Developed/Published by:Ā Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
Released:Ā 05/10/1984
Completed:Ā 18/01/2024
Completion:Ā Saw all the levels (thereās only three.)
Iām not sure I can think of a company as venerated as Nintendo. A company thatās ultimately considered peerlessāa promise of reliability, of quality, but with a mystique that somehow makes it all impossible to duplicate. While itās made mistakes, theyāve always been mistakes that only Nintendo could have made. We might buy Apple products, or use Google, but even if we liked what they did at one point, weāre by now tired of the greed, the privacy violations, the churn of samey products, the enshittification. Itās hard to tell anyone apart. But not Nintendo. They stand alone.
Which I suppose is why itās nice to go back and play these old games and see that just like everyone else Nintendo basically has no idea what theyāre fucking doing. I mean, this. Devil World. Made with the gay abandon that only Asian developers can have about western religious iconography, it takes Pac-Man (sort of, more on that in a minute) and throws in random auto-scrolling and the need to collect crosses and bibles to survive while the devil dances at the top of the screen like he's in Haxan. Itās textbookĀ weird and Iām sure itās been in all sorts of Angry Video Game Nerd or Seanbaby-type videos but Iām not looking them up and neither should you.
Thereās two things that are crazy about this. One, itās that itās apparently the first Famicom game that Shigeru Miyamoto directed. Itās a pretty early original title for the system (outside of sports titles) and it strikes me to what extent that even after Donkey Kong Miyamoto was still finding his feet as a designer. In fact, as I subscribe to the theory that Super Mario Bros. is more heavily based on Pac-Land than Miyamoto might admit (āsky colourā my arse) I wonder how much Donkey Kong was inspired by Space Panic, the proto-platformer, and Miyamoto simply āhitā on the tweaks that would make it eternal as he would do with Pac-Land. Hereā¦ he is not successful. In fact, the concept just feels sort ofā¦ unfinished. Half-arsed.
To put it in more detail: On the first stage of Devil World, you are navigating a fairly small wrap-around maze (a la Flicky) but one that moves in a random* cardinal direction for a random* amount of time, meaning you can get squished between walls and the edge of the screen. There are monsters that move around the maze (but who donāt seem especially bothered about chasing you, at least to begin with) who kill you on touch, but you can kill those by collecting a cross and firing a fireball at them. The cross, also, is the only way to collect the dots around the maze. It runs out after a set amount of time and then you have to collect another (though thereās a bunch around the level, and they donāt run out.)
*There may be some system to this, but I never worked it out.
On the second stage, youāre still avoiding the monsters and trying not to get squished, but youāre collecting four bibles and taking them back to the central āsealā (think the central ghost box from Pac-Man) to get to the next level.Ā
The third stage is a bonus level with no enemies where youāre trying to collect six bonus boxes before time is up. The level is still scrolling randomly, but thereās some arrows in the level thatā¦ allow you to move the direction? Maybe?Ā
Ultimatelyā¦ none of this works. The random level movement and wall squishes feel, well, random. Having to collect the cross to pick up dots feels arbitrary, and the bible collection is sort ofā¦ pointlessly easy? And itās all rather slow and unresponsive.Ā
Itās possible that these were Miyamotoās attempts to ālevel-upā the maze chase game the way adding jumping created the platformer and then when it didnāt work, wellā¦ the game had to come out. But maybe itās also the fault of the second crazy thing about Devil World. Rather absurdly the gameās other designer, Takashi Tezuka, had never heard of Pac-Man. Doesnāt seem like the best foot to get off on when youāre, you knowā¦ cloning Pac-Man, to be honest.
Devil World is one of those examples of a game where some people tried something to make something already good better, and everything they did made it significantly worse. Waitā¦ they enshittified Pac-Manā¦ Nintendo arenāt different at all!!!!
Will I ever play it again? It simply isnāt worth the time.
Final Thought: I was honestly very surprised to discover that this was actually released in Europe in mid-1987 despite being not released in the US due to the olā religious iconography. Rough for the weans who got a copy of this that late in the game.
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