Another one of Namco’s iconic characters gets his own land!

There’s no gradient, but a three-color title is good enough

To Beat: Finish Level 4-8
Played: 3/8/19 – 3/9/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Mappy-Land Longplay

Mappy was a popular arcade game by Namco that released in 1983. The NES received many arcade ports during its lifespan, including many other Namco classics such as Galaga and Pac-Man. Mappy did get a Famicom port but never saw an NES release. Instead, what we got was Mappy-Land, a console-only sequel that extends the formula from a score-based arcade game to an adventure game. Let’s dive in and see how that panned out.

Mappy-Land was developed by Tose. It was first released on the Famicom in November 1986. There it was published by Namco. The NES version in North America came out way later in April 1989, published by Taxan. It was also included on Wii U Virtual Console worldwide in 2015. This game and the arcade original were the only two Mappy games released in the US. Japan had the arcade sequel Hopping Mappy in 1986 and a Famicom platformer in 1989 called Mappy Kids.

In Mappy-Land, you play the role of Mappy over four different stories, most of which center around Mapico, Mappy’s girlfriend. In the first story, you are collecting cheese as a present for Mapico’s birthday. In Story 2, you gather wedding rings because Mappy wants to marry Mapico. The third story has you collecting Christmas trees for a party. In the final story, you find baseballs for Mappy Jr.’s birthday party. Each of these stories consist of eight areas, so in all there are 32 areas to clear in Mappy-Land to consider the game beaten.

Collect items, avoid enemies. Sounds simple!

This is a simple maze-chase style game with equally simple controls. The D-pad controls Mappy. You can walk left and right. Press Up or Down to use ladders. The B button lets Mappy perform a small jump. Most items are in the air and Mappy jumps to grab them, and even though B-button jumping is normally something I hate, it didn’t bother me this time. The A button is used for deploying weapons. That’s all there is to it.

The ground rules for this game are also simple, mostly following from the original Mappy arcade game. You start on the bottom left and the enemies, the cat Nyamco and his crew of Mukies, begin pursuing Mappy from the upper right. This is a scrolling game that expands several screens horizontally. The structure of each level is four floors high that are sometimes connected by ladders. Empty vertical columns often contain a trampoline at the bottom that Mappy and the enemies can use to switch between the floors. Mappy passes through all enemies unharmed while on the trampoline. You can only get off the trampoline while moving upward, and after a few consecutive bounces the trampoline will vanish until you either get off or fall through to your death. Mappy loses a life if he collides with an enemy or if he falls, except when he is either on or leaving a trampoline. You can also fall on top of a partial ladder and be okay. The goal of each level is to collect the six items from the story, then exit to the right.

Since you can’t always navigate your way around all the pursuing enemies, you have some defensive weapons at your disposal. These are displayed in a row at the top of the screen and you can collect more as you find them. Press A to use them, however you can only the item positioned at the end of the list, so the last item collected is the first one used. You start off with three cat toys. Mukies will get distracted by them allowing you to pass through them, but Nyamco is unaffected. Coins do just the opposite; they distract Nyamco but the Mukies don’t bother with them. Pots cause Mukies to faint, letting you pass by safely. Fish are thrown forward and bounce ahead, which causes all enemies to chase them.

I was able to distract the muky but not Nyamco.

Each of the eight areas has a different visual theme, a different costume that Nyamco wears, and a unique attacking weapon that shows up at fixed locations in the stages. The first area is Railroad Town and it contains pulleys. Grab one and Mappy will slide to the left, knocking out any enemies in the way. The second area is Western World and there are punching bags. Jumping into one cause it to rock back and forth for a while which knocks out passing enemies. The next area is Tropical World with fireworks. These are like bombs. Set them up with a jump and they will sit there until an enemy passes and it explodes. The fourth area is Jungle World. This area has a different structure from the others. There are no weapons here, but the level layout is a wide open space with no floors and no enemies that actively pursue you. There are trampolines strewn about, many of which are high up off the ground and slide left and right. Use these trampolines to catch and cling to vines that help you cross pools of water. You can fall safely after bouncing and you can control Mappy with Left and Right as you fall, but you must land on a trampoline after leaping from a vine or you will lose a life.

The fifth area is Pirate World. This one has horizontal bars and Mappy will swing around them for a time, hitting any enemies that pass by. The sixth area is Ghost Town which also has a different play style than the other stages. This is another open area where Mappy uses a balloon to fly around. Use the D-pad to fly in any direction. Mappy is armed with an infinite use flashlight that he shines when you press A. The cats fly around as ghosts and you can vanish them with the flashlight. Here you collect keys to open a door leading to a side area. You have to find an item here that lets you pass through to the end of the stage. The next area is Seventh Avenue and it contains sticks that you bop from underneath to hurt enemies above you. I never was able to utilize these when I played. The final area is Muky Town. There are bowling balls that roll along the ground when you release them, taking out enemies along the way. Instead of going off to the right when you collect all the items, you must enter the castle door in the center. This takes you to another side area with no enemies and a new set of items. You must collect all the items here and reach Mapico at the end of the area before the level song completes. If you fail, you are awarded no bonus points but you get to repeat that part again as many times as needed without losing any lives. Complete it to earn a point bonus, then you go to the first area of the next story.

It’s nice not being chased sometimes.

As you proceed through the stories, the enemies start chasing you faster and thus are harder to avoid. Some areas also have the exit blocked, just like how I described above about Ghost Town. In that case, you need to locate the sub area that opens once all items are gathered. Inside the sub area, you have to collect another item that lets you pass through to the end of the main area outside. The entrance to the sub area is often telegraphed by a doorway in the background that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

Now I’ll cover a few miscellaneous features and tips about Mappy-Land. Sometimes, the necessary sub area is made a little bit harder to find because you need to jump into the entrance. This tripped me up on one specific level. You can use both kinds of weapons together. For instance, you can distract a bunch of Mukies with the cat toy and then run them all over with the pulley in the first stage. Combo attacks like this also earn you a bunch of points. It is also possible to jump over a single enemy if you get trapped. I wasn’t aware this was possible until I re-read the manual after beating the game. Even though it’s not necessary for beating the game, I know it would have been handy to know that.

Mappy begins with two extra lives. There are no extra life pickups but you do earn a free life at 40,000 points. I didn’t score much higher than that so I don’t know if you can earn more lives or not. Dying in a level maintains the items collected, and that’s helpful for clearing some of the more difficult areas. You have unlimited continues to use when you run out of lives. You go back to the title screen but you can choose the Continue option on the main menu to restart the latest level. Be careful to manually select the Continue option so that you don’t accidentally start from the beginning and lose your progress. Mappy-Land has your back anyway in case that happens. The game features a built-in Stage Select option. You can choose to play any story and any odd-numbered area in that story. This means you can skip straight to 4-7 from the start and only have to play two areas to get the proper ending!

Some levels have you entering rooms in the background.

This was my first time playing through Mappy-Land. I only played one area during my initial cart testing. I remember reading about this game in my old gaming magazines. I didn’t get a chance to try it until I collected the game as an adult. I haven’t personally come across many copies of this game, but it is reasonably common. A loose cart sells for around $8 or so. My copy has some label peeling, so I wouldn’t mind running into a condition upgrade in the future.

I didn’t have much trouble beating this game for the first time. This is a straightforward game that you can just keep trying until you get through. There are a few tricky spots to cope with. Jungle World is cumbersome at first with the floating trampolines and unintuitive physics. If you don’t catch the vines in the right way, it is possible to fall to your doom between them. It reminds me of Spelunker but not in a good way. Some of the later levels are laid out where one of the objects you need is located on a one-way path. It can be tricky to get the enemies to cooperate so you can get through, but that’s why you have your weapons. I would take an intentional death just to ensure I could get an item in an out of the way location. This is a minor spoiler, but there’s a level where the floors are invisible unless you have a torch that you found in the previous area. If you have to continue on that stage then you are locked out of the torch altogether. While possible to navigate blind, it is really helpful to see the layout at least once before. I didn’t have to go back a level via the stage select or anything, but that was an option I might have considered if I were stuck for a long time. My longplay video was my second attempt and it went well enough. I got stuck for several minutes on 4-1, which was the only major blemish in an otherwise average run.

I had a fun time playing Mappy-Land, though it’s not without its issues. The graphics are simplistic but detailed enough with the different backgrounds and costumes for Nyamco. They might be nice for 1986 standards but not as great by 1989 when it reached the NES. I liked the music and how there was a different song for every area. They even brought back the original Mappy song for one of the sub-areas. The controls are easy to learn and use. The gameplay is okay but it gets repetitive. It’s not a terribly long game, but 32 levels of being chased around simple mazes is quite enough. The mechanics drag this game down a little bit. Mappy can fall from any height after bouncing off a trampoline and be fine, yet if he takes a tiny fall of a ledge he dies. But you can fall onto a half-ladder with no trouble. The rules don’t really make sense, but to be fair, neither does passing through deadly enemies on the trampoline. The Jungle World is the worst offender here, trying to flesh out some platforming that doesn’t fit the style of this game. Ghost Town with the floating balloon does it much better. The game is a little bit janky overall. I haven’t sold the game well here, but I had fun playing it and I appreciate its modest difficulty and some nice touches along the way.

#116 – Mappy-Land

That menacing dragon and his friends pose quite a stiff but fun challenge.

Not pictured is the dancing circle of letters in “Burai Fighter”!

To Beat: Finish all 7 stages
To Complete: Beat the game on the highest difficulty
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 3/31/16 – 4/14/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 9/10

I’ve taken on a number of shooter games already for the blog but there has yet to be a more typical style space shooter until Burai Fighter. The game stands out a bit with its bright yellow label, but behind the scenes there is a fun and challenging action game that is worth a play.

Burai Fighter was originally developed for the NES and released in March 1990. It was developed by KID and published by Taxan. It was released on the NES in Europe and Australia later in 1990 and was also released on the Famicom in July 1990, published by Taito. Burai Fighter was also developed for the Game Boy and was released first in Japan just prior to the Famicom version, debuting in June 1990. It would come out in North America and Europe in 1991. The Game Boy game is called Burai Fighter Deluxe even though some elements of the game were lost in moving to the handheld. There was also a Game Boy Color version released in Japan in 1999 as Burai Fighter Color and in North America in 2000 as Space Marauder.

Burai Fighter is one of the first games designed and produced by Ken Lobb. He is perhaps best known as a designer for the original Killer Instinct. After Taxan closed, he briefly worked for Namco contributing on Splatterhouse 2 and 3 for Sega Genesis. Next he would work for Nintendo where he worked on Killer Instinct and other games such as Super Punch-Out!!, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, and many others. He left Nintendo to work at Microsoft Game Studios where he is still employed today. It’s always nice to see where a well known personality in gaming starts out!

Starting off the game with a wall of enemies!

Burai Fighter is a shoot-em-up where you control an unnamed protagonist in his efforts to defeat the evil Burai and their armies from taking over the universe. You are equipped with a jet pack that lets you fly in any direction as the game scrolls forward. One of the unique features of this game is that the scrolling isn’t just in one direction. The scrolling direction changes in whichever direction the level was designed though it does follow a linear path. It’s important to pay attention to your surroundings so that you can avoid getting trapped if the level veers in an unexpected direction. Because of this scrolling, you can fire your gun in eight directions. Holding down the fire button locks the direction you are shooting so you can maneuver at will while firing in whatever direction you want.

There are three types of weapon enhancements to your standard gun. The Laser changes your standard shot into a high powered beam similar to the Laser powerup in Gradius. The Ring power fires a round projectile in addition to your standard gun and this shot can go through walls. The Missile powerup also augments your standard gun but always fires to the right no matter what direction you are aiming the basic shot. These weapons can be powered up by collecting powerup icons. The letter on this icon cycles between L, R, and M for their respective weapons. You can switch your weapon by grabbing this icon whenever the letter on it changes to which weapon you want. Certain enemies drop these but they are also scattered throughout the levels. There are a couple of other powerups to collect. The S icon increases your movement speed, and there is a spiked ball you can grab that rotates around you killing most enemies when they touch it.

Choose your path wisely because the level can smash you.

Each weapon type can be powered up between three different strengths. Collecting 5 icons of the same type gives you the Level 2 weapon, and collecting 10 icons gives you the Level 3 weapon. The Level 2 Laser fires a second laser in the opposite direction of your shot, and the Level 3 Laser shoots in all four diagonal directions plus it restores your basic gun for even more firepower. The Level 2 Ring similarly adds another Ring shot behind you, and Level 3 adds a spread effect in the direction you are aiming. The Level 2 Missile adds missiles that shoot to the left, and the Level 3 Missile adds missiles that fire both up and down giving you four missiles at once. The game keeps track of how many icons of each type you have so you know when you are about to add some firepower. When you die, the weapon currently in use goes all the way back down to zero. However, the other two weapons maintain their current level so this is less of a setback than in many other shooters. Of course if you have to continue then everything resets back to square one.

Lesser enemies will occasionally drop these shards that you can collect in order to fill a meter at the bottom of the screen. This meter has notches in it breaking the meter down into eight segments. Each segment of this bar represents a cobalt bomb that you can fire off by pressing A. This is a very powerful bomb that destroys all bullets and most enemies on screen. However it deals no damage to the bosses. I found it especially useful as a defense move to get out of situations where I was trapped by oncoming enemy fire. If you are able to fill the meter up completely it will award you an extra life but you lose all your bombs in the process.

Burai Fighter has seven levels in two distinct styles. The majority of the levels play out with the multi-directional linear scrolling as described previously. Each level has a boss encounter at the end. They are huge screen-sized bosses with lots of moving parts and they put up quite a fight. These levels also contain hidden rooms that can be found in the gaps on the edge of the screen. When you find a hidden room the level scrolls briefly to reveal the room and all the nice powerups and prizes hidden inside. There are ten hidden rooms in the game and they are difficult to find. I only found two or three of these rooms when I played and I had problems getting in to the room even when I knew where it was. Maybe there’s a trick to it that I didn’t figure out but after awhile I didn’t even bother looking for them.

It wouldn’t be a shoot-em-up without needing to destroy all the cores!

Levels 3 and 6 deviate by playing from a top-down perspective. These stages were removed from the Game Boy versions. Before you start the level you are presented with a map indicating your starting position and the location of the base that you must destroy. The map shuffles these placements every time you restart the level so some attempts will have a more favorable setup than others. The idea is to head in the direction of the base and destroy all the targets on the base once you find it. If you get lost trying to find the base it is almost always a lost cause since you only see the map one time before the level. The other important element is that you cannot lock the firing direction in these stages. You can only shoot in the direction you are moving. This can be pretty challenging whenever you are being tailed by an ever-growing group of enemies. The level ends whenever the base is completely destroyed. It’s a short stage and it’s a decent diversion from the normal levels.

Graphically the game has very nice visual effects and the coloring is pretty bright and varied for this type of game. The level graphics themselves are kind of non-descript and don’t really stand out much aside from the organic look in Stage 2. I like the music in this game, particularly the track from the first level. This game really shines in visual flair. The game makes heavy use of rotating individual sprites, such as in the swinging arms of bosses and the star splash effect when using a cobalt bomb. It’s even evident from powering on the game and watching the letters in Burai Fighter form a circle and rotate around. This makes the game look really interesting.

There are three difficulty levels in Burai Fighter: Eagle (easy), Albatross (normal), and Ace (hard). Each difficulty level increases the number of enemies and the rate of enemy fire. There are multiple endings based on the difficulty level, so in order to get the best ending you have to take on the challenge of the hardest difficulty. Fortunately to help out there are not only unlimited continues but also stage passwords. The passwords are only four characters long and they are actual English words so they are really easy to memorize and input. The downside with simple passwords is that the game will start you off with no powerups every time.

Meet the rotating arm of death!

This was my first attempt at beating Burai Fighter, but I had completed the first level on Albatross difficulty when testing out my cart. From that short experience I knew this game was good and I was very excited to take on the challenge. Since I want the best ending I started right off on Ace difficulty. The first level took a bit of time though I learned it fairly quickly, but Stage 2 slowed me down almost from the start. That level goes on for awhile and it winds around with different challenges at every turn. Each continue is a setback as it bumps you back to the start of the stage. About halfway through I got my groove and that led me to finishing the stage. Level 3 is the first top-down level and I died and lost my weapons while trying to get my bearings. After that small setback it didn’t take too long to finish, and Level 4 also went by quickly.

Level 5 was my biggest stumbling block in the whole game. The initial scrolling segment is really erratic with tight quarters and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out the best way through the mess of enemies. This was where I realized I should probably start using cobalt bombs! Even with the bombs I needed lots of practice on this stage. The boss was hard too as there are several moving parts to account for and avoid. Level 6 is the other top-down stage and this time I cleared it on my first try! The final level is the hardest of all but I spent less time here than on Stage 5. The final boss is the Slimedragon that you see on the cover of the game. The best way I can describe this creature is he is an elusive bullet sponge. It’s okay once you figure out the rhythm of the fight but the battle goes on and on for quite some time because he is so hard to hit. Beating that boss was a real feel good moment and a weight off my shoulders.

Now, it’s spoiler time! Skip ahead if you don’t want to know what happens next. After sitting through the ending, the developers felt that it was a great time to reveal that the game actually has a hidden fourth difficulty level labeled Ultimate that contains the true best ending. So it was back to the drawing board for another playthrough. From what I could tell there were no significant differences between Ace and Ultimate. The enemies move a little bit faster and fire more bullets. The bosses have higher health as well. I thought for awhile that the scrolling was a tiny bit faster than before but now I’m not so sure that’s true. This mode was no cakewalk for certain but I got through it quicker the second time around since I already knew what to expect in the levels.

Tough boss fights look really good in full action.

This game was quite a challenge even with continues and a password save. Having to beat the game on the hardest difficulty may have made it seem harder to me than it really was. I don’t think Burai Fighter is in true top tier difficulty but it’s up there. I am guessing clearing the game on Eagle difficulty is still a stiff challenge but much more manageable than the higher levels. My difficulty assessment here is really a gut feeling and may be completely off base. Either way, I am sticking with my choices.

I get the impression that Burai Fighter is an unheralded good game on NES since I hardly ever see it discussed. It’s a great original title that I think would be a lot of fun for shooter fans. I particularly like the bosses and how they are technical showpieces while they also pose a nice challenge. The game has this visual pizzazz to it that doesn’t show up in many other NES games. Plus the game is still very affordable for a loose cart. It’s a mystery to me why this game is not more popular. It’s a fun game and I recommend it!

#22 – Burai Fighter