Pu-Li-Ru-La

Released: 1991
Published by: Taito
Genre: Beat-'em-up
Platforms: Arcade, ported to FM Towns Marty, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PS2

[Note: Sorry for the late update. It was a holiday weekend up here in the frozen tundras.] Well, looks like it's the second week in a row of Taito-developed games! But they do deserve to be in the spotlight, as this week's game Pu-Li-Ru-La is a short but sweet classic weird game. What starts out as a seemingly saccharine fairy tale story turns into a surreal mess (though still admittedly saccharine) in which the two heroes Zac and Mel fight robots, clowns, and angry bamboo shoots to save their homeland of Radishland.

The basic premise behind the game is that each town in Radishland has a key that controls the flow of time, and these keys have been stolen by an evil mastermind, subsequently stopping time. For some reason all sorts of bizarre baddies are roaming around in the frozen towns, and when you kill them they turn into ADORABLE little fuzzy animals that you can, uh, run into to collect points. The combat is pretty simple, Zac and Mel have only one attack (club dudes over the head with a Magic Stick) and can use up to three magic spells per life, which are randomly selected and usually pretty awesome—at one point Mel used a spell that one-hit KO'ed the stage boss and moved us right along to the next level.

If I could have only posted one screenshot to sum up the magic of Pu-Li-Ru-La, this would be it.

While it might sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill sidescrolling beat-'em-up so far, the fun of the game starts in around level three when the world takes a sharp twist for the strange and surreal. Levels are littered with photos of real people blocking the screen or interacting with the characters (for example, a room in which a sideways face on the wall licks your heroes with a giant cartoon tongue). Demonic mosaics replace the storybook towns of the beginning of the game. The game explains in broken English that Radishland is being twisted by a megalomaniac's dreams, and while it's allegedly referring to the final boss, we can probably safely assume it applies to the game designers themselves. It's amazingly fun wondering what sort of monstrosity the next level will hold.

Wait, wait, wait... I don't think this is quite what I signed up for when I started playing this game.

Pu-Li-Ru-La's certainly a bit of an anomaly in the gaming world. It seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been targeted at a pretty young audience, judging from the pastel colours, cutesy characters, and difficulty level—it only takes a handful of credits to beat. And yet, there's something so off about it. It was obviously a pretty successful venture for Taito, as it was ported to four different consoles (!) between 1991 and 1997. It's extremely short, taking probably less than fifteen minutes to beat, but there's just so much to take in that you'll probably find yourself coming back to it. It's a shining example of the really weird arcade games that were coming out in the '90s, perhaps because it's something pretty much anyone with a taste for the offbeat can pick up and enjoy.

Pu-Li-Ru-La gets 4.5/5 nightmare fantasy worlds on the GTPU weird-o-meter. Give it a try, I promise you won't be disappointed. Now if only Taito would get around to making a sequel...

Takeshi no Chousenjou

Released: 1986
Published by: Taito
Genre: Action/Life Sim (?)
Platforms: Famicom

I have a confession to make. I didn't exactly 100% complete the game in the review you're about to read. Don't get me wrong, it has been done--see the first episode of Game Center CX for an example of this--but unfortunately my patience could only go so far. Hopefully after reading the review you'll understand.

Takeshi no Chousenjou was released in the mid '80s, originally planned by Taito to be a tie-in product with a popular TV show. Western audiences may be familiar with that show, as it was broadcast in the UK and North America about a decade later as "Takeshi's Castle" and "MXC" respectively. There's nothing unusual about tie-in games--heck, some of them have even been downright playable. What makes Chousenjou special is the fact that Beat Takeshi himself, legendary comedian, actor, and star of the show, played a large part in the development of the game. The result had absolutely nothing to do with the TV show it was meant to adapt, and instead became a legendary kuso-ge (crappy game) that eventually earned cult status and managed to sell roughly 800,000 copies despite, or maybe because of, its frank unplayability.

If you can't read Japanese, you might not be able to tell, but I'm about to divorce my wife, and she's about to try to beat me to death.

The game puts you in the role of a disgruntled salaryman going about his day-to-day life. You start out at your workplace (where you can punch your boss off of his chair and through his desk), but you're free to roam the streets (to punch housewives and other passers-by), enter bars (to punch waitresses and old men), and so on. The game isn't all fun and punches though, as there are yakuza wandering the streets who'll turn the tables on you, and the game demands that certain things be done and choices be made in a really specific, astronomically unintuitive sequence. An example of this is the requirement that you choose a specific hobby early on in the game that you'll need to help you out later: choose to enroll in any lesson but "music", and then any instrument but "shamisen", and you're set up for failure right from the start. Through tedious trial-and-error, or a strategy guide, you may manage to get through the first part of this game, but the best is yet to come.

Hey, it's the main character's funeral. Hopefully you can enjoy this austere scene, because you'll be seeing it a whole lot over the course of playing this game.

Takeshi's sadistic tendencies shine through at several points from here on, in such unique challenges as having to passably sing karaoke at a bar with the rudimentary Famicom microphone, or having to expose a map to sunlight for an hour to activate the invisible ink it's printed in. This particular sequence requires you to leave the console alone for that full hour--pressing a single button will result in your chance being wasted and having to wait another hour. But in what's possibly the most frustrating challenge, your salaryman hero decides to set out to a secret island to find a buried treasure, and you're forced to go by way of hang-glider. Enemies assail you while you do your best to get to that island... but of course, since you're just gliding, you can dodge them by going down, but never up. This makes getting over the massive mountain towards the end of the course pretty difficult, to say the least. Once you're on the island, things don't get much easier, as entering the wrong hut will trap you, forcing you to reset the game.

You might be wondering by now why anyone would want to play this game, but trust me, there's something irresistable about it to a fan of unusual games. I heartily recommend that everyone give it a try, just to soak in the sheer absurdity of it. Takeshi managed to play a joke on the gaming community--and judging from the fact that people are still talking about it more than 20 years later, it was a pretty awesome joke. Takeshi no Chousenjou gets 4/5 henpecked salarymen on the GTPU weird-o-meter.