a stacking doll-like scenario, truly surreal, where the giant skull you have bounced off becomes what you have to bounce off another giant skull of yourself on and on until the section is entirely complete. It is the best moment of the game, though the first disc itself ends having to travel into the screen through a vortex collecting your limbs back again, Mr. Bones as a character constantly haunted by the fact his bones, whilst brought together by skeleticism, seemingly wander off on their own accord.

Disc two, whilst with highlights and weird tangents, does however show the issues of how finickety some of the levels were and that Mr. Bones could have done with some revisions in places. This has some of the most frustrating moments of the entirely set of levels, beginning from the get-go with our lead trying to navigate an underwater tunnel without hitting rocks in-screen. Moments like this do show, honestly, that some fine-tuning to the difficulty were needed, and there are a few examples here. Having to release a skeletal dragon for example, by bouncing off the giant screws of its chains, and more so when, having apologized for their temper, they help fly you to DaGoulian‘s castle, where there is mandatory damage to go through all the stain glass windows showing his life, a cool visual touch but having to maneuver Mr. Bones, swaying like a drunken sailor on a boat in the claws of the dragon, past hazards and collecting the health to be prepared for the next stain glass window is a frustrating challenge in itself. The most egregious is an ice lake stage where, having to navigate the thin ice, it is precarious to an extreme and only needs you to fall in the water twice before the extreme cold suck you into the currents below. Thankfully, in contrast to this, you have some of the strangest moments of this entire game, like recreating the civilians Lilliput of Guillver's Travels, the iconic extra tiny people of the Jonathan Swift novel only touched upon once, with these characters never appearing again baring the level where you protect them from spiders. Weirder still, worthy of historical record in videogame lore, is thwarting a boss by way of telling jokes, which is up there next to Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle (1989) with beating bosses through Paper, Rock, Scissors, only with less concerns of irritating random chance, and more Dad jokes.

It is night and day why this would have not been a hit, too weird to live to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, if thankfully existing, but this has to also be factored in with the fact that, despite all the fascinating games I have nodded to just from 1996, that was already seen as a time when the Sega Saturn was failing in the West, meaning even the cult games would have been effected.  Mr. Bones on a preview demo on a disc called Sega Flash Vol. 3 (1996), released with issue #15 of Sega Saturn Magazine in the United Kingdom, was where I first learn of this game as a kid, part of a holy collection of Saturn games mostly never gotten to and rare - Keio Flying Squadron 2 (1996), Die Hard Arcade (1996), Dark Savior (1996), Dragon Force (1996), Enemy Zero - which showed that, whilst the reality was Sony were winning, it did not diminish how many idiosyncratic games they had regardless of the flagging virtues of the Saturn. All those alongside Mr. Bones had European releases in PAL and are now mostly rare, a murder's row of games, even if they all had flaws, one would argue for their preservation and re-release on a Saturn mini console, Mr. Bones a really odd game outmatched in terms of the virtues for all its flaws. Mr. Bones comes with me better with its good moments and the aesthetic really standing out, less morbid as the final boss battle is bouncing back attacks with one's guitar solos and a villain forgetting they are a vampire, more broadly spooky. [Spoilers] It has the tone where, for a slight ending, it is still a good happy one, glad to see, where a character like Mr. Bones gets to enter a dimensional portal and be with a female banshee he wooed with his music earlier in disc one. [Spoilers End] A potentially one-dimensional figure, a literal skeleton, he is given enough life literally by voice actor Fitz Houston and the game, memorable since childhood for images welding that guitar like a king, and I can only wishing this was preserved and re-released. Zono as a studio sadly did not last long into the 2000s, whilst Ed Annunziata was able to continue on, even moving on into mobile phone gaming and its possibilities. It did lead to him having direct involvement with the Nokia N-Gage as a game producer, which did not go well at all for that handheld console/phone hybrid, but there was at least an attempt.

Games of the Abstract: Haunted Casino (1996)

Developer: Societa Daikanyama

Publisher: Societa Daikanyama

One Player

Originally for the Sega Saturn

 

For the Sega Saturn, there were a string of adult releases under the Japanese only release rating of "RedX18". In Japan, Sega used their own age rating, an optional one for its systems in Japan. Zen Nenrei was considered for all ages, and Nenrei Seigen 18 Saiijou was for adults over the age of 18¹. X Shitei 18 Saiijou, the aforementioned RedX18 as I have initially called it, was also designed for adults over the age of 18, but also subject to more sales restrictions for explicit erotic content. There is one exception - the 1996 Japanese release of Mortal Kombat II for the Saturn got the X Shitei 18 Saiijou rating for violence - but this is a rating entirely for games with explicit nudity. Some adventure games (Can Can Bunny Premiere (1996)) qualified, and to my surprise, a licensed game for a popular anime franchise from the time, called Tenchi Muyou, Tenchi Muyou! Ryououki Gokuraku CD-ROM for Sega Saturn (1995), fell into this rating too. There are also full motion video works with live action footage of models, such as VIC Tokai's Playboy Karaoke Collection games, licensed from the Playboy magazine company, and Virtua Photo Studio: Cameraman Simulation (1996), where you play a cameraman and as the title entails, involves photo shots with real models. Most of these games, however, are strip mah-jong games, a staple in Japanese video games from Gal Jan (1996) to the Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai games, and then you get Haunted Casino, an outlier in the set. Alongside how this was the biggest game in this group, in terms of three discs being required, this is a strip game in the western mould of blackjack, poker and roulette with an explicit horror slant.

Erotic games have been licensed from the Atari 2600, to unofficially for the likes of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but with the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer in the nineties welcoming erotic software with open arms as a console, the increase in graphical capabilities and full motion video allowed for erotica in video games (or interactive movies) to have more to work with, to depict its content with more explicit and also more visually vibrant work than in a time, like the Atari 2600, the hardware prevented more than vague shapes in lewd positions. This era completely stayed in Japan when it came to the Sega Saturn, but in mind how, in vast contrast to its disastrous history in the United States and the small era of release in Europe, this console was a success for Sega in their home country. With the vast number of software genres their home land got - from the scrolling shooters to the visual novels – it makes sensible logic for better or worse to be more accepting of this genre on a marketing perspective. Haunted Casino does however need to be explicitly talked of in how, compared to the modern day in gaming, and what you could publish on the likes of the PC-98 personal computer before the Saturn, this is tame in terms of erotica as it is entirely softcore nudity. It is, without considering the gender of the dealers you play in the titular casino in these games over three rounds, nudity with the anatomy mostly of dolls, and you would not have gotten anything more explicit in Sega software for the console.

Likewise, the erotic and card games have been bedfellows for a long time; said to be developed in the United States in the 19th Century, in New Orleans around strip clubs², strip poker is an idiosyncratic choice to include instead of mahjong, seen once in a game which focuses on a strip take on blackjack predominantly. The horror theme as well is as idiosyncratic. Horror intermingling with the sensual, the fear of loss replacing the risk of harm in this case, is a curious tonal choice with more monstrous and unnatural female dealers to play against than "cute" female characters in other RedX18 mah-jong games. The developer/publisher Societa Daikanyama worked prominently for the Sega Saturn alone, though it was the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer where they made their start. With the original 1994 version of The Yakyuuken Special, the console from the United States had however managed to have a good foothold in Japan, even South Korea, with exclusive games. The console allowed both for these types of games, the 3DO and Saturn versions strip "rock paper scissor" with real footage of actresses, and with the console having allowed new developers to publish software for the system at a cheaper cost, something of note with a famous FMV horror game originally from the 3DO, Kenji Eno and Warp's D (1995). Societa produced little after the few games they released for the Saturn, and Haunted Casino still stands out among their work as an ambitious (and curious) hybrid of a casino gambling game, strip card games, and interactive walking sections which feel influenced by Myst (1993), the legendary Cyan release that became the most successful game of this wave of CD based productions financially in this decade.

It is implicitly Western, i.e. European, in aesthetic with no Japanese horror iconography at all. Set in a gothic castle which follows the tropes of classic European horror iconography - gargoyle door knockers that talk, suits of golden feminine armour and western interiors - the protagonist is genderless though with mind, as we get into, the likely target audience of  this being male gamers. This casino is run by supernatural figures, and upon entering, you are introduced to a cackling blue imp with a nice raspy voice, a female voice actor as common in Japanese voice acting to play characters like these as much as male children in anime. A mischievous figure, he is one of the sole explicitly non-human characters in this abode, barring a portrait on the ground floor of a female imp. Starting with the first disc (ground floor), you play blackjack with a red haired mermaid, roulette (its sole inclusion) with a harpy, and a game named Heaven and Hell with an aquatic figure with a tail and possible Chinese influence in her costume design.

A slight disappointment with the game, with characters that are explicitly hyper-feminised in design, is how they do not really play up the idea of these figures being supernatural entities despite the initial two mentioned referencing mythological figures linked to their female counterparts. Mermaids in numerous global folklores are figures of beauty but also talked of as dangerous in their allure, talked of causing shipwrecks, whilst harpies are far more common than their male equivalent from Ancient Greek and Roman mythology. These are clearly very western looking (for the most part) ideals of beauty in design, but with no sense of the monstrous involved which feels a lost chance. When the implicit point of Haunted Castle is this Western horror tone, these female characters in their design, mostly moving away from Eastern and Japanese costume designs and with full figured proportions, do look like models with fake ears and horns on, which still stand out as good art work but miss something in terms of the supernatural tone. Stepping away from the titillation, the idea of the dealer of gambling tables being the most sensual figure, whether male or female, is a really interesting premise for a gambling video game, something which could be leaned on in terms of erotic card games where ideals of beauty can be eroticised in monstrous forms that undercut conventional ideas of attractiveness. The idea of mixing the thrill/fear of losing in a card game with the promise of sexuality is something already there, but adding to this a figure you desire and fear, or at least get a Halloween party sense of spookiness in a fun way, is a subversive idea, making the sense that these figures do not go further in their unnatural nature disingenuous to the premise.

There is the obvious skeletal elephant in the room of the notion of the male gaze. In mind this would have been sold for a male audience in Japan, the "male gaze" concept as developed by the likes of Laura Mulvey involves male heterosexual depictions of women in the arts, turning them into figures of sexual desire for their pleasure. The concept is one I have ambivalence for, bearing in mind I am a heterosexual male and not the person to analyze this concept, because it can be oversimplified when it comes to who the player of a game like this could be. It needs to ask how would a gay male player react to this game, where as you play the rounds (one with the women clothes, second in exaggerated lingerie, the later nude), or how a female player would react to the material, factoring in LGBTQ female gamers as well. Far more dubious, in truth, is if you win the three rounds, the female dealers against their will are sucked into a void and turned into a playing card of your choice which you possess, which is cheesy in hindsight, but does present the literal possession of women as objects. Considering the likelihood, if you lost, your character would likely lose their soul, this is still the more questionable thing if part of a game, in historical hindsight, whilst still pure cheese in presentation.

The lascivious side is on full display, including a theatre of the bottom floor where you can watch presentations of the female cast in still images in various states of undress, but that was the game’s selling point; instead the sense of having to raise the stakes in this to the act of capturing your beaten opponents, whilst befitting the horror tone, becomes the thing which will cause people to roll their eyes. Games like this do cause one to release that, because video games were dominated by male creators selling games to male costumers, that factors in how a mere fragment of gender and sexuality has ever been brought to the medium for a few good decades, where a game like this does not present a wide array of body shapes and types even among fictional monster women, or imaging how an LGBTQ version of this, such as strip poker with male dealers for a male audience, would feel in tone. As a result, Haunted Casino’s mild sexuality in the expanding of voices even in terms of sexuality does feel pure cheesecake that feels of an entirely different time.

To get these images of the dealers nude too, you need to actually beat the games, and for starters, whilst these gamers transpire in rooms, you have to move around the casino, in which this presents itself as if it was a puzzle game in full three dimensions without any actual point and click puzzles to solve. Having needed to double tap the controls after a delay to move or turn my unseen character, very little of the world is interactive at all, merely aesthetic context for the game: you can find yourself in an entirely lightless room on the first floor listening to dialogue, and an attempt to enter the treasury leads to a trapdoor down into the cellar, which you can climb back out of, but this is contextual flavour to a game where the challenge itself is entering the rooms where gambling tables are found. Gambling as a video game as well is also with the concern of random chance being a factor, meaning one can, as in real life, lose many of your newly earned coins with ease. Poker, when played on the second floor with a cat girl, here really depends on luck with the cards you get, and especially involves playing safe, even if you know the rules, and the Heaven and Hell card game, which appears twice, proves a challenge. Whilst aesthetically appropriate, it needs to be described in terms of how it can be a frustrating game among those here if diagrams are not at hand – there are three stages, each where you can choose to put coins on Heaven, Hell or that there will be a draw, and you need to guess from the card chosen for Heaven and the other for Hell which will be higher in value. A success means you can risk further with a larger reward on the second stage, with the new cards and the older ones totalling the amount for Heaven or for Hell, the third stage the same if you manage to bet right. In comparison, I find myself realising I have a better skill at blackjack which thankfully makes up most of the seven dealers you encounter with three games of it played between. This will be a nightmare depending on your luck to beat the dealers, even if the game itself is short; even if all need to be beaten three times each, and is extended out into three discs, those seven dealers and the theatre itself are the main core of the game, , where a lot was designed for wanting full motion video scenes that are not even erotic but for their spooky tone, such as a cut scene of two suits of the armour talking to each other on the second level.

The result is a curiosity of its time, where practically, it would have made more sense to stick to the card games and not have its sections investigating the manor. They do add a lot in terms of mood, and make Haunted Casino for its obvious flaws absolutely compelling. This is not scary horror, as it would have been inappropriate for its content unless desiring a more transgressive erotic tone. It is instead the kind of game for the more open minded player on Halloween, and a really ambitious project to even attempt back then. This is pretty extravagant in mind to this being a production from a developer/publisher specialising in erotic games, as FMV and fully rendered animation at this time would have been a lot of hard work for window dressing, which could be summed up in there being a bedroom on the second floor which is never of use barring for the sake of its appearance. It evokes The Mansion of Hidden Souls (1994), the Sega Saturn sequel of the similar named Sega CD original, where you only interact with items with a purpose, in the case of this later game with less interaction barring the equivalent of flavour text, such as dialogue from gargoyle door knockers or ram your head into a locked door. There is also the added aspect that there is no music in the game barring a slight flourish when dealers are defeated. As a result, this will put people off for what is a very simplistic erotic gambling game, but for those who are not, it adds to the eerie and strange mood of the entire production. It is, if not off-putting, a very ambitious style which is just there. For the sake of style, now dated, the artistic decisions add to the game.

It also means that, with each floor a disc, you win a key off the last dealer you beat per the first two levels, needing to give them to the female demon tending to the elevator to move between discs. This game manages to have more discs than some cult games on the Saturn as a result of this – Mr. Bones (1996) is only two as another eccentric one-off perfect for Halloween – and it means Haunted Casino sits alongside the Saturn port of Konami’s cult hit Policenauts (1996) in terms of having three discs within its physical release just because of how FMV took a lot of space in CDs. Next to lengthy JRPGs like Shining the Holy Ark (1997) and Dragon Force (1996) from the console, which were long games to immerse oneself in however designed around the limited space of CDs/cartridges for video games, many of these multi disc games were shorter but ballooned in disc number due to the amount of information needed to store full motion video. Enemy Zero (1996), from our friends of Kenji Eno’s Warp studio, is technically a three disc game too, but the four (the first) is the intro cut scene, whilst Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997) used the four discs for each world as a much more ambitious follow-up to the critical and financial success of Myst. RPGs and other genres would have more discs, see Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), but that was when they started adding FMV themselves and started taking advantage of the disc space for content, whilst these FMV centric games with hindsight present a fascinating passage in gaming's history trying to work with technical limitations. Haunted Casino is the kind of game a hell of a lot more easier to make nowadays, and with less discs needed in the modern day, itself a peculiar artefact only contrasted by the likes of the Saturn port of Phantasmagoria (1995), the Sierra computer point-and-click horror game, which was Japanese exclusive and eight discs long due to how much FMV it used.

The second disc / floor is where the war of attrition and grinding with the money credits comes into play as this is where the cat girl and her poker table comes in, entirely based on having a good enough hand immediately rather than hoping the one new card you get switch for being remotely of use. Pamela the dragon-like figure with a unicorn horn presents another Heaven and Hell game, and you encounter an elf that plays blackjack. The lack of music is contrasted by the voice acting, where even if with some repetition varies, including some use of English in the instruction as a dealer to the player tells them when to bet. This is a good point to bring up one of the other curious aspects of this game’s existence, in that Japan’s has strict gambling laws would prevent Western card games like blackjack and poker being possible to play with real financial stakes when the game was released. Until 27th July 2018, when the Japanese Diet passed the Act for Development of Specified Complex Tourist Facilities Areas (the Act), which legalises gambling to be operated by licensed private entities in certain designated locations within Japan, gambling in general in the country was prohibited barring public sport and lotteries under the Japanese Penal Code (Act No. 45 of 1907)³. There are poker players from Japan in world tournaments, but playing for money itself is the issue, where money transactions from card games was not allowed in the law⁴, and how gambling licenses until this 2018 act were only allowed for local governments or government-related entities to have  for the likes of lotteries³. Tellingly, with pachinko parlours, hugely popular in Japan, you won steel ball bearings meant to be exchanged for prizes in the parlours, and financial transactions come with the stores where such prizes can be exchanged in close proximity even if unmarked stores⁵. Haunted Casino as a result really sticks out as a niche in mind to this, when mah-jong games including the erotic kind are a more commonplace genre, with mah-jong popular in Japan. It presents Haunted Casino, using western games in a western horror aesthetic, as a curious creative decision in terms of video game erotica, not even factoring in the challenge its gambling mechanics thus bring in, with no way to accumulate more money and hoping you win each dealer to survive.

Befittingly the last dealer, the big head of this casino, is a female demon, effectively the Queen among them in how more stylish her design is, even if the fact you return for another game of blackjack undercuts any grandeur to the proceedings. It does however present an accidentally bleak ending where, even if a language barrier is involved to understand the dialogue, you become the real monster of the game just from how the ending plays out. With no dealers left not turned into cards, the casino crumbles to the ground, and even our lovable imp guide dissipates into nothing, making one feel truly the villain of the game for decimating the location from existence. The only thing left standing is the theatre, merely a wall left standing with a sheet on it, the projector in the dirt projecting the films of the dealers as ghosts to lust over, and in itself it proves a misanthropic ending in leaving one culpable of destroying the place and left with only one’s fantasies to have. You do not even have the insinuation of any physical relationship with these figures, just these images left preserved on these films, certainly the befitting horror appropriate ending even if a killjoy to the sensual tone.

Societa Daikanyama do not really exist beyond the Saturn, and in terms of this game, a stigma against erotic games will view it as an oddity that would not reward in playing it, even in terms of titillation as sexually explicit games now are easier to purchase least for PC players. For a Saturn game, of its own type and in terms of both horror and FMV titles, it is a real oddity. I mentioned earlier this game would be easier to make nowadays, but few would try to recreate the presentation, just create the card tables within the world for ease. Legitimately a curiosity in the truest sense, Societa themselves would vanish by 2013⁵. Their old site, preserved through the Wayback Machine (and Japanese only, requiring translation), does talk of a Windows PC version of Haunted Casino they intended to release, including a front page apology for its release date being undecided, a port which never came to be⁶. An erotic gambling game in the decades after, the kind found on Valve's Steam site, would never have this elaborate tone with the Myst-like FMV walking sequences, as it would be impractical for financial cost or even in terms of a suitable aesthetic. This makes the game a compelling one-off in terms of a genre and attitude to gaming that feels ambitious even for pure lascivious reasons. It is a game you could bounce off just because as a gambling game, you unless you are good, lucky or cheat are at the mercy of the cards' favour, but as a game for the Sega Saturn and in its spectrum of horror adjacent games, even others from other consoles in that era, it stands out greatly.

 

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1) SEGA Rating page on Sega Retro.

2) The History of Strip Poker: The Bare Facts of the Game, written by Ali Amel for Previous Magazine and published on March 6th 2019.

3) A general introduction to gambling law in Japan, written by Anderson Mōri & Tomotsune for Lexology, published on May 11th 2022.

4) Playing Poker in Japan: What's It Like? by Ivan Potocki for My Poker Coaching.

5) The Secret Life of Pachinko: How Japan's gaming parlors really work, written by David Kushner, and published for IEEE Spectrum on October 1st 2020.

6) The Societa Daikanyama page for Sega Retro.

7) Societta's Web Page (updated 2001/02/05). From March 1st 2001 by way of the Wayback Machine.

Games of the Abstract: Strahl (1993)

 

a.k.a. Triad Stone

Developer: Data East

Publisher: Pioneer Productions / Panasonic

One Player

3DO Interactive Multiplayer / Sega Saturn / Pioneer LaserActive

 

Strahl is definitely of its time – a full motion video game in the mould of Dragon’s Lair (1983), the legendary arcade game where, using laser disc technology to play and animated by Don Bluth, you attempted to rescue a princess from a dragon’s castle by way of animated sequences and proto-quick time events, pressing the right button commands at the right times to avoid a game over. Dragon’s Lair was a seminal title from the eighties, because as much because of how ahead of its time graphically was if by way of sacrificing game play freedom, leading to a boom of FMV games by themselves connected to this idea of minimal interactivity. By the time Strahl however reaches a point when FMV games, including these specific animated ones would become less appreciated. There would still be FMV games in a variety of genres by the late nineties, such as the point and click genre, but as the likes of American Laser Games, who won favour with lightgun games like Mad Dog McCree (1990), would need to look into alternate revenue, like normal games like Mazer (1995) or targeted for a female audience with the Her Interactive line, and polygons in video games would become the popular trend, these games would be under threat as consoles 3DO and the Sega CD would be criticised for having FMV games in general.

Strahl is an odd case thought, as this was originally developed as an arcade game, and yet ended up on multiple consoles like the 3DO and the Sega Saturn in the mid-nineties. This is also distinct as this is among a small number of Japanese animated FMV games, (mostly) released in the eighties for the arcade, and getting ports to games consoles in the nineties. Time Gal (1985), ported to the Sega CD and other consoles was a Taito property and is probably the most well known of this group. Important to all of them, and Strahl, is Toei Animation, the legendary animation studio who were founded in 1948 and an institution in Japanese anime, be they with their Dragonball adaptations or One Piece or Precure etc. Among all the mediums they worked in, these FMV laserdisc games from Japan were among their projects.

Evil is creeping through a fantasy land, and you play a male hero who has to travel to remote and dangerous places to collect gems to stop this. Strahl, based on the version I played, offers you to choose which animated segment to play, where you need to press the right directional button at the right time when prompted, press the sword button when prompted, and when it is brought up, bash the last button you need as much as possible until you fill an onscreen orb blue. You have continues and as you progress in the 3DO version, thankfully you keep progress in the session you play. This is in mind that the game is short, where I was able to finish it within one session, the issue more reflexes and how, having to complete segments, having to remember what to expect can be the case with repeating scenes. You have leeway with most of the button prompts, but this does present the issue, undercutting the virtues of the animation itself, of having to repeat an entire segment from the beginning if you get a fail state. This is an issue with an FMV game in general like this.

This is beautiful to look at, a fun game to play in mind its structure is an artefact of a different time. The scenarios vary between more traditional scenes from a fantasy but also be very inventive, such as escaping a haunted field which references Gulliver’s Travels with tiny people trying to attack you, before you become small and they giant, or the final level you unlock facing mirror images of yourself in duels. Compression is obvious an issue with full motion video, be it for the 3DO or the Saturn, but the animation is incredibly good. Strahl however comes with the knowledge that, even back when it was released, it would have become part of the backlash against these games, as longer and more interactive genres were becoming more appreciated and wanted. It comes with the sense that, by this point, this type of game originally meant for the eighties post-Dragon’s Lair was out of time. Its obscurity now neither helps, a shame as it is a work that should be preserved and, for me, was entertaining. These are the kind of obscurities which fascinate, and once you get used to this, Strahl for those who could play it would find reward even for a shorter gaming experience.

Games of the Abstract: D (1995)

 

Developer: Warp

Publisher: Panasonic / Acclaim

One Player

Sega Saturn / 3DO Interactive Multiplayer/ Sony Playstation / MS-DOS

 

D is another horror game of the past whose age is visible, though released the same year as Phantasmagoria (1995), in the world of cutting edge polygonal games and the genres which managed to struggle on at this time, I will argue D's legacy is importance and has a structure, if not already used by a modern game, which could be evolved further into the modern day.

D's legacy is as tied to Warp, its developer, and their founder Kenji Eno, coming to video games in the nineteen eighties and become a true one-off. As we will get to, the legacy of Warp is not as well preserved as it should be except, which is sad as, even out of morbid curiosity let alone the innovations Warp had, the story of Kenji Eno is that of both an auteur and an absolute miscreant who would have been fascinating to talk to in the flesh, let alone an entire independent developer team who worked on games like this. He was certainly a shit stirrer at times, the legacy of D even marking the future trajectory of Warp as, as a result of Sony not realising D was a huge hit on multiple consoles and under printing the Playsation One release, they undersold it. Kenji Eno's own testament talks of how Sony had only manufactured around 28,000 units despite there being 100,000 pre-orders from retailers confirmed which understandably annoyed him¹. Eno was not pleased and thus, at a Sony show where he was allowed to be a guest speaker, he presented that their next game would be for Sega, switching the Sony Playstation logo for the Sega Saturn one in a middle finger salute. Warp once included a condom for Short Warp (1996)¹, a mini-game collection made for the 3DO, but Warp also created Real Sound: Kaze no Regret (1997), a Japanese only Saturn game (later published for the Sega Dreamcast) designed for blind players. Alongside the deal Eno made to donate a thousand games along with Saturns to blind people with Sega¹, to make the game exclusive for the console, this is still ahead of its time. Even in the 2020s games are slowly starting to adapt to disabilities for players, one of the only of games similar to this I am aware of being A Blind Legend (2015), a fantasy game about a knight which is a hack n slash game entirely built not on sight but by binaural 3D sounds, together making a fascinating pair of experiments as much as virtuous in their goals.

D itself, which obviously has the issue of being able to search on it online unless you include its year of release and/or either Warp or Kenji Eno's name, was not Warp's first project. We must thank Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts and arguably another man ahead of his time as, when he decided to bring forth the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console, a machine whose preservation in catalogue only really exists in emulation and its fan base, his console despite being a failure of the fifth generation was ahead of its time in so much. No region lock for games, no censorship for games even if it led to Vivid Interactive full motion video softcore, and because of its unique model of creation, the hardware being more expensive but the games not, the licenses for developers to be able to create software was cheaper. With a market in Japan and even South Korea, Warp and Kenji Eno were able to exist due to this cheaper gateway, and sadly again with the lack of official preservation, the games they made before D (only one getting a Western release) sound fascinating. Around the time D was made there was Trip'd (1995), a bizarre puzzle game which got the Western release, and Oyaji Hunter Mahjong (1995), which sounds the most compelling as a story of a male superhero who fights older men who perv young women through games of mahjong, with the additional surprise of having animated cut scenes directed by Ichiro Itano, a legendary animator for the likes of the Macross anime franchise if also a notorious figure when he does helm the anime director's seat.

D was a push for the company. A three dimensional FMV game, the Saturn version I played for this review requiring two discs, the restrictions in fully animated scenes noticed in how it streamlines the game down into an interactive movie with puzzles. The technology at this time was to the point that games which went further and used live action video would struggle further, to which Phantasmagoria, as already mentioned, was a point n click game which took seven discs when it was first released (eight for the Saturn port exclusive to Japan). D in context was really idiosyncratic and an inspired challenge, especially as Warp embraced the restrictions as part of the gameplay. You only have a maximum of two hours to beat the game, or its game over without a proper ending, and you cannot pause either, which is a unique concept still to have had. It also streamlines the point and click genre by way of first person, as Myst (1993), in which whilst it could struggle for replay value for some in the current day, it nonetheless jettisons aspects of these games I myself have struggled with. The filler you can find in point and click games are mostly gone and any time I lost in my first attempt, by time out, came from wandering the limited directions you can go and not figuring out the few mechanics there, something I learnt from in terms of mistakes for attempts after.

I will not damn the game's limitations, as this was a game which did not try to hide its restrictions, the two hour play time as a maximum as much to work around the task rendering this game's animation fully for Warp as an small company. If that seems short for a game which would have been sold for £39.99² in the United Kingdom for the Sega Saturn, this was a curious era of games that experimented with the formats they came with, and new technology, and managed to be huge hits despite restrictions in terms of their content or scale. Phantasmagoria was one such example, becoming a hit in 1995, and previously Myst, as also has been mentioned, was a game built by Rand and Robyn Miller on HyperCard, a Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers software which was for organisation, even for organising cooking recipes³, but became a cultural juggernaut, one which for the PC had the advantage of being a way to sell CD player technology with.

Thankfully, some radical games are still being made today, even with the advantage of huger budgets than Kenji Eno could have ever imagined, but there was a fascinating period here in the mid-nineties where early pioneers managed to have successes even with aesthetics and content which would have been considered "dated" decades later. At this time, D would have pushed a Sega Saturn let alone a PC, where there is one route you need to get to, but you must face the puzzles in the way of Laura, the "virtual actress" who would star as different characters in an unofficial trilogy, with Enemy Zero (1996) for the Saturn, and D2 (1999) for the Sega Dreamcast.

The story can be argued to be the weakest point of the fame, though it has charm for me, especially in mind that it was not even fleshed out with cut scenes, the main thrust of the game, and its title, involving the legacy of Dracula on Laura's family not involved until after the game play itself was already being fleshed out^1b. Abruptly, at the Los Angeles National Hospital, its director Dr. Richter Harris has gone on a shooting spree. Managing to get through the police barrier is his daughter Laura, who upon entering is taken into another realm in a gothic manor, a mental prison where Laura will have to complete the puzzles to reach her father, able to project himself to her and warning her of the dire consequences of trying to reach him. To get to this plot's conclusion, with one of two endings, you will need to figure out those puzzles, part of the game logic that there will be doors which require swords to open them but all able to be figured out without drawing any long bows. The puzzles for the most part are simple, and in hindsight to the limitations of the game, this has less of the irritance I struggle with from point and click games. There is no object to examine for no reason, unless it is one of the few designed for a scare like a room full of spikes with a dead body within it. This means you have to figure the game out from a series of spots and sights which all have to be interacted with to continue, only with how the question. If you, as I did, lose because you wasted time trying to find everything, or working around that you have single paths to get around the rooms, the game is short as an experience you can replay and fix your mistakes.

The controls are very simple, be it on a Saturn controller or keyboard, where you need only one up button to go forwards, left and right to turn around, one button to interact, and one button for the inventory, which alongside the items you collect has a pocket watch to show you how much time you have, and a pocket mirror which provides hints three times before it breaks. The puzzles are not obscure, barring one where if you have no knowledge of astrological signs, you will have to learn them or hope pure luck is one your side. Again, it has its weird logic, the first puzzle of the game involving having to get around a spike wall trap, by placing a piece of paper into a bowl of water for a right combination, to get a needed tool to disarm the trap, but the game is helped by the lack of pointless tangents, not forcing you to wander aimlessly.

At three points, you could argue the game has some frustrating moments, but they could be so much worse. First is one around a safe, where surrounding a cool image, of a chained up corpse whose hand is sealed through a wall into the safe the other side, you have the issue of timing the number combination wheel to get the right combination, but it has a logic and you can figure out the timing mechanism through sound. The second is probably the most likely the frustrate as, when you get to the second disc, switching mid game in an older copy, the main location is a revolving chamber where you need to activate a switch to get to the locations for the next puzzles, including dead ends, which could be a huge time waster. It seems not as random for me, and if you help yourself in being able to get through the first disc quickly or well, you have more time to go with. It is this section where replays come to mind, as you now have to figure out, in multiple locations, where everything goes rather than just rooms you can wander between with ease. The third, eating through time for me at one point, is a prototype of quick time events involving a suit of armour, but I suspect this got me, far from a cruel inclusion of pushing the buttons in a simple series, for pressing them more than required. Only because of this mistake was I forced into a Myth of Sisyphus situation involving falling into a pit over and over, as the armour threatened a sword at me every time I climbed back up.

There are other puzzles which are inspired, and structurally, nothing is amiss for me for the game. Even its aesthetic, which has aged into obsolescence, still looks unique, eeriness to the entire production in its stilted form. The atmosphere is found for a horror game, including in terms of the music when it does appear, both from the Moscow Festival Orchestra, and by Kenji Eno himself. It pulled me in as an interactive experience, even as its premise has a cheesy vampire related plot. That barring one aspect connected to another of Kenji Eno's notorious stories, where when you find any of the four beetles in the game, the closest to a bonus goal to collect them, they cause flashbacks for Laura of a traumatising memory she had forgotten. [Major Spoiler] Namely, that she killed her mother as a child and cannibalised her body. [Spoilers End] The flashbacks, though they have aged, have an unnerving quality in their lack of realism now, especially as aesthetic touches, like rapid cuts including of the word "D" in red, have a menace to them still. It is far less gory than games that were already made at the time, nor a title released a year later like Harvester (1996), but notoriously, Eno with the original 3DO version delayed submitting the master until the last moment, for when it is to be printed into CD form, submitting a censored version but bringing to the United States, on the plane, the original uncensored version^1c. He was not reprimanded at all, and in terms of any plot here, his action, and how all the other versions for other formats kept this back-story, it proves the most compelling aspect of a b-movie plot for the additional macabre nature of it.

For me personally, D is of its time, but in context, it is an exceptional piece in terms of what it could achieve. That and this both has an attitude to a puzzle video game superior to others I have seen, where I have found myself with point and click games where I am stuck in circles with puzzles which make no sense, or the potential of "dead man walking" scenarios where you prevent yourself from progressing on and have to start again. Neither does this require you to have to complete everything in order, as it is possible, if you know the answers from before, to skip segments without breaking the game. It is a game template whose form should be replicated, as far as the limit of time to complete it, and in its simplicity. The phenomenon in the 2010s of the "escape room"⁴, real life but also virtual equivalents, in which for the live productions a group of people pay to escape a room which has puzzles that need to be figured out, is what should be the video game equivalent of D's legacy, and it is noticeable that, as with Myst being about having to manoeuvre alien equipment and props in the environment themselves as the puzzles, they present an inspired pair for puzzle games of the decades after. Even a modern day blockbuster in the horror genre like Resident Evil Village (2021), whilst having dynamics like monsters to avoid at the same time, has puzzle sections as much as it is a first person shooter, which causes one to speculate how these earlier games paved the way of the likes of this future hit.  

Warp after this, with the game a huge success, continued the unofficial "Laura" trilogy with Enemy Zero and D2. Tragically, after this Warp did not really make a great deal, and with multiple name changes and one WiiWare game, You, Me, and the Cubes (2009) under the developer name From Yellow to Orange Inc., Kenji Eno also died tragically young at forty three in 2013. The bitterest aspect is that the company's legacy is not preserved, with the exception of D, which has the advantage, as having a PC conversion, of being acquired and resurrected by Nightdive Studios in 2016⁵. Whilst a huge hit in the day, this like a few of these titles from this fascinating transitionary period, of FMV crazes and things like a CD drive for PCs as new things, D is likely to be seen as an aged curiosity for many. For me, coming to this, D in its achievements is perfect.

 

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1) Japan's Wayward Son, an interview with Kenji Eno, written by Shane Bettenhausen and James Mielke for 1up.com, published originally on August 7th 2008. [Preserved by Archive.com on December 8th 2012.]

1b) Also taken from Japan's Wayward Son, the interview with Kenji Eno, but the paragraph in the interview is worth quoting:

1UP: When you were first starting and you didn't have a storyline, did you know that the guy at the end was Dracula? Did you know that even when there was no storyline? 

KE [Kenji Eno]: Right in the beginning, it was just a plain adventure game, and I didn't know that I would make the twist ending about Dracula.

 

1c) Also taken from the Japan's Wayward Son interview:

1UP: D was the game that made Warp famous. Were you trying to push the boundaries and preconceptions of game storylines with its cannibalism theme?

KE [Kenji Eno]: There's a crazy story behind this. When I was first making D, it had no story. The game was already almost completed, so to put a story in the game, I had to insert it as flashbacks. While I was doing that, I wanted to do some kind of a trick. Back in those days, you weren't allowed to make any violent games -- like, stabbing people inside the game was taboo -- so you weren't allowed to do that. D has cannibalism, which was a total taboo back in the day!

But I wanted to put this in the game, so what I did was I didn't show anyone else in the company those scenes; I was hiding them until the very end. You submit the master, and they check the master and approve the master and put a sticker on it, and this gets sent to the U.S. to get printed. There was a penalty you had to pay if you're late in submitting the master, but you'd also have to deliver it by hand. So, knowing this, I submitted it late on purpose. I submitted a clean one and got it approved. Then I had to bring it to America. So on the plane, I switched the discs and submitted it to 3DO, and it got manufactured like that.

2) Computer & Video Games magazine, "March 1996" (UK; 1996-02-09), page 30

3) The Retronauts podcast and Episode 126: A deep dive into HyperCard and Myst is worth listening for this connection.

4) The unbelievably lucrative business of escape rooms, written by Sally French and Jessica Marmor Shaw, published for MarketWatch on July 21st 2015.

5) Cult 3DO horror D makes its way to PC, written by Tom Sykes for PC Gamer and published on June 5th 2016.