Gallery: Broke in Tokyo: Retro Game Shopping on a Weak Dollar
01broke-in-tokyo-cocoron
Every year that I go to Tokyo Game Show, I assign myself a challenge that I made up: Scrounge in the bargain bins of the country's videogame stores and buy 10 videogames for a total of 1000 yen, which is roughly equivalent to $10. Or, rather, it *used* to be $10. This year, the yen-to-dollar ratio was the lowest I'd ever experienced in 10 years of living in and traveling to Japan. A thousand yen wasn't $10 anymore, it was more like $13. Could I still get 10 games and only spend 10 bucks? Yes — but this time I was going to have to cheat. Cocoron ------- I'd never heard of this Famicom side-scrolling action game, but apparently it's got [something of a cult following](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUAdPMc9Cns) even in the U.S. The gimmick here is that you can actually create your own character when it begins, by picking a comical head and body. I put the face of a ninja on a tank. What then transpires is a boring, rather difficult romp through a few repetitive levels. While it's fun to build new creations and see what they feel like when you play as them, Cocoron didn't really hold my interest. Next!
02broke-in-tokyo-pinball-party
Pinball Party ------------- The black-and-white Game Boy is home to several excellent pinball games, like Revenge of the Gator and Kirby's Pinball Land. Note that this is not one of them. I was excited to try Jaleco's Pinball Party, but it turned out to be a complete mess. The ball physics are totally off — it speeds up and slows down unrealistically when it's rolling along the flippers, it doesn't rebound right, etc. As if this wasn't bad enough, the only music is a thirty-second loop of the most irritating sounds that ever came out of the Game Boy's tinny speaker. It doesn't even loop properly, it just stops and then starts up again. I believe that this music is, to this day, played at the annual semi-formal dance at Guantanamo Bay.
03broke-in-tokyo-chip-n-dales-rescue-rangers
Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers ----------------------------- Many games are reduced to the closeout price of 100 yen because they are crap. But you can actually go home with some very good games for cheap if you don't mind buying them in horrible condition. Like this filthy copy of [Chip 'n Dale, the excellent Capcom action game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_%27n_Dale_Rescue_Rangers_%28video_game%29) based on the after-school cartoon series. This is a high-quality game that shouldn't be cleared out for a buck, but it's in awful shape — never mind the dirt, the whole back label's been ripped off. (I suspect a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser will fix that first problem.)
04broke-in-tokyo-gb-genjin-land
GB Genjin Land -------------- I got duped. I bought this Game Boy bargain expecting that it was one of the Bonk's Adventure platforming games. As it turns out, it's a totally different genre, and one of the few games in the series that wasn't released in the U.S. [GB Genjin Land](http://bonkzonk.com/game.ktn?Game=gbgl) is a series of mini-games based around the Bonk engine and characters. You can play a game of Breakout by bonking a ball into rows of bones, or a rousing match of Whack-a-Mole in which you bonk enemies that pop out of the ground. Interesting, but not what I was hoping for.
05broke-in-tokyo-super-chinese-world
Super Chinese World ------------------- Besides being a horrible name for a take-out restaurant, Super Chinese World is a series of bad action games from [Culture Brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_Brain), purveyors of such B-grade NES games as Flying Warriors and The Magic of Scheherazade. Released as Super Ninja Boy in the West, Super Chinese World is an odd hybrid of action and role-playing. You wander around a map and randomly encounter enemies, but the battles take place in a small side-view level and play out like a bad action game. This, by the way, is how I cheated. Super Famicom games are common as dirt these days, and a store in Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district called Retro Game Camp has a box of them outside for free (with purchase). Since I was buying other games, I got a few of these without having to pay. As long as you don't think about this too hard, I technically stayed under budget.
06broke-in-tokyo-silva-saga-ii
Silva Saga II ------------- Another salvaged game out of the free pile, Silva Saga II comes from the days when role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were some of the most popular content on the 16-bit Super Famicom, and thus inspired the most copies. Some copies were much more blatant about it. Within the first few minutes of playing [Silva Saga II](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Saga_II:_The_Legend_of_Light_and_Darkness), an old man was saying to me that if I wanted to learn more about the Light Warriors, I would have to go find a Golden Needle and trade it for his Canoe. "Hey old man," I said to my television. "Those three things are ripped straight out of Final Fantasy." The Canoe worked exactly as it did in Square's game, too, allowing me to ford the thin rivers that crisscrossed the world map. Battles looked more like Dragon Quest. The whole thing felt like it was designed by people who loved RPGs but didn't know how to make them. I think I drew something resembling the map of the first dungeon on a piece of graph paper back in middle school. Actually, for as creatively bankrupt as Silva Saga proved to be, it was actually kind of addictive. The music was pleasant, the graphics were the good kind of strange and it wasn't obnoxiously difficult in the beginning. I kind of want to go back.
07broke-in-tokyo-the-dungeon-rpg
The Dungeon RPG --------------- Before D3 Publisher got all respectable, it was best known in Japan for the [Simple series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Simple_series_games) of PlayStation games. These were games developed and sold extremely cheaply, with an MSRP of 1500 yen. They were not very good, although games like Earth Defense Force and Oneechanbara got their start in this series. I can understand people wanting to play a generic, cheap game like The Chess or The Bowling. But The Dungeon RPG? Did people really want a no-frills role-playing game? I thought the frills were the whole point. But that is indeed what The Dungeon RPG is; it dumps you into the first floor of a dungeon with only the slightest hint of context or purpose. The graphics and music are awful and the controls are terrible. But you save lots of money!
08broke-in-tokyo-rockman-world-2
Rockman World 2 --------------- 1up.com Editor-in-Chief and Mega Man aficionado Jeremy Parish turned up his nose at this 100-yen purchase, telling me that this second Game Boy game is disliked by fans and even by the series producer Kenji Inafune. Apparently Capcom outsourced the game to another developer that didn't know anything about the series. I don't know. It's still probably the most fun game in this entire feature. Also, it's still stupidly difficult, which I always understood was what Mega Man fans wanted.
09broke-in-tokyo-fatal-fury-special
Garou Densetsu Special ---------------------- Man, I used to spend *money* on these games. Like, real money. Like, kid-with-no-job money. I owned the Super Nintendo version of Fatal Fury and I played it a lot. Probably more than it deserved: I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but SNK's fighting games never felt nearly as good as the Street Fighter series that they were ripping off left and right. It's a little depressing when you get a free copy of something that you would have, 20 years ago, spent way too much allowance money on. Garou Densetsu Special (released as [Fatal Fury Special](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Fury_Special) here) is at least a good way to kill an hour on a Sunday if you have a friend around. Which is more than I can say for most of the other games I found this time.
10broke-in-tokyo-skweek
Skweek ------ A shopping tip for those of you heading to Akihabara: There is now a semi-regular flea market there called [Mottainai](http://www.udx-akibaichi.jp/mottainai/). We happened into this and found a few games here and there on vendors' blankets. The only thing I wanted to buy was this sealed copy of the PC Engine game [Skweek](http://www.pcengine.co.uk/HTML_Games/Skweek.htm). What's it like? Hell if I know — like I'm going to break the seal! I did that once with [Madouking Granzort on SuperGrafx](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/video/supergrafx-games/1886150686) and the results were highly disappointing. There's probably a reason the shrink wrap is still on this thing. Best to leave it there, even for 100 yen.
