Jeremy Parish
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NES Works Gaiden #31: Chack'N Pop / Dig Dug / Flappy
🕑 Added 2021-12-29 13:10:58 +0000 UTCThis week's episode will seem very familiar to long-time viewers. And, I guess, new viewers alike. These games have all appeared on video games other platforms throughout the years, one as recently as last month (Chack'N Pop) and one way back in about 2015 or so (Flappy). Of course, because of my out-of-order approach to videos, all of those other renditions are either contemporary releases (as we now know Chack'N Pop shipped in the same month on both SG-1000 and Famicom! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GqBqA9LsX5HAkrBbGfvCnFRBK2JFZ1BhPEgbmHiwkxc/edit?usp=sharing) or else subsequent releases. Anyway, just a quirk of history, I guess. NES Works Gaiden will increasingly feature unfamiliar works as I power through to the end of 1985 (which as far as I'm taking the early Famicom stuff)!
Comments
TheyCallMeSleeper
I would say it's a combination of budget and whoever the publisher is that happens to be contracting the project in the first place. Having played some Tose games over the years myself, there are definitely a few that appear to have been small-budget and yet have shown the team flexing their muscle.
Vinushika
People just really wanted to make games about birds back then, I guess. Some of them turned out to be foundational (Flicky, Chack'n Pop sort of if you see it as a proto Bubble Bobble), or not, but "cute blob that can hop around" is a pretty compelling game concept going all the way back to Nuts & Milk. I wonder how much of Tose's strange games in this era come from the publishers not giving them much cash versus the actual technical competence of Tose's staff. Their output quality has certainly varied a whole lot between Chack'n Pop and, say, Yoshi's Cookie (NES/Game Boy)
TheyCallMeSleeper
Apparently, the Egret II Mini was announced last week to be getting Western distribution through a subsidiary of Strictly Limited/ININ. Not canceling my Amazon Japan preorder though, since they didn't give a firm date and it'll likely remain the original model as was (I believe) the Astro City Mini's case. But as long as Taito's machine also has an English-language option, all will be good. (Even if it doesn't, what kind of person would I be to turn down a round of Space Invaders???)
