Dank Zine - Issue 80
Issue 80 has a bunny girl platformer from a mystery developer in Toyama Prefecture, a full history of how drum and bass grew up inside your Amiga, a dating sim that accidentally launched a whole spinoff universe, and a giant mutant camel. Good issue.
Sad Cat Comix: When do you know a game is bad? Easy. When it lies. Says it's an RPG, but you just walk in circles. Says it's a platformer, but you fall through the floor. Sad Cat sees through it. Sad Cat and Honk go to an Arcade to play Space Harrier.
Nihon Softec and the Bunny Girl Action Series: A deep dive into Usagi na Panic, a light-hearted sword-swinging platformer on PC-98 starring Ramy, a rabbit-eared girl with a health bar shaped like a carrot that drains constantly, forcing you to move efficiently through ten stages or die of exhaustion. The developer, Nihon Softec, was a tiny studio from Toyama Prefecture with credits listing only two or three people per game, making everything from pinball to samurai strategy before quietly pivoting out of games and into general IT solutions in the early 2000s. This article covers all three entries in the series, including the 1995 sequel that added RPG elements and an island hub, the CD-ROM EX Special Pack that became a collector's item almost immediately, and the Windows 95 follow-up Geo Light Moon, which had more colours and MIDI audio and somehow managed to feel more dated than its predecessors. A fan translation of the first game exists. Original floppy copies now sell for roughly twice their original price.
Into the Wonderful: How DNB Got Out of the Underground and Into Video Games. This one starts at the beginning: broke kids with Amigas and ProTracker, passing samples around like mixtapes, learning to slice a break by hand because there was nothing else. The article traces how the same tools used to make game music in the late 1980s became the tools that built jungle, how composers like Muffler and Allister Brimble were writing what was basically proto-DNB for loading screens and menu music, and how games like Xenon 2: Megablast, Speedball 2, Gods, and Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 were sneaking breakbeat culture into living rooms at a time when mainstream radio refused to touch it. It also covers what happened when the feedback loop reversed, and actual jungle producers started scoring games, from Wolverine: Adamantium Rage to Wipeout to Namco's Tetsukazu Nakanishi hiding amen breaks inside Ridge Racer and Ace Combat 2. Ends with Ultrakill. Good article.
Weird New Hacks and Translations: Four patches for this issue. Chobits: Atashi Dake no Hito is a GBA visual novel tie-in to the manga, originally bundled with a clear blue limited-edition GBA and never released outside Japan; it is now fully translated. Gambler: Queen's Cup is a 1994 FM Towns romance game about a career gambler who wants something real, locked behind a language barrier for over 30 years, now in English. Battle Master: Kyukyoku no Senshitachi is a chunky SNES fighter that borrows heavily from Street Fighter II but has enough peak-'93 energy to be worth the look, now translated. EMIT is a trilogy of Koei visual novels originally made as English-learning tools for Japanese players, set in a world where people age in reverse, now fully translated across all three volumes, including previously untouched side content.
KEGS32 Apple IIgs Emulator Quick Guide Step-by-step instructions for getting GS/OS running on KEGS32, including how to fix the "Check Startup Device" error and how to swap disks on two-disk games. Also: a reminder that the Apple IIgs had a glorious Ensoniq music chip and a lot of purple.
Please Don't Play This Game: Hatsukoi Monogatari (MS-DOS, 1993). One of the first dating sims ever made, and it shows. You get three months of in-game time, a stylized oval watch interface, and one blinking girl. The space angel in mech armour promised in the opening does nothing. Her name is Flo. You will forget she exists. The dating sim formula had not been established yet, because this game was the formula, and it was still figuring out what fun was. It predates Tokimeki Memorial, came out the same year as Dokyusei, and accidentally spun off an entire magical girl franchise because people liked Flo more than the game itself. Dank-O-Meter: 4/10.
Please Play This Instead: Revenge of the Mutant Camels (C64/Amiga/Atari ST, 1984) Jeff Minter spent part of his development time at a zoo studying real camels so their walk cycles would look right. This is a game where a giant camel shoots flying British phone boxes and raining dogs across 42 waves of progressive absurdity, with a co-op mode in which the second player controls a goat riding on the camel's back. If you finished the original C64 version in 1984, you could win a real trip to Egypt. Someone actually won. Minter went back and fixed a collision bug in 2021. 5 camels out of 5.
3DO-roscopes by MisterRadon: Your horoscope, assigned a 3DO game. Putt-Putt Fun Pack Cancers are told to stop mistaking stimulation for genuine curiosity. Alone in the Dark 2, Capricorns are reminded that there is probably a logical explanation for whatever is happening around them.
Dank Art Art from AnnK, Goemonsama, Chuboh, and Maru, featuring Gimmick!, Hataraku Chocobo, Super Bomberman, Silpheed, Thunder Force III, Super Adventure Rockman, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Mad Motor, Rompers, Bomb Kick, The Astyanax, Tecmo Knight, and more from the streams of LordBBH, Macaw45, Dnopls, Goati_, Tondagossa, and AnnK.