Demo Disc Vol. 24: World War Wumbo

While the concept of the "console war" in video gaming still exists to this day, it's arguable that nothing has ever truly reached the notoriety of the "16-bit War" between the Sega Genesis & the Super Nintendo in North America. In the region that I call home the 80s were mainly dominated by the Nintendo Entertainment System, a console that managed to revitalize the home video game console market following the Crash of 1983, though a big part of that domination was due to tactics & regulations from Nintendo of America that would later be called out as being monopolistically illegal, like literally prohibiting all third-party publishers from publishing games for the competition, at least for a certain period of time. This domination would change with the launch of the Sega Genesis on August 14, 1989 (which had previously launched in Japan as the Mega Drive on October 29, 1988), Sega's 16-bit console that had a slightly slow start but in 1990 would see stronger sales, and once Sonic the Hedgehog debuted in 1991 (& was bundled with the console, replacing Altered Beast) the "war" was truly on. The Genesis would consistently outsell the SNES across four Christmas seasons (1991 to 1994), with it even getting to the point where the Genesis would outsell the SNES 2:1, but in the end Nintendo would still manage to defeat Sega in the "16-bit War" for one main reason: Nintendo Played the Long Game.

The release of Donkey Kong Country in late 1994 would help start a surge in SNES sales, while Nintendo of America's continued support of the console for the remainder of the decade with major new game releases continued to entice people to buy the console during the era of the PlayStation, Saturn, & N64. In comparison, Sega of America's own massive disarray in the mid-90s prevented the Genesis from seeing quite as consistent late-game support (~150-ish games from 1995 to 1998, compared to the SNES' ~250-ish), and the Mega Drive's consistent lack of popularity in Japan certainly didn't help things (no more than just 10 games developed in Japan on Genesis from 1995 to 1998, compared to a little over 40 on SNES). Still, the Genesis vs. SNES "war" makes for some really fun storytelling...

As mentioned, in Japan the battle wasn't really between the Mega Drive & the Super Famicom, but rather was more between NEC & Hudson Soft's PC-Engine & the Super Famicom, and even then it was more of a battle for second place, as the Super Famicom handily outsold the PC-Engine. However, Sega has always maintained a cult following in Japan, and sometime in the mid-00s that resulted in something interesting. Around that time a writer by the name of Anastasia Shestakova (which could very well be a pen name; their real identity is unknown) debuted a doujinshi in the digital pages of doujin web magazine Red Road titled Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de/The Center of the Blue World, with art by adult doujinshi artist Crimson, who herself had previously worked with her brother under the name Carmine & today also works as a YouTuber; despite the pedigree, Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de is not an H-doujin. This doujin reinterpreted the various console wars as literal wars between warring fantasy nations, & over time around 200 chapters (including the various side story chapters interspersed between the numbered ones) were produced by Shestakova & Crimson across five "Parts", with the first 50 being collected physically across nine volumes between 2007 & 2009; officially the doujin is still considered ongoing, but hasn't had a new chapter since November 11, 2018. The success & notoriety of Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de would result in publisher Micro Magazine wanting to publish it as an "official" manga, & the duo would take this opportunity to revamp their doujin, implementing new additions, making some changes, & properly inking all of the artwork this time, minus some scenes, like flashbacks, solely for effect. This resulted in Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de Kanzenban/The Core of the Blue World: Complete Edition, which came out between 2010 & 2013, collecting all of Parts 1 & 2 across 10 volumes, including the ~15 chapters that the initial nine-volume run didn't.

It's with the Complete Edition that Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de would find its greatest notoriety. A three-episode anime adaptation of Part 1 would get announced in early 2012, which Crunchyroll simulcasted before Media Blasters would eventually release it on dual-audio DVD & BD in 2017, and in early 2013 Seven Seas announced that it had licensed the Complete Edition of the manga for official English release; all of these official English releases would change the title to the, admittedly catchy, World War Blue. Seven Seas' release schedule for World War Blue did look to be a bit inconsistent, regularly swapping between every two months & every three months for the first seven volumes, before taking the better part of an entire year to release Volume 8 in mid-2015... and then that was it! Yeah, Seven Seas just stopped releasing World War Blue after Volume 8, despite there only being two more volumes to go of the version it was releasing, and their webpage for the manga is even still up to this very day. Seven Seas actually did respond to a question about World War Blue's cancellation in 2016, citing poor sales, & not even Media Blasters giving the anime a physical release a year later made them revive it for a mere two books. Despite coming out at a time where digital releases of manga were becoming more common, the World War Blue manga was a print-only release (in English, at least), though in all fairness the books Seven Seas did release remain relatively easy to get a hold of at (more or less) the original retail price; still, the irony that a digital doujin is physical-only in English is ridiculously thick.

If you're fine with Japanese, the original doujin version is still available in full on its official website, all the way up through Part 5's current hiatus (Part 2's links are oddly broken & need the Wayback Machine to actually read, though), though for this Demo Disc I'll focus solely on the eight volumes that came out in English; that said, I'll rely on the official site for images here, for simplicity's sake. Was World War Blue deserving of its cancellation by Seven Seas a mere two books before finishing because it wasn't actually all that good, or was it just a victim of other factors beyond its control? Let's boot it up & find out!

Doing It "The Wrong Way": My History with Masami Kurumada's Works as an English-Speaking American Fan

Unlike (seemingly) most English-speaking anime fans, of any generation apparently, I kind of got into anime a little bit later in life. Sure, I watched some anime that aired for kids growing up in the late 90s & early 00s, like Pokémon & Digimon, I do vaguely remember seeing the likes of Voltron & Transformers via reruns in the early 90s, etc., & that era of both FoxKids & Kids WB was filled with anime, as it's how I first saw stuff like Ultimate Muscle, Shaman King, & even Escaflowne. But I didn't even know about Toonami on Cartoon Network until 2002 or so (i.e. my first Gundam was G Gundam, not Gundam Wing, Gundam Seed, or the UC-era stuff between all of those), and it wasn't until 2004 that I decided to really get into anime more in-depth, despite already owning a handful of official DVD releases by that point. Entering into mid-2004 I was already 17-going-on-18 & a senior in high school, about to graduate & go to college, a far cry from the young teens (or younger, even) that I tend to see most anime fans reminisce about how they got into the fandom, & I hadn't watched stuff like Sailor Moon growing up, rented anime VHS tapes or DVDs that rental stores really shouldn't have been renting out to kids, seen other anime-focused programming blocks like Anime on Sci-fi in the 90s or Anime Unleashed in the 00s, or engaged in tape trading & the like. For me, my start into anime was as someone who was entering young adulthood & discovering digital fansubs, while also buying official releases as well. Also, I live & have grown up in the United States of America all my life, having only traveled outside of the country a handful of times (namely Hungary & Canada, both to visit family).

In that case, it's kind of all the more bizarre that I became such a massive fan of Masami Kurumada & his works... because, from all indications, I shouldn't be.

Effectively the way "North of Mexico"
sees Masami Kurumada, as proven by history.

Honestly, I don't like to write about my personal life here, mainly because I don't think there's really all that much to say. I've done it before, sure, but that was because they were related to the only real times I had anything interesting to tell the story of, like that time I got published on GameStop at age 17, or that one year I made next-to-no-effort YouTube videos (relatively) early on in the site's life, or that "Proto-Blog" I did before starting The Land of Obscusion. I really don't consider myself all that special, so I don't find much point in writing about my past as a fan of stuff, because (in the grand scheme of things) I'm not really all that different from most people. My love of writing about obscure & forgotten stuff isn't all that different from stuff other people love doing; it's just a difference in specificity of the subject itself. However, this is one of those exceptions, because this is truly something that's honestly rather unique about me, when compared to other English-speaking anime fans. Considering where I live, how long I've been into anime as an earnest fan, & how little anyone really cares about him in English-speaking fandom, there should be no feasible reason why I am such a fan of Masami Kurumada. And, indeed, it often feels like I am utterly alone in that regard, because while there are English-speaking "Saint Seiya fans" who have been anime fans for much longer than me (& are much more notable & cooler than me, in every way)... I did not become a fan like they did, it's why I have always referred to myself as a "Masami Kurumada fan", and it's why I went as far as dedicate an entire year of this blog to a single mangaka for his 50th Anniversary.

Obscusion B-List: Video Game Ports That Shouldn't Have Been Possible... But Actually Happened... STILL Yet Again

Complete transparency here for this piece: This was not originally planned in any way. I had hoped for something else to be ready for the first half of November that's (to some extent) out of my control, and it unfortunately didn't come to pass. I'm under no obligation to provide new writings every week or two... but I like to try. Therefore, instead of the usual introduction I would give this kind of Obscusion B-List article, I've decided to be 100% honest & admit that this was literally started on the prior Wednesday; for stuff like this I try to give myself at least a week, just to think things out & take my time. Also, let's face it, after three prior entries of this subject it's honestly just getting hard to make an intro that's somewhat unique from the prior ones. At least it's been around two years since the previous version of this B-List, which just happened to be how I wound up pacing these, completely by accident. Finally, I just like making these lists, because this is a really fun subject to look into.

Anyway, let's go over still yet another six video games that were ported to hardware that, in essence, really had no reasonable right or reason to be playing them!

In theory, every new piece of gaming hardware needs a handful game types at launch, and I don't necessarily mean specific genres. What I mean is that a good hardware launch should have at least one killer app that makes people want to buy it, at least one title that'll keep people coming back for more over & over, & at least one title that can showcase what the hardware is capable of. For that last example a common direction used to be releasing a port of some sort, something that wasn't capable at all on prior hardware (at least, not without major changes) to show people that this truly was "next-gen". Both the ColecoVision & NES had Donkey Kong, the Genesis had Altered Beast, the SNES had Final Fight & Gradius III, and the Dreamcast & PS2 had SoulCalibur & Tekken Tag Tournament, respectively, among other examples. The Game Boy Advance had a bunch of hardware spectacles for its launch in 2001, showcasing the handheld's ability to handle things that the Game Boy & Game Boy Color never could, and there were also ports of older games. Most of these were ports of 16-bit classics, like Earthworm Jim, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, & the SNES remake of Super Mario Bros. 2/USA, but there was one GBA launch title (for North America & Europe, at least) that dared to go even further & show that the GBA was truly a 32-bit handheld: Rayman Advance.

Obscusion B-Side: Nostradamus (Arcade): Stand Your Ground Till the End, Engage the Enemy, Insert Credit!

Born in December of 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Provence in the the Kingdom of France, Michel de Nostradame was an astrologer, apothecary, & physician who today is best known more for being an alleged seer who went by the Latinized mononym Nostradamus. While he initially worked shortly in medicine to help deal with outbreaks of the plague, he eventually switched over to the occult & in 1550 published an almanac that sold extremely well for the time. The success of this almanac led to Nostradamus becoming recognized as a "psychic" advisor by the likes of nobility & royalty, even becoming Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to Charles IX, though Nostradamus' ability at this on his own was later found by historians to be rather poor. In fact, Nostradamus was afraid that he'd be persecuted by the Inquisition, but since he never practiced magic he was considered fine. What's most associated with Nostradamus, to this very day, is his 1555 publication Les Prophéties, which contained hundreds of poetic quatrains that, in the centuries since his passing in 1566, have often been looked at as prophesizing future events, with most quatrains detailing disasters of some sort. Many people have, in retrospect, tried to associate Nostradamus' almost purposefully vague, randomly ordered, & multi-language-written "predictions" to various people & historical events, like the French Revolution, the rises of both Napoleon & Hitler, the atomic bomb, & 9/11, among others.

Unsurprisingly, this involves either misreading what Nostradamus actually wrote, ignoring his penchant for simply projecting past events into the future, or not taking into consideration his history as an astrologer. However, this makes Nostradamus a great source for fictional & semi-historical stories, including video games!

Existing roughly from 1988 to 1998, though its last games would continue to come out up through 2001, the Japanese company Face was one of many different publishers in video game history that managed to stick around for a while but never truly became notable throughout its lifetime. If you were to look through Face's catalog you'd find mostly forgotten fare, though the quality of said fare was apparently more decent than you'd think from such a no-name company, and arguably Face became most notable during its last few years when it was a supporter of SNK's Neo Geo arcade hardware. Namely, Face was responsible (in some part) for the games Gururin, ZuPaPa! (which was finished in 1994 but not released until SNK bought the rights to it after Face's dissolution & published it as one of its last games before going bankrupt itself in 2001), & Money Puzzle/Idol Exchanger. That last one has easily become Face's most famous release, having since achieved cult classic status & is still played competitively in Japan to this day, most recently making news when a literal high school girl went to EVO Japan this year & absolutely destroyed all her competition in mirror matches. Ironically, it's rumored that Face's most popular game is what killed the company, due to Data East allegedly suing Face over similarities to the Magical Drop series... and apparently won, with Face suffering financially because of it; to be fair, the two games do play extremely similar, with only slight differences. Today, if Hamster's ACA Neo Geo re-release of Money Puzzle Exchanger is any indication (plus Gururin, too), Face's catalog now belongs to Excel, an "electronic device trading company" that's owned by Kaga Electronics, which itself has a history in video games via its now-defunct Naxat Soft/Kaga Create & Taxan subsidiaries; in fact, Kaga's own modern-day web address even uses the Taxan moniker, which is kind of quaint.

So, what does Face have to do with Nostradamus? Simply put, as you can see from the title screen above, in 1993 Face released an arcade shoot-em-up simply titled Nostradamus. In more detail, Face released a game that used Nostradamus' prophecy that "in 1999 and seven months" a "great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky", and in this game's case Face allegedly went with the standard idea for a shooter to represent the "great leader out of the sky": An alien invasion. Beyond that...Face's game really has no connection with Nostradamus outside of the title screen featuring a portrait of the man himself that looks to be based on the portrait that his son Cesar made in 1614, nearly 50 years after his father's death, only with it flipped & Nostradamus himself looking much, much older on the title screen. Still, just the idea of an arcade sci-fi shooter named Nostradamus has always caught my interest, & one thing I have yet to cover for the yearly Halloween piece is a good-ol' alien invasion; also, Nostradamus' prophecies are sometimes utilized in horror productions. Therefore, I want celebrate Halloween this year by going over what is easily the most bizarre thing to ever be associated with the legendary (not really a) seer.

Yes, even more bizarre that that time in the 2010s Marvel Comics had a seemingly-immortal Sir Isaac Newton keep Nostradamus alive in order for him to prophesize events for the Brotherhood of the Shield; at least that one actually involved the man himself directly!

Obscusion B-Side: Atypical Alchemists Associate, NEC Home Electronics' Last Stand (& UFO Interactive's First)

In June of 1953 electronics company NEC Corporation split off its radio division as its own company & named it Shin NEC, where it'd manufacture & sell things like vacuum tubes, CRTs, tape records, & later on radio receivers & "white goods"; i.e. major home appliances. In 1981 Shin NEC would debut its first ever personal computers, namely the PC-6000 & PC-8800 series, the latter of which eventually becoming the most popular PC line in Japan during that decade. In 1983 Shin NEC would change its name to NEC Home Electronics (or NEC-HE, for short), expanding into products like CD players. In 1987 NEC-HE would enter the video game market with the PC-Engine (alongside Hudson Soft), which would become the closest competitor to Nintendo's Famicom & Super Famicom in Japan during the 16-bit generation & even introduce the idea of games being released on CD; outside of Japan the "TurboGrafx-16" was another story entirely. NEC-HE would continue seeing success into the 90s with the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² upgrade as well as the later models in the PC-9800 series of computers, but eventually the good times would come to an end.

That started with the launch of the PC-FX in 1994, the Japan-only successor to the PC-Engine that simply failed to deliver & would sell only around 300,000 units before being discontinued in February 1998 & becoming NEC's final console; still sold better than the Atari Jaguar, at least. Meanwhile, the PC-98 eventually lost momentum to Windows 95 PCs, though NEC did later make PC-98s that supported all the way up to Windows 2000 up through 2003. Still, this resulted in NEC-HE now being a third-party video game company, for all intents & purposes, but by this point that seemed kind of redundant as there was already a video game development & publishing division with NEC Interchannel, itself the successor to the music division NEC Avenue, which had already expanded out into publishing games on non-NEC hardware a couple of years prior. Think of this like how Sony Computer Entertainment Japan & Sony Music Entertainment Japan were both publishing video games between 1994 & 2004, i.e. two separate entities under the same overall corporate umbrella.

However, NEC-HE seemingly still wanted to remain relevant in the video game industry so it would enter the third-party business itself, deciding to work with partner developers to put out titles that would be completely different from Interchannel's output. For those wondering about market confusion, NEC-HE had full rights to use the iconic blue-lettered NEC logo on the covers of its releases, whereas Interchannel had its own unique logo for its releases, so there was no way to confuse which division released which game. Unfortunately, outside of a PS1 port of PC-FX game Wakusei Koukitai Little Cats (which itself was published by FamilySoft, not NEC-HE) in June 1998 & Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 for PC-Engine CD in June 1999 (the final official release for that console), NEC-HE would only release four original games before getting shut down in early 2000, all of which came out on the Sega Dreamcast. However, these four games all booted up showing the above image of something called "Atypical Alchemists Associate", with Sega Retro calling it "an internal development group" within NEC-HE. However, I think this was meant to be more of a collective branding than an actual development studio & that's because, aside from NEC-HE having never really developed a game in-house, these titles share a common central goal that was 100% true to the brand's name: Being anything, & I mean ANYTHING, other than "typical".

Seeing as 2024 marks 25 years since the launch of the Sega Dreamcast in North America, & two of these games did see release outside of Japan, let's go over the quartet of games released under the Atypical Alchemists Associate branding & see how NEC Home Electronics, the division that gave us the legendary PC-88, PC-98, & co-created the PC-Engine, went down swinging as a third-party publisher.