March 16th
Today's challenge is: After Work Relaxation.
Halfway done!
I didn't think today through a whole lot, mainly because I'd honestly play anything to get my mind off work, even games I don't like, so I consider this one to be kind of a freebie. I did try to pick a somewhat relaxing game, but that's the extent of my effort. Otherwise, I just picked whatever I feeled like talking about.
I decided to talk about
Magical Chase. It's a shmup (yeah, a relaxing shmup) with 3 difficulty settings: breeze, bumpy and rough, but it's always an evenly smooth experience regardless of what you pick (the difficulty does increase or decrease significantly (depending on your pick), but no “spikes” are present). You control a cute witch on a broom named Ripple, and go through horizontally scrolling stages, where you usually have to fight a boss or two (shoutouts to Fat Metal).
She has two weapons in her arsenal. One is her main gun, which is upgraded by visiting the pumpkin man in a mid level shop (you see it floating up, then fly into it and you can buy custom parts, as well as health upgrades and stuff like that). The other one is her stars, which behave in an extremely counter intuitive way. They either move around the witch in reverse, like if you fall back, they'll get in front of you, and if you push forward, they'll cover your back, or they lock themselves in a specific position, which is weird to set up and I honestly don't really understand how the hell it works. The stars can also block certain incoming attacks, and it is necessary to make use of that in some levels.
The artstyle is fantastic for the era, the level design is flawless in my opinion, and the music is great. As I've already mentionned twice, I have a soft spot for cute 'em ups, and even though I first heard of this game because of its value, that's not really why I wanted to play it. There are a lot of wacky enemies and stage mechanics, and after playing through the game with my buddy for the first time, I stayed up all night to complete it a second time on the higher difficulty setting. I found it to be quite nice and relaxing still, which is basically the only reason it's the game I picked today, as I've never played this after work. I also never even booted my own copy or played my own PC Engine console (more on that in the next paragraph).
You can't talk about Magical Chase without talking about how it is the most expensive game to ever see a regular release, with copies fetching well over 10k dollars everytime nowadays. I personally own a custom made reproduction cart, which is even rarer than the real deal. Contrary to the PC Engine (the Turbografx-16 in Europe and Japan), the TG-16 has some weird protection in its HU-cards (there exist the PC Henshin, which is the third version of the region converter which allows you to play North American copies on the Japanese PC Engine, which was actually developped by a Quebec dude, and which I own). You really have to know the right people in order to get your hands on that, and even then that's not the most likely thing to happen.
I also seeked to buy two copies of this, which I did. A friend of mine bought one from a Canadian turbo enthusiasts' test run batch, and let me in on their little experience. They eventually sold a tiny batch of these carts, and I got there just in time to buy what I wanted. I gifted my friend Phil (who doesn't like cutesy girly games at all) one of the copies as a troll gift (he likes horizontal 2D shooters, however, so it wasn't entirely troll).
I've technically lied though, as I actually had heard of Magical Chase before (in a litteral sense). During FlashFlashRevolution's 6th Official Tournament, a chart for a song called “Ochitsukeruwakenaiwayo!” (by a guy going by “Yuuyu”) was used for Round 3 in my division. I later learned that the song was sort of a medley/arrangement of music from the Title Screen, the jingle that played after pressing “Run” on said title screen, and the first level of Magical Chase.
The game was initially released for the PC Engine, then got a slightly enhanced version 2 years later on the Turbografx-16. It was later made available on PC and on the Game Boy Color.
