Jade Marker

Do you think uncle iroh would crank that soulja boy??

Anime tie-in video games are almost always bad. There are good ones, of course, but like, they're a cash grab, right? They're there to cater to otaku who really love the anime and would buy any merch, and thus like anything, they're not there to like, make a statement, or even sometimes be ACCURATE to the source material. They're there to make a quick buck.

Just like in everything else, Utena saw that trend and was like "fuck that shit", completely breaking the mold. And so we got an Utena game on the Saturn, the only game the franchise ever saw. And it's stunningly good. Way, WAY better than it should be.

Warning: I WILL talk about some Utena spoilers in this. It's just how it is. Also, there's a bath scene I'll be showing a picture of, so be careful looking at this at work. It's not like, smut, but it's tasteful Anime nudity.

I picked up a copy recently for the novelty and also because you can do arbitrary code execution over the modem port, which I will absolutely use for shenanigans

The game above is part of their Morita Shogi series, a kinda-long-running series of Shogi simulations aimed at enthusiasts. Emphasis on "enthusiast" because the previous game(s) in the series, Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shogi 1 (and 2 which was cancelled) for the Super Famicom incorporated a 32-bit math coprocessor chip running at a whopping 21 MHz! That's about 6 times as fast as the Super Famicom's CPU itself, nearly twice as fast as the 3DO's CPU, and quite a bit faster than the GBA! All for processing Shogi opponent AI, and reportedly costing over 13,000 yen at retail. Shogi diehards really put their money where their mouth is, I guess!

Beyond Shogi, they also developed other games that Japanese boomer-era men would enjoy, like Mahjong and Golf simulations. The latter being a point of interest because they co-developed (Along with Media Factory) one of the few 64DD games, Japan Pro Golf Tour 64! This is a pretty standard realistic golf simulator, but it does use the DD in interesting ways, notably using Randnet to allow players to participate in national online tournaments. Neat! Due to its late release on the DD, it's now the most valuable game on the system, going for ~$3,000 on a good day.

Finally, SETA put out one of the all time classics of N64 peripheral wackiness, Tetris 64. No, not any of the Tetris games we got in America for the N64, but one exclusive to Japan that used a one-off device called the Bio Sensor. I've talked about this doohickey on Cohost before, but it was a device that plugged into the controller on one end and clipped onto your earlobe with the other, continuously reading your pulse as you play to adjust difficulty on the fly. Yep, turns out we got the Wii Vitality Sensor after all, it was just on the N64 over a decade earlier and only for a single Tetris game!

I may not be interested in Golf, Shogi, or Mahjong games, but I will always be interested in old games doing weird and impressive stuff for the hell of it. My hat goes off to you, SETA. You probably made lots of Japanese dads happy.