![]() ![]() While Reika can come off rather girlish, she is charming and full of personality, if sometimes a bit annoying. That isn’t to say it’s all necessarily bad, though. In essence, she embodies what constituted mid-80s anime hotness, for better or for worse. Her outfit can even get torn off at times when you miss an input. She’s flirty, generally cheerful as she giggles and skips through danger for most of the game, dolling out little quips here and there, with some shrieks of panic when in distress. Being a long green-haired gal in a half-vest top and red hot pants, she can be described as a blend of Yuri from Dirty Pair, Lum from Urusei Yatsura, and a hint of Milia from Macross. Female characterization in video games has come under a lot of fire in recent years, and Reika is still a product of her era. Well, it was sort of progressive, but not entirely 100% positive. ![]() There was no hiding that you were in control of an action heroine – a fairly progressive notion at a time when the majority of arcade games still put the player in the role of a nameless unseen pilot of a spaceship. Pac Man forebears, she was neither an animal with maternal instincts nor an abstract yellow disc constantly eating, and unlike Baraduke from the same year, her gender was upfront and on the marquee display. Not exactly a deep plot, but enough to justify the perils she’ll face throughout the interactive feature.Īs the title explicitly states, Reika is one of the pioneers of playable girls in gaming, she is at least one of the first ostensibly fully human female protagonists created specifically for a video game. Time Gal, is able to follow him to the past with her own, much-smaller time traveling medallion on her chest and a laser pistol at her side. In 4001 AD a criminal named Luda steals an experimental time machine in order to change history and seize power. The heroine’s experiences and exploits are more in line with Dexter from Space Ace than Dirk the Daring in many ways.Īt some point between the 21st century and the 41th, time travel has become a possiblity, and as Timecop, Back to the Future Part II, and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey taught us, it is a potentially dangerous tool when placed in the wrong hands. Time Gal was one of their most memorable of FMV games. One such company was Taito, who pumped out a few unique titles with moderate success against the changing trends in the mid-80s, complete with original animation from Toei. In Japan though, a few publishers were keeping the genre alive. The little arcade nickelodeon shows had lost their luster, and their owners were going back to cheaper cabinets that didn’t require expensive laserdisc players with their high failure rates. Gamers were becoming sick of seeing the same animations over and over through the trial and error process of memorization. ![]() Even by the release of Bluth’s sequel title, its only contribution was more inputs at a faster clip with quicker reaction time, making the expensive game more of a quarter-muncher. A lot of the character and finesse that made Dragon’s Lair successful was stripped away as many titles haphazardly forced in input and battle sequences with little regard to flow. Instead many developers spliced and edited footage from films and anime into a more or less coherent mashing of stages to play through, such a Sega’s Astron Belt swiping from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Message from Space, and Battle Beyond the Stars, and Stern’s Cliff Hanger using scenes from 2 Lupin III movies: Mystery of Mamo and Castle of Cagliostro. Despite many ambitious companies wanting in on the gold rush, not all of them had the backing of an ex-Disney animator’s studio to produce the video for their games. It wouldn’t take long for the market to get flooded with similar titles and for the novelty to wear off, leaving the new genre running out of steam by the time Space Ace debuted in 1984.Īnd it wasn’t from a lack of effort – no, scratch that, it was from a lack of effort. The gimmick of basically watching a short movie with bare interactive input to keep it rolling was astoundingly lucrative, with Don Bluth’s 10 minute animated fantasy short making 32 times its million dollar budget in 8 months. Pull back the proverbial curtain and the flashy magic trick turns out simple – and expensive: a laserdisc player hooked up with a CPU with the most rudimentary of coding to change video tracks on the fly (even less so if the game itself doesn’t bother keeping score). In an era where vector graphics and digitized voices were the pinnacle of programming and memory tech, Dragon’s Lair wowed gamers with visuals and sounds straight out of a cartoon – which it essentially was. It’s easy to imagine how powerful an impression laserdisc games left on arcade visitors in 1983. ![]()
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