#eggconsole

I’ve had some requests to cover D4Enterprise’s EGGCONSOLE releases like I used to at TouchArcade. It does seem as though there isn’t much out there about them a lot of the time, and I pick up each release anyway. So let’s do that that little thing. I’ll start with the most recent release and work my way back while also staying on top of whatever new releases come. Today’s game is…

かつてFC版で遊んだ記憶を頼りに探索を開始するがやはりFC版とは勝手が違うらしい…が、

昔と同じ罠にハマった。

どうにか太陽の神殿まで辿りつくも何かおかしい。

また初めからだ…

そしてチチェン・イツァーの探索を始めて4日、ついに太陽の神殿をクリア！

Some Thoughts About... Popful Mail (PC-88 EGG Console re-release, 2024)

Popful Mail is one of my top 5 favorite games so I was very excited to see it come to the Switch. Very quickly tampered by it being the PC-Engine version, not the Sega CD one. Or even that SNES version. Or even the PC-98 version... But still! A chance to play Popful Mail again! It was one of the first games I got for my Sega CD and I love it to this day. I mean, if you look at Lust or my other demon characters and wonder why they have such long ears, it’s a healthy mix of Popful Mail and Shining Force/Yoshitaka Tamaki’s art.

Just to reiterate! This is the PC-88 release. It is not the (fantastic) Sega CD one. The game is in Japanese. Just about everything. Popful Mail isn’t the most story-based of games, but you’re going to miss out on all the dialogue. And the menus. And the stores. An overlay explaining the shops would be nice or just stick a translated picture in the instructions. I remembered enough of the Sega CD one to find the heal option and buying items at least shows a picture of what you’re buying, but some of the options don’t make sense to me. There’s a PC-Engine 98 walkthrough on GameFAQs and that was most useful, but there are enough differences between the 98 and 88 versions that it’s not perfect.

There’s a point where you have to “swap disks” to continue and for some reason that’s not automated in the overlay and the message is in Japanese. So you go to the disk change menu in the EGG overlay and there are way more options than you think there would be. There’s a “2” in the Japanese message so you try switching to disk 2 and nothing happens. So it’s just trial and error swapping thing around. If you swap disks in both drives and load the visual disk, the game progresses! BUUUT! After the cutscene, the game just goes black with no message, English or Japanese. I tried every combination of disks but couldn’t get it to progress. So I reloaded my previous save and ignored the “2” in the message and only swapped to the visual disc, and then after the cutscene, NOW swapped it to the “2”disc, and it worked! There is absolutely no reason this should not be automated or be in the EGG instruction manual. This was just a straight up garbage process. I could understand leaving it how it is for history’s sake, but to not have a translated step-by-step guide in the EGG instruction manual is just laziness, incompetence, or being so cheap that you won’t spring for an extra three sentences of translation work.

It’s still an action-adventure game but it used a bump combat system. So weird! Instead of slashing a sword, fighting is just jumping over enemies and hitting them from behind. Attacking from the front either has the enemy block the attack, do damage to you as well, or shoot you with a projectile. Just smashing into them from the back makes some of the early bosses easier than regular enemies with projectile attacks. The bump system actually makes Mail terrible for the majority of the game. In the Sega CD version, I used Mail for all but a few fights. In this version, Tatto is the star of the show where you’ll spend stages in a row never switching off of him because of how much enemies spam projectiles or how most bosses fight you from a distance.

Lining up shots from the back is made more difficult by the how limited the color palette is. The graphics are hard on the eyes. The backgrounds are super busy and just as saturated as the main characters while being the same colors, plus it kind of blurs when you walk. So yeah, it’s a rough play and I stuck to very short play sessions.

The music is still awesome. It’s similar to the Sega CD’s but just different enough to be fun in its own right.

The changes the Sega CD version made are interesting. In this version, Mail can toss daggers up and down! The wedding ring sidequest is gone so you never fight the leader of the Badger Gang, but that same lady now leads you to freeing Slicky from the cave-in. Muttonhead has an evil Gaw! Your health refills when on the world map! You’re not allowed to change characters during boss fights! The boomerang is governed by a mechanic where you have to hold the attack button down to send it and it returns when you let go (making it almost useless). The economy balancing is... well, it’s actually pretty close to how Working Designs re-did the Sega CD version. Everything is crazy expensive and you die in just a few hits so the game is super grindy and unfair.

In short, if this was the first/only version of Popful Mail I ever played, I wouldn’t have any reverence for the series. This game is just frustrating, grindy, and the fetch quests are tedious even if you can understand the language. This is a neat historical piece but it is not a fun game to play.

To be honest, I couldn’t force myself to finish the game. I got up to the boss of the ice world (world 4 of 5) and it’s one of the most poorly made fights I have ever played in a video game. The boss’s attacks move too fast for how bad the controls are and how small the gameplay window is and each attack drains your health so you die in a few hits. It took me multiple deaths to even realize why one attack was almost instantly killing me even when I dodged it (it leaves a like 3 pixel tall trail behind the shot that is blue on a blue background on top of blue ground). The boss spends most of the fight invulnerable and only opens up for like two seconds, which is barely enough time to hit it and can line up with the other shots it’s firing so you lose half your health to take off two percent of the boss’s health. And to top all that off, you’re dealing with ice physics while trying to fight it. It’s not a hard fight; it’s a poorly made unfair fight that has no redeeming factors or entertainment. In the Sega CD version, this fight is a slog, but it’s entirely doable and certainly doesn’t feel unfair. It’s simply not worth beating that boss to see the end of the game. The EGG Console overlay has a weird “scene select” option that lets you jump to specific points in the game and one of them is right after the ice world, so I gave the last world a try, but the bosses remain absolute trash. I forced myself to beat the Golem boss in 5-1, but once I got to the Fright Knight in 5-2, I just put the game down again and gave up. The boss itself isn’t difficult, it’s that the boss is designed to take advantage of the worst part of the controls and camera so you’re fighting the game rather than the enemy. And, yet again, the boss has an insane amount of health, kills you three hits, and spends most of the fight invincible. I had to look up online how to even hurt the boss. So thanks, Youtube, and for showing me the end of the PC-E version of Popful Mail. At least in the PC-98 version, Mail’s fight against the Overlord actually looks more interesting than the Sega CD’s, but I’m bummed out I never got to experience it.

Whatever EGG’s porting overlay is, it has an option to speed up or slow down how the game runs, so that’s neat. It has a rewind feature, but instead of it being the normal “hold down to rewind”, pressing the button jumps you back a little bit, so you have to keep pressing it until you get where you want to be. But it doesn’t seem to jump you back the same distance each time you press the button. There’s no precision to it, but it kind of gets you there as long as you’re willing to go way farther back than you intended.

The rerelease includes a gallery with some fun art I hadn’t seen before. Buuut they didn’t translate the text or notes so it feels super low effort.

EGGコンソール イース PC-8801mkIISR for Nintendo Switch（EGGCONSOLE Ys PC-8801mkIISR）

The Switch has basically turned into a game historian's dream come true, with classic titles getting ported, remade, remastered and localized for the first time all over the place. From Hamster's weekly Arcade Archives, to M2's fantastic as always work with Sega Ages, and Nintendo's own library available via their online service, there's no shortage of great titles for anyone who wants to revisit their own childhood, or just dive deep to better understand the past.

What I definitely didn't expect was for classic Japanese computer games to start ending up on the console, much less in North America. For a long time, these games have kinda had a forbidden fruit appeal for Westerners, a last frontier of games that was difficult to navigate due to the language barrier, the aging hardware, Windows cannibalizing all other operating systems during the 90's and of course, few of the games being exported over here, but it's gotten a lot better in recent years, mostly thanks to D4 enterprises.