Re-release this: MaBoShi's Arcade

A game released to little fanfare by a developer who didn't release games very often anymore. It deserves another chance.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

MaBoShi’s Arcade — known outside of North America as MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade — is a fascinating little WiiWare title. It’s a single-player experience, but one that can be played simultaneously with two other players. What one player does in their portion of the arcade — with their shape, as it were — can influence the games of other players. When you play solo, two computer players will eventually end up filling the other arcade slots, impacting your game just like you were playing with friends on the couch. That alone would make it stand out, given how you don’t tend to see games designed like this, but the real reason MaBoShi’s Arcade is fondly remembered by critics and this guy right here is because of the quality of the games contained within it.

Mindware Corp does not develop games very often. In fact, they stopped altogether for a significant stretch of time, as their founder, Mikito Ichikawa, had become “disillusioned” with the creative state of the game industry. Ichikawa himself has a history in the industry worth telling, but for now, just know that Mindware resurfaced well over a decade after their last release, following the launch of the Nintendo DS and Wii. And did so for MaBoShi’s Arcade, which certainly features original game design.

The three games of the titular arcade are Circle, Stick, and Square. All three are controlled by just one button, and play vastly different from each other. In Circle, you control the direction that a ball spins and travels in within a larger circle. Enemies emanate from the center of the circle, and your goal is to crash into each one before they can escape the stage. You get bonus points for chaining together enemy clears, and there are multipliers to collect while you spin around the circle, as well. If one single enemy escapes, it’s game over. No continues, no lives, just game over. So, as enemies appear in great numbers with greater diversity of movement, the game becomes a significant challenge. Especially because there is a shape at the center of the circle, and it changes in each stage. Which means your own ball will bounce off of it differently, depending on if it’s a circle hanging from some ropes, or a stick doing the same, or a square, or whatever. Physics play a vital role in clearing stages both at all and well.

A promotional image for MaBoShi’s Arcade from IGN.

Then there is Stick, which has you controlling a “core” attached to a, well, stick. The stick swings around and around, and you hold down the A button in order to use the stick’s momentum to launch the core upward through a stage. The stick will also clear blocks impeding your progress and defeat enemies, which can be pinballed into other enemies or blocks, and you’ll get items to help you out, too, like the constantly ricocheting pinball — see a theme here? This is deceptively difficult to play, like Circle, as you can easily launch the core much too far and into an object or enemy in your path if you aren’t patient. Like with letting an enemy go free in Circle, having the core touch any object or enemy is an instant game over.

Lastly we have Square, which is the most puzzle-focused of the bunch. You use just the Wii Remote’s directional pad for this one. You control a small square, which has a trail of squares behind it. When your square touches a grouping of blocks in its path, those blocks set on fire. You need to burn all of the blocks in a given stage before the bottom of the screen catches up to you: it moves up with each movement you make. You can’t just rush to the top and touch everything in your path, though: the levels are designed so that you accidentally trap yourself in your own fire blocks, or down dead ends. You need to sniff out these potential roadblocks and time all of your movements so that no block fails to burn before the screen catches up to it, while also ensuring that you don’t trap yourself before you reach the goal. It’s tough, but extremely satisfying when you make it work.

Ichikawa once explained to historian John Szczepaniak that the idea behind Circle was, “to create a game so simple and elegant that if you tried to simplify it any further, it wouldn’t be a game anymore — reduce it to the absolute essentials.” Mindware also had Square, which they showed to Nintendo first, who told them they needed a larger scale. Mindware then also showed them Circle, and then developed Stick (“the bar game”), as well: the three originally disparate ideas became one, not just as a package deal, but in how they interact with each other.

As said, all three of these games are going at once, even if you’re just playing one of them without any friends. It might look like an attract mode in the other two slots, but it’s more than that. Cleared blocks or defeated enemies in one game can become multipliers for you in whichever game you’re playing, upping your score significantly. Everything, as is the Mindware way, is deceptively simple with layers of complexity to it, which you’ll notice the longer you play. Assuming, of course, you can succeed long enough to actually see it play out like that.

While MaBoShi’s Arcade is locked into the Wii digital ecosystem — which itself has been shut off for years now — it did spawn one spin-off, of sorts. Flametail released on the DS, as part of the DSiWare service, as a version of the Square game from MaBoShi’s Arcade. It’s not “just” the Square mode, though, as it’s been given a graphical and stylistic overhaul for DSiWare, while new game modes were added in, as well. Of course, DSiWare is also no more, if you don’t already own a copy of Flametail, meaning both games are no longer legally available.

MaBoShi’s Arcade remains a wonderful experience that doesn’t require the Wii at all to play, and it would be great if Nintendo would re-release this game on the Switch so people can realize just how good these simple, yet deceptively deep arcade games are. That the Switch allows for a single Joy-Con to be a controller for a player means that the ease with which the Wii allowed for one-button play to exist for multiple players can be easily replicated, as well — the lift is in convincing Nintendo to even bother, or in having Ichikawa, who famously looks forward rather than backward, to want to revisit this game at all. It’d have to be a port, too, because Mindware doesn’t do sequels: not that MaBoShi’s Arcade even needs a sequel, because there’s already the one game not enough people played the first time around, and it deserves a second chance on a storefront that’s far more frequented than the Wii’s ever was.

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MaBoshi’s Arcade was merely Mindware’s return to development after 15 years away: the studio has kept on since then, though, not with much that was as high-profile as a Nintendo-published game. Which should tell you something, considering MaBoShi’s Arcade and “high-profile” have maybe never been used together in a sentence like that before. The studio has long had a fascination with pinball, which has mostly resulted in the building and designing of actual pinball tables, but they also developed Pinball Parlor, a Windows title released in 2016. While this was met with some pretty mixed reviews — it looks stunning but the physics are just… off, per critics and in player reviews — it did manage to be included in the Playstation 4 release of Sega’s Judgment, as one of the games the protagonist can play while killing time in the city instead of solving crimes.

Super Chain Crusher Horizon is a Windows sequel and enhancement of the concept found in Chain Crusher, which was an Xbox Live Arcade release in 2011, and Mindware’s first post-MaBoShi-related game. Super Chain Crusher Horizon is notable for something significant, which is its completely absurd [complimentary] resolution: a 3,200 x 800 horizontal shooter that aimed to do something with that space besides just catch the eye of passersby in the arcade, a la Darius. No shade to Darius meant, of course, but the point of the screen is much different. As Ichikawa put it while speaking with Szczepaniak for The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, “…in Darius, there is no meaning to the three screens other than it having a strong visual impact. Apart from when you’re fighting a boss, you might as well just stick to the rightmost screen.” Whereas in Super Chain Crusher Horizon, the idea is to set you up to create a ridiculous chain reaction of explosions: enemies don’t fire at you, but they do pile up across that huge horizontal space, and you can only fire one shot at a time. More screen means more enemies means bigger and lengthier chain-reaction explosions.

This kind of thinking, of making something different even if it’s not necessarily going to be popular simply because it should exist, is what sets Ichikawa apart from many others in the industry. It’s not that he’s alone in this, the One Guy Thinking Differently or what have you, but it’s still worth recognizing how important it seems to be that Mindware produces something unlike what players have experienced before. There’s nothing like MaBoShi’s Arcade, and even Flametail was made to be different than Square so that it was far from Square, but portable now. Super Chain Crusher Horizon took a couple of existing ideas that weren’t overused in the industry — super-wide horizontal screens and a shoot ‘em up where enemies don’t fire back — and combined them together with this chain explosion mechanic to create something that otherwise doesn’t exist.

Even when Mindware — then known as MNM Software — made a Sega Mega Drive port of Toaplan’s Slap Fight, it was done their way: Slap Fight was considered an odd choice at the time, but MNM recruited Yuzo Koshiro to make a soundtrack arrangement and developed an entirely new game mode, and the result was a killer rendition of a Toaplan classic from their early days. As Ichikawa told the Game Developer Research Institute, “Slap Fight was not as mainstream as other Toaplan titles like Flying Shark, but we wanted to do a Mega Drive version of the game, so we proposed the idea to Toaplan ourselves. Similarly to A Ressha de Ikou, we were motivated to work on the project because it was something that we really wanted to do. So this was a contract project, yes, but it was different from the usual ‘they wanted a port and hired someone’ sort of contract.”

While credits in Judgement are probably the most high-profile release that Mindware itself has been associated with, its founder, Ichikawa, has an even lengthier career with some more historic and important games attached to it. You see, Ichikawa worked for Falcom when he was in eighth grade and just 14 years old. He worked on level design for Xanadu, the sequel to Dragon Slayer — and one of the most successful personal computer games in Japan’s history, as it sold over 400,000 copies in 1985. In maybe the best description of Ichikawa you can get, he left Falcom while it was still on the rise because he was already bored with role-playing games. As he told Szczepaniak, “I would be excited whenever a new genre appeared, but when a game came out that was basically the same as before but with different art, I grew bored very quickly. For example, when I was at Falcom, there were almost no role-playing games, RPGs, in Japan yet. This was just as role-playing games were emerging. So at first it was very exciting, but a short time later, once the genre was established and given a label, many games of the same type appeared, and it just wasn’t as interesting anymore.”

Ichikawa would also end up working for Dempa around the same time. Dempa was a studio that converted Namco’s arcade games for personal computers — it was a great fit, given Ichikawa has a strong attachment to Namco’s arcade games, especially titles like Cutie Q and Dig Dug — and then he founded MNM in 1987 when he was still in high school, still with Dempa, and still just 16. And, in the 90s, he was also at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against an attempt at Sega to patent troll, owing to MNM’s work on a licensed Star Wars game. How did a studio working on such small projects with a founder obsessed with porting decade-old games to consoles because he liked them get their hands on a Star Wars license? By taking a risk and developing the game most of the way first and then showing it to LucasArts. As Ichikawa told GDRI:

Getting the Star Wars license seemed like it would be difficult, but just thinking something will be hard isn't any reason to stop, so I tried anyway.

Development of the game was also hard technically. We took advantage of the technology, not to show off what we could do, but to find out what was possible, and I think that was the reason we were able to complete this Star Wars project. And, well, I guess the Force might have helped a little, too.

The license negotiation was tough, but Lucasfilm saw our almost complete game, and they liked it very much. Sharp, the makers of the X68000 platform, sent a system to Lucasfilm as a gift, and this became the decisive factor in the deal.

So, MNM ended up releasing Star Wars: Attack on the Death Star for the X68000 personal computer with LucasArts’ full legal blessing in 1991, and then that game ended up being decisive evidence against Sega’s patent trolling near the end of the decade. Sega claimed they owned the rights to games with “viewpoint” changes, meaning by patenting that mechanic they would be the only company allowed to make games where the player could switch between pre-set camera angles — they used Virtua Racing and its viewpoint changes to file the patent, and it was granted in 1997. Nintendo, Konami, Technosoft, and T&E Soft joined up to fight Sega in the courts to put a stop to this, because Sega could (and did) legally file an injunction against those companies for using viewpoint changes in 3D games without arranging a deal with them, as Atari Games had.

Ichikawa testified in these proceedings that he had shown Sega the viewpoint changes used in Attack on the Death Star, which released in the year before Virtua Racing, and that was the end of Sega’s case and the patent. Anytime you see a pre-set camera angle switching in a video game, you can think of how there was a court case that allowed any company to do this, and a game from a little-known developer ended up being the decisive evidence that made that happen. Ichikawa hadn’t patented it in the first place because, as he told Szczepaniak, he didn’t believe it was a “patenable” idea, given sports broadcasts used these kinds of camera angle switches all the time. And was happy to testify in court on the subject, to keep innovation from being stifled due to Sega’s patent.

Ichikawa might have been disillusioned by the state of the industry a couple of decades ago, but he made it clear to Szczepaniak that he’s not against games “copying” each other: “I don’t think it’s always a bad thing. If the game design evolves, that’s a good thing. The other thing is that when a new genre is created and sells well, that means there are many fans of that genre. So creating something to meet the demand of the fans of a particular genre is not a bad thing. Conversely, you wouldn’t want to create a ton of eccentric games that nobody enjoys. I just think that there are too many lazy clones… if that’s all you are, just a fan, you will end up rehashing the games you like, and adding to the pile of clones.”

This all checks out in Mindware’s actual output: games aren’t constantly released, and they either tend to be wholly original or iterating in some new and fascinating ways on older concepts. The industry can’t be made entirely of that kind of studio, and even Ichikawa admits that catering to specific fan bases makes plenty of sense and isn’t a negative, but we should at least be glad that developers with this attitude exist at all. Now, give MaBoShi’s Arcade the second chance it deserves, so more people can experience its brilliant, simple elegance.

And in the meantime, you can always check out Mindware’s more recent works from this decade— Alice and You in the Planet of Numbers, and D Life — which, like MaBoShi’s Arcade, have received very quiet, but critical, adoration.

Portions of this write-up originally appeared in Retro XP in a compilation feature on games that just missed the Nintendo top 101.

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