[TORUMASUTA]

What's the intersection between a vast technological empire despoiling a primitive planet and Japanese anime witches? Read on to find out!



Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, creators of cult classic Star Control II, are associated with a bizarre number of important, inspiring, and basically ignored games. Star Control II might be known among the better read, but a lot of the other stuff they worked on was either ahead of its time or so different from everything else that it left an impression. Although their company, Toys for Bob, is currently under the yoke of Corporate America and makes exciting titles such as "Madagascar 2" and "Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure" but their past history of games worked on should make any other game developer jealous. Not only do they have the beloved Star Control II and the original Star Control, but games like Archon, The Unholy War, Mail-Order Monsters, and others are accredited to them, with "special thanks" going to them for Toejam and Earl and Starflight. It's a list of Best Games You've Never Played, more or less.

The Unholy War specifically is an interesting one. A PSX title, it plays a bit like Archon, and a bit like the original Star Control. You're presented with a hex grid, with one player at each end, who control a base hex. You use money to buy units and send them across these hexes, attempting to claim money-producing hexes before your enemy can. With the money you gain from controlling these spaces, you can (hopefully) build more units and conquer the enemy's base. When two units meet, the two units fight it out in a 3D battle that plays like a planetary version of Star Control's melees, and each unit has a special ability it can use on the map (such as setting a hex on fire, or giving a chance of producing an extra unit). It's very easy to get into, but very addicting once you get into it, but unfortunately it's one of those games (like Bomberman) that only comes alive in the multiplayer mode, and was mostly looked down on for the less-than-stellar single player mode.

Now, out of all the games that Toys for Bob was known to produce, there's one that stands out in particular, and that's a Japanese-only title whose name apparently translates as "Little Witching Mischiefs." As near as I could tell, it was a game about some young anime girls who were also witches, and they did stuff, apparently. Notable among the cast was Cutie Honey, who doesn't really count as Little, nor technically is a Witch, but there's nothing wrong with a little Cutie Honey as far as I'm concerned, especially if she's up to some Mischief. I'd seen screenshots before of the game, and it looked a bit like The Unholy War, so much so that I was sure that the engine was most likely similar. For some reason, I couldn't find this Japanese-only game about and (optimistically) for little girls in America for some reason, so I never found out.

That was, until just a little while ago, when I saw the the screenshots over here.

For the uninitiated, which you almost certainly are, the enemies in those screens are from The Unholy War. The games are pretty drastic in tone, as the next two openings will show, so finding this out was kind of a surprise! You got your epic violent sci-fi thriller in my cute witch game! You got your cute witch game in my epic violent sci-fi thriller!





I couldn't sleep for weeks, because the burden of the questions was simpy too great to bear. Was Little Mischievous Witch Chappy inducted into the vast Teknos Empire via a dark ritual? Did the Arcane and Teknos sides become friends and team up against Japan? I had to find out, so I emailed Toys for Bob, and got back some interesting responses.

[Persona-sama]

Whoa, they basically made the Super Robot Wars equivalent of magical girls from the 50s and 60s. That's amazing.
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[LordGek]

While it definitely was a game almost in the same quirky style, I don't think there was any connection between the Toys for Bob crew and the Toejam and Earl crew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toejam_and_Earl

But if there is actually some connection I'd love to hear it, perhaps Toejam and Earl's Johnson Voorsanger Productions (who then changed their name to Toejam and Earl Productions) shared some of the same developers?

[TORUMASUTA]

[LordGek]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Gek, I appreciate the way you try to focus and deliver on a single subject, but you probably should've taken a closer look at the front page/Force Feedback..

on topic: whoa
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[Vehicular Manslaughter]

[ionustron]

Man, Unholy War was fantastic, but kinda crash-prone. It was a Christmas gift my brother gave me one year, came out of left field, and then I read the back of the case; one of it's bullet points was from the creators of Star Controll II! or to that effect. We'd fire it up every few years.

I recall reading somewhere that there was much more silly story planned for the teams, but Eidos wanted nothing of it. Instead, we got little dry snippets of story in between single player missions.

That bit about the rat was interesting. I'm kinda curious to track down Internal Solitude Obituary of the game to see just how the game balance differed, and WTF Cutie Honey???

(This also reminds me to track down Wrath Unleashed later...)

[TORUMASUTA]

[hebereke]

[TORUMASUTA]

[Cossix]

Toll you got linked on Tiny Cartridge how does this make you feel

Also are these seriously the guys that made Pandemonium 1 and 2? Those two games were pretty goddamn good. They reminded me a lot of those Hand of Fate adventure games.
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I play games sometimes

[hebereke]

[TORUMASUTA]

Hey, I DID get linked by Tiny Cartridge! Between this and the time SiliconEra linked me, I think I may have finally hit the Big Time.

hebereke, you make a compelling argument. I still find it strange that they'd translate some of the game and not all of it unless they had a good reason to, but what you're saying probably makes more sense.
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www.mechadamashii.com -- God Bless the Machine

[JohnH]

I've never played, and sadly barely heard, of either of those games, but I can help explain Ford and Reiche's presence on TJ&E's credits. They've worked with Voorsanger and Johnson on games in the past. Greg Johnson, if memory serves, was lead designer on Star Control II, which is a very similar type of game to Starflight.

These are all among the most awesome people still working in U.S. game development. We should all mail them dollars and dollars.

[Sketch]

Wow, you actually contacted them to ask about LWM? Good man!

I'd always been curious about that, thinking it was simply a rebranding of Unholy War (which I'd played and enjoyed), but it seems the game was actually something a bit more than that!

You should do some kind of HG101 article on this. It's too interesting to sink into obscurity at the bottom of a forum board.
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GAMES OF THE WORLD: everything from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe

[mrkboucher]

The term empire derives from the Latin imperium batteries. Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples (ethnic groups) united and ruled either by a monarch (emperor, empress) or an oligarchy. Geopolitically, the term empire has denoted very different, territorially-extreme states at the strong end, the extensive Spanish Empire (16th c.) online dvd rental and the British Empire (19th c.), at the weak end, the Holy Roman Empire (8th c.–19th c.), in its Medieval and early-modern forms, and the Byzantine Empire (15th c.), that was a direct continuation of the Roman Empire, that, in its final century of existence, was more a city-state than a territorial empire. Etymologically, the political usage of “empire” denotes a strong, centrally-controlled nation-state desktop computer, but, in the looser, quotidian, vernacular usage, it denotes a large-scale business enterprise (i.e. a transnational corporation) and a political organisation of either national-, regional-, or city scale, controlled either by a person (a political boss) phentermine or a group authority (political bosses).

[CubaLibre]

This is the worst one so far :(
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