Pooyan / City Connection / Hyper Sports retrospective: Pigs all the way down | NES Works Gaiden
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
- Some familiar faces show up this week on Famicom, along with a few that didn't make their way to NES. Konami's Pooyan headlines this episode with a simple but charming and masterfully designed single-screen arcade game hailing from the early career of one of retrogaming's most infamous minds, Tokuro Fujiwara. It's less soul-crushing in terms of difficulty than Ghosts ’N Goblins or Mega Man. He was still young. He hadn't realized that his calling in life would be to reduce millions of children to tears.
Also stepping into the post-Super Mario void, we have City Connection-a good game on NES and a better one on Famicom due to simple release timing. A Flicky-style platformer feels a lot more of-the-moment in 1985 than it did in 1988! And, finally, Hyper Sports, the other set of the raw materials that Konami would combine into Track & Field. Like Hyper Olympic, it feels like half a game. That's because, for those of us in the U.S., it literally is half a game.
Production notes:
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NES/Famicom footage captured from @analogueinc Nt Mini; arcade footage captured from MiSTer with thanks to @MiSTerAddons. Video upscaled to 720 with @atemsoft xRGB Mini Framemeister.
Random trivia - the rights to the Jaleco catalogue are now held by a company called City Connection. They've been publishing back catalogue material the past couple of years on Switch and...having a bit of a learning curve with emulation and input lag. But it's cool that things like Game Tengoku - Jaleco's mid-90s answer to Parodius - are still seeing the light of day. Credit to this channel, I'd never have understood the elaborated Field Combat references in that game had you not covered it. And to bring this all full circle, the recent re-release of Game Tengoku added Clarice and her City car as a ship. In the game's rather lengthy documentary commentary she takes great pains to establish that she is the original Jaleco heroine, beloved around the world and takes credit for being the reason Jaleco still exists in some form to this day. But that she would be perfectly alright with it if all cats, bamboo shoots and police cars disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow. She's presented as a bit of a psycho.
Yep, a lot of City Connection's legacy was covered in the NES Works episode on the game.
Pooyan!!! I loved that game.
Once again another staple of those sketchy 64000 games on 1 carts.
Pooyan has a lot more going for it than the typical classic-era arcade port. The music is pretty close to the arcade game!
City Connection's bleached version also features a rare Nintendo of America taboo: Smoking. Really wonder when those invisible regulations were introduced...considering Monster Party...
Jeremy, you and I share a virulent hatred of the City Connection cat.
Heh, I unknowingly recreated the Pooyan scenario as a kid on Lemmings Tribes for the SNES. On one of the levels I would set up archer lemmings on some raised tiers and have the rest of the lemmings corralled far below, then make those grounded lemmings into balloon lemmings, and the rest speaks for itself. Good times.
The cat floating away with blank expression after you hit it in City Connection really tickles my funny bone
like many NROM games, I first played Pooyan in the very early 90s on a bootleg 250-in-1 multicart that contained nearly all these simple early games like Circus Charlie, Battle City, Bomberman, Pooyan, City Connection, Nuts & Milk, Road Fighter and many others. Of course the likes of Super Mario Bros or Excitebike occupied most of my attention, but I still remember playing these when I was a tot.
It's a Konami and City Connection week it would appear. Interesting that Pooyan would have a connection to the guy who'd give us some great Capcom games. Nice Simpsons meme to end the episode though.
8:50 oh my god I have been trying to figure out my entire life why the cats play Flohwalzer when hit! Never would have guessed it was a pun on the translated name of the piece.
Road kill exist in Tokyo also. And cats and dogs are common urban animals which can damage a car (maybe not so much a cat unless the cat is freaking huge, but...).
Still waiting for Lum No Wedding Bell. But I am not holding my breath for it.
@@tskmaster3837 The Japanese title for the Flea Waltz is "neko funjatta" which means: I stepped on the cat.
Never made the connection with this game before though.
Man, I love the box art for City Connection, it's so Choro-Q.
Also I ship Clarice and Blonde Dude.
They both work, Clarisse and and her lanky boyfriend.
I like to comment identifying the classical music in the games Jeremy covers. In city connection we hear Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto and I also know the flea waltz as “shave and a haircut,” which has the most famous ending riff of all time.
Pooyan was so much fun to play as a kid!
The music and artwork were especially cute!
I always thought the pigs/tapirs were fighting against pink alligators. 😂
Random aside: While I never saw Pooyan in an arcade, it - along with Amidar - was the first emulated arcade game I ever saw. This was pre Mame, and mind blowing.
I can't be the only one who saw the wolves pushing the boulder and thought of Ultros and the 5 ton weight.
I was thinking the little ghost dude at the top of the screen in Chack'n Pop, personally.
'Pooyan' was also one of the only thirteen games released on the Casio PV-1000. More so, and even more 'honorable' it was the cartridge GPA-101, the very first in its library!
Coincidentally, I began my journey to gather PV-1000 and PV-2000 materials for future videos today. Please feel free to send a floral arrangement to my funeral.
Here's a City connection: Skids, the Autobot who was almost completely left out of the cartoon basically by accident (his toy came out in late 1984, too late to be part of the original cast but too early to be on the list of new toys for 1985, so he fell through the cracks and only managed a couple of cameos), turned into a Honda City. Which was an unfamiliar vehicle to American and British writers and artists, who misinterpreted the boxy car as a minivan and drew him as such when he turned up in the comics.
Yeah, I've eyeballed buying a modern-era Skids from time to time because I love the City, but I (1) can't decide on the red version or blue version and (2) worry that buying one Transformer will lead to buying more Transformers, something that I do not need in my life right now.
Pooyan is one of those simple to play games that’s actually a ton of fun to play. There’s more skill than it would seem getting the feel of the perfect meat arc and taking out as many wolves as possible.
But I can see why it didn’t make the black box cut (as it felt more akin to a very early 80’s title vs. something post super Mario). It’s one of the few I’d ever play in the 100 in 1 early nes packs.
(It is interesting just as a look back seeing games I thought were just kind of bad in 1988 (city connection) in their proper timeframe release contexts. That’s pretty impressive for 1985 famicom
Mini-game collections in the style of Track & Field have some appeal in a competitive head-to-head environment where some kind of stakes are involved. That sort of stuff is prime material for retro mystery tournaments.
Couldn't really imagine having to make due with it in the '80s as the sole cartridge received for that year's birthday or Christmas, though.
I love pooyan and city connection big parts of my childhood
That skeet shooting mini game looks to function like a rhythm game. Kind of interesting to think about, as that would be something Konami would pioneer down the road.
i used to play Pooyan and City Connection with my older sister when i was a little kid. Oh man the memories
Was City Connection a license or a promotional tie in with the launch of the Honda City?
Not as far as I've ever heard. Although I'm no expert in the Japanese Licensing Laws!
I've looked into it and have been unable to find any indication that Honda used City Connection for marketing purposes.
@@JeremyParish Maybe it was the arcade version more, but it was something I saw in a retrospective on the game (well, when "review" was copying the AVGN and throwing verbal abuse at the game) in an very early TH-cam video.
Growing up a friend had one of the many 52 in 1 carts available for NES and my favorite game to play on it was Pooyan, all time favorite right here
I'd never heard of Pooyan before today! Looks like fun.
I’m surprised to hear this was new to you!
@@JeremyParish Someone always find out sooner or later.
Nintendo should have released Pooyan in the USA in the first place. 😀👍🎮🐷
Especially back in 1985 right?
Good grief...I always thought those were cats for some reason...pigs makes total sense, hahaha
i played pooyan on a multi games cartridge (101 games) when i was a kid!
Before this, all I knew about Pooyan came from MGS Peace Walker.
I had a Pooyan cassette tape for the tape player attachment on my Tandy TRS-80 that was hand me downed to me in the mid 80s when I was very young. It took minutes to load and was very primitive looking. So much nostalgia for such a nothing game.
I managed to get very good at NES Track & Field back then, including getting a Perfect in Skeet Shooting (a UFO bonus target appears at the end), and even getting all-perfect once or twice at Archery (you get a cat with an apple on its head for a bonus target). But High Jump, ugh.... I managed to play arcade Track & Field once on a cruise that my parents drug me along on, and High Jump is a bear both on NES/Famicom and arcade, where it's the final event before it loops. T&F isn't bad, but it doesn't have the crazy over-the-top feats and fun of Numan Olympics or its sequel. (Of course, no game without the official stamp of the IOC has any glimmer of a chance of being released under that name today. Ugh, again.)
I've always been an avid fan of that Principal Skinner quote you used at the end of the video!
I never thought of "Leaded Gas" until this video.
It was very much A Thing when I was growing up.
@@JeremyParish Yep, we called it "Regular" at the gas station.
@Jeremy Parish is there a method to which random clips you pick for your intros?
I find a media release contemporary to the games being discussed-ideally to the month, when possible.
It's always the children who are wrong. Always.
Poor 4-H club!
Hyper sports are the father of rythm and heavens
Jeremy, will be a long time in the future if you get to this game but another Fujiwara-produced series is the SNES Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, which plays as a mild sendup of the whole Ghosts N' Goblins series. Very odd.
One of my first video games was the Atari 2600 port of Pooyan. Was quite good considering the platform.
I actually own City Connection! And it always surprised me how much fun I had playing it as a kid. I loved that game, but I can't help thinking I would have loved it a lot more if it had a cute girl as the protagonist. Also one of the very VERY few games I ever got my grandma to try, and as I recall she had a good time with it.
I do not think Konami had any of their hands on this version of "Pooyan". It seems to be all Hudson. It doesn't even have the pause sound, or any other trademark sounds they had at that time.
Dat Jeremy synchronization at 10:12
Pooyan was pretty fun. I only first played it through a multicart. Neopets kind of had their own version.
So is the two buttons for the running the left and right leg?
Pooyan seems familiar...
you probably have seen it on many of those multicades that only have early 80's arcade games
@@navibc31 if there's a gameboy port it's likely as my father bought 3 multicarts as he didn't want to buy actual games..!
I don't get the games where you have to waggle a joystick or hammer a button to win, it's like people enjoy wearing out controllers, but people must like these games since they even were common all over the place including the arcades, and they still sort of exist in the form of Mario Party games and the like.
Pooyan was always an NES favourite of mine (it was on some 63-in-1 import cart). I'm not surprised that so much top talent had worked on it!
Great group of fun titles.
The one thing that I dislike about City Connection is that you have only a split second at game over to see your final score before the title screen . Seriously NES arcade ports with no high score table or top score shown are my enemy 🙂
Name checks out
Ugh and I'm noticing now it was taken out of the NES version
@@JeremyParish haha thanks Jeremy
I think city connection is a rather simple yet fun game
and you can't go wrong with jumping cars, in my experience
You'll do a bit better at Archery if you hold down the button to raise your angle.
"City Connection" is a clear example where I can safely say the Arcade version is better.
And what did Famicom Power think?
Your Hyper Shot might have been stiff, it still looks a lot cleaner than 99% of Hyper Shots I see which have worn everything away around the run button.
i thought this one was going to be Platoon by Sunsoft..oh well...cool video nonetheless xD
what is that controller at 0:22
What is the anime in the intro? Looks like Mospeada but different
Yeah, that does look like Yellow Dancer, I thought the same thing.
Yep, it's Mospaeda: Live Love Alive.
City Connection should be an Anime or a Manga
I'd watch it.
@@JeremyParish The heralding story of a girl who loves to drive!
The Famicom port of Pooyan has nothing on the 2600 version. 🤣
I loved the stark, frank, "women" slide and I hope it makes a reappearance
I like to imagine there's a universe out there where game publishers never stopped trying to cater to women and video games became known as a "girl's toy" instead of "just for boys". With pink SNESes being sold next to the Barbies. Maybe in that world, the IT space would be dominated by women!
@@charon59 a huge amount of Pong players in the arcades were women, which wouldn't have been too long ago in the early 1980s, so for a while women were considered core video game customers
@@holdingpattern245 I know! That's why it's fun to imagine an alternate universe where video game devs did NOT shift over to marketing video games just to boys, because they totally should not have, and didn't have to! I consider that fact a huge missed opportunity on the Video Game industry's part as a whole.
Some experts might say that part of the reason for the shift to marketing just to boys might have been as a result of the crash of '84, when the Famicom had to rebrand itself as a "toy" (the NES) in order to penetrate the US market. Since the toy marketplace had already long been segregated into "girl" and "boy" toys, Nintendo had to pick a side, and they picked "boys", but that's not the whole story,. I could go on, but debating it any further would just be engaging in historical fictionalization at this point :P
So, what is "Pooyan", if not the name of the pig(s)?
this is funny because i just bought city connection on famicom because of an inside joke between me and my friend