This week's game(s) is Madoushi Lulba, a trilogy of comical adventure games from Compile that's connected to their Madou Monogatari series (and in turn Puyo Puyo). They're very brief but charming experiences that are worth playing... if you can get them to work better than I was able to!
Madoushi Lulba is a fascinating saga that tells the tale of a anthropomorphic feline swordsman named Cyber Cat and his top hat wearing duck companion named Haagen Duck as they attempt to hunt down the titular sorcerer. Mechanically, they're extremely simple adventure games and each part is somewhere around 10-20 minutes long (not counting any retries), but the real value in them comes from their sense of humor, charm, and place in Compile's history. If you enjoy Compile's other games or just like to see lots of goofy fellas, these games absolutely have you covered. Each scenario introduces strange talking animals that you have to deal with in appropriately strange ways, whether that's dancing for a raccoon, convincing a moose to give you honey, tickling a rat fortune teller, or spacing out so hard that you get an Owlbear killed for its incompetence. Unfurling these scenarios in full is a joy, though the battle sequences can lead to some troublesome trial and error. Madoushi Lulba is also notable for having a lot of its core elements influence aspects of the design of the Madou Monogatari games or even having its characters directly show up. If you're a fan of those games or Puyo Puyo, this is an oft-forgotten link (at least outside of Japan) that you'll want to check out!
As an early success within Compile's Disc Station, they were initially released as individual games and then compiled (heh) into a single game with various enhancements and a new chapter. That version's on Project EGG, which is great, but I decided to try to play the MSX originals because the first part has a fan translation. That translation works great, but parts two and three were not so cooperative. Most significantly, I couldn't actually get past the intro of part two without it hanging on a black screen! Part three mostly works until it decides to stop doing so at the worst possible moment, which is as funny as it is tragic. As you can see, I'm very far from being an expert on this trilogy since I wasn't even able to play one of them, but I think there's fun to be had in sharing my experience, getting awareness of these out there so smarter individuals can work around the issues I had, and getting a laugh or two out of my misfortune. Like Compile's writing, I like to have fun around here, you know?