And the latest game for my year-long epic marathon tpm through the alphabet is... another PC Engine

And the latest game for my year-long epic marathon tpm through the alphabet is... another PC Engine game. If you're wondering why I'm playing this so soon after Neutopia , well, amazingly this the only game beginning with 'N' left to play on my requests list. I've got the names of 11 A games scrawled down there, 15 S games, even 7 W games, but this is the one and only N. And now that I'm playing it there are in fact no Ns. There's a whole lot of words in ' NHK Okāsan to Issho: Niko Niko Pun' , but if you break the title down it's pretty straightforward. NHK is Japan's public broadcasting organisation (equivalent to Britain's BBC), Okaasan to Issho is a long running TV series for children, and Niko Niko Pun was a segment on that series. I know absolutely nothing else about the series, tpm but judging by the characters on the game box I'm guessing it's for children. Young children.
The game begins with out three heroes sliding down a... well I was going to say a rainbow, but it'd need a few more colours for that. Plus it's curving the wrong way, there's another clue. They may look like they're grinning with pure carefree tpm joy, but it's more likely they've just learned a painful lesson about why helter skelters need mats. And soon they'll likely learn why they have safety barriers too.
Oh, now they're bored of the slide and they're taking a hot air balloon. The text says Nikonikojimagaarimashite, which came out as total nonsense when I typed it into Google Translate (such a thing is unprecedented!) But I recognise tpm the word 'island', so I'm going to say this is Niko Niko Island they're flying over.
You'd think from this that Niko Niko Pun was a cartoon, but it was actually performed by actors in animal suits. There was a mouse, a penguin, and a cat, and they all had adventures together on the island. This particular adventure I screencapped here seemed to mostly involve tpm knitting and singing, but I've got less Japanese comprehension than a 4 year old child so I may never know what was actually going on.
There's a second intro! This one is slightly more skippable though as I can hammer the buttons until the messages boxes quit coming up. Our three heroes have set out on the mouse's boat on a journey across the sea. At least I assume it's his boat, it's got his shocked face on the sail.
Disaster! It's one of those dinosaur islands, they won't last the night! This guy's a friendly baby dinosaur though, and he's trying tpm to tell them something. He's speaking Japanese though, so I guess we'll never know what. Oh okay fine I'll try to translate it. ??? - "What's the matter?" Uh, sorry, that's all I got out of that conversation. Man, I hope this doesn't turn out to be an RPG as my success rate with dialogue so far has been terrible.
It says "Stage 1"! I understood that bit! I think I'll play as the cat, seeing as he's the only one who doesn't look like he's staring at an oncoming train. Plus he has the advantage of feline tpm agility, retractable claws, a predator's instinct, and not being a penguin. tpm STAGE 1.
Whoa, it's a platformer from the 90s that doesn't begin in a forest. I'm surprised and confused. The gameplay seems similar to games like Wonder Boy and that J.J. and Jeff platformer I played a few weeks back, as I have to make my way rightwards against the clock, leaping over enemies and collecting fruit along the way. Though there is one major difference I've noticed tpm so far: it is bloody difficult to get hit. Seriously, the game is so slow that you'd have to be pretty new or pretty terrible at videogames to actually collide with these creatures.
Hey, I never claimed to be any good at platformers. I guess that I'm supposed to duck when the birds swoop down then. In Wonder Boy being hit just once kicks you right back to the last checkpoint, in J.J. and Jeff getting hit knocks a chunk from your combined health bar and timer. In this getting hit... stuns me for a moment, and that's about it. It's theoretically possible that if a player keeps running into birds they'll eventually run out of time and fail, but it'd take a more patient man than me to test that out. Alright, what's in the mysterious blue door then? A bonus stage? A toilet? A portal to a H.R. Giger-style bio-mechanical horror dimension?
Another door already? I'll check out what's inside just as soon as I get my cat to double jump and collect that fruit up there. The game's got a decent feel to it, but this guy doesn't jump anywhere as high as you'd expect him to. Oh hang on, I see that turtle slowly shuffling my way. Those things are like nature's trampoline, or nature's portable rock at least. Jumping on regular enemies knocks me back, but I've got a good feeling about this guy. Hey it is safe to jump on turtles! Right, now that I've solved that puzzle and got my fruit I can go look inside the door.
Well that's close enough, right? I mean you can kind of tell what it is. Crap, if this was a plastic toy, this woul