TeddyBoy Blues (1985)

Name:TeddyBoy Blues
Number:177
Year:1985
Publisher:SEGA
Developer:SEGA
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:50 minutes
Won:Not possible

Games related to real music are always weird. Most of the time it seems like it's not so much that people license the music for a genuine idea as much as licensing it to sucker in fans. Especially in the action sphere. It's always either some super popular band/artist everyone knows or some literal flash in the pan nobody would remember a year after the game was released. To say nothing of how every one of these games feel like some bizarre fever dream. This isn't limited to old games either, modern phone games are just as liable to be a series of bizarre situations as ye olde console/computer games.

TeddyBoy Blues is nominally related to singer/actress Yoko Ishino. (translated as Yohko Ishino on the title because that was how they did it then) Singing the song Teddyboy Blues, of which the game takes it's title from, is how she got her start, before becoming an actress and "media personality", which I presume is code for famous person who appears on shows because they need a famous person but also want to not spend too much money. Of interest outside of Japan, she holds the dubious fame of being in Godzilla vs Destoroyah.

Why do I say her music career is only how she got her start? Well, based on my knowledge of the Japanese music industry, if you aren't selling a ton of CD/vinyl albums, you're a failure, and she only has two albums. Even today in Japan, heck, even today in the world where streaming is king, a lot of these so-called famous musicians seem to make Yoko Ishino look like Davie Bowie.

Her backup band consists of most monsters in the game.

The game's attract mode has a pixel version of Ishino playing an instrumental 8-bit cover. This also plays throughout the game, I think. It's awful. No getting around it. The actual song is no real prize either, but there's actually something to it, the game's music is just all noise. I'm sure with someone else as a singer the real song could be something really nice, but Ishino just feels bland as a singer. We also get some of the monsters as musicians...for some reason? And get a good look at her now, because this is the best she's ever going to look in this game.

The ice blocks here don't make you slide, rather, you can shoot them to destroy them.

Now, what I can say about the game itself is...it's a side-scrolling shooter. You shoot, you jump, and you move left and right. No aiming beyond left/right, no crouching, no double jump. Your firing rate is only tied into how many times you press the fire button. Almost everything dies in one hit. The game does nothing really, to distinguish itself here.

It's kind of hard to get a good screenshot of this in action, so here are the jelly enemies.

There are basically two gimmicks in this game, the only thing that really makes it unique from what would be an otherwise wholly unremarkable game. Firstly, the way the monsters spawn and how you deal with them. At the beginning of each stage, there are these dice, which, over a period of time, depending on the stage, spawn monsters. Once you defeat them, they turn into a baby form of themselves and you have to grab them before a set period of time or they drain your time meter. Once they're babies, they're out of the game as far as fighting you goes.

Secondly, the levels loop. Not like in a lot of games where there's a lot of real estate before that happens. No, on a lot of stages you don't even get a complete screen. You could call this game Claustrophobia and it wouldn't be inaccurate. This basically feels like the real appeal of the game. It's not unusual for a game to loop around, but it doesn't happen as often in side-scrollers and never in all four directions. It's very disorienting and if you're not careful, you can find yourself just completely lost despite the practical area of the game being really small. Remember, everything can fall in an endless loop.

There might just be all the enemies in the game here, but good luck getting there.

Now, you're not given free reign to deal with this as you please. No, you have a time limit. It's generous enough for most stages, but if you aren't quick on capturing the baby enemies you can run out. Then if you camp somewhere, the game shoots a fireball at where you're standing. This doesn't hurt you, but does destroy the floor beneath you. Or the air beneath you if you keep jumping onto something. This isn't uniformly bad, you can exploit this to take out a floor which is going to inconvenience you or is getting in your way.

The enemies I fought in the game, which I suspect consist of most enemies most players will see, are as follows:

• Blue Ninjas, they walk in one direction, jumping whenever the situation calls for it. As such, they're the most basic enemy to deal with in this game.
• Bouncing Worms, a series of individual segments that bounce around. Depending on where you shoot it, it make break apart into two worms. They don't often bounce enough to get over walls, so if they're in a tight spot with no way to enter it can be tricky dealing with them.
• Bouncing Men, like the worms, except they're either weird men or crickets. They have a higher jump, but mostly the strategy is the same. They usually don't get stuck like the worms though.
• Black Teddy Bears, these guys jump around quite aggressively. They can take you quite by surprise if you aren't expecting them.
• Worms, they crawl along the walls until they get over you, and then drop straight down. Their AI is intentionally a little stupid, so they don't check if there's another floor between you and them.
• Snails, like the worms, they crawl along the walls, but unlike the worms, they more or less just crawl everywhere. Even against the backdrop. These guys are really annoying, because if you hit their shell, as in their flesh part isn't facing you, they just retreat into their shell and become invincible for a certain period of time after you stop shooting.
• Jellies, these guys are the only enemies, that I encountered, that take more than one shot to kill. They move around slowly, jumping over obstacles, and only stopping whenever you shoot them. They're pretty annoying to beat.
  

This is the kind of image you would get if someone was holding a gun off-screen.

The game occasionally offers one of two mini-games, chosen the first time it's available. A shooting gallery, and a treasure hunt where you play as Ishino. The treasure hunt is the better of the two, if only because I feel incredibly bored by most virtual shooting galleries. First, you get an image of Ishino that, were I her, I would sue the hell out of Sega for.

And she doesn't look much better whenever you don't find something...

Then you have a small period of time to find 42 treasures. The total is just something you find over the course of each time you enter the mini-game, with each further time having a shorter period you can check for items. Basically, you need to approach certain edges of each object in order to get treasure. Some objects have multiple treasures, others might have none. I didn't get all the treasures so I probably missed something. I feel like the game just doesn't give you any time on later returns, which is just one of those many ways the game seems to encourage the player not to play the game.

Yes, this is the first thing any player will see on this stage.

Now, that's a weird thing to say, you might be asking. Well, the game really wants to screw you out of your lives. This is the first arcade game that pulled the cheap gotcha of having an enemy spawn when you start. In an arcade game, I feel less like that's a cheap move and more an outright greedy move. You barely get any lives in this game to start with, and you get no continues. I know that you get more lives, but even for an arcade game it's tight with them. And this game knows how to abuse its systems to get those lives.

Weapons:
A basic weapon, you don't even get an autofire button. 1/10

Enemies:
It tries to do something clever, but with the constraints placed on the game itself, the enemies don't really excite too much. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
While erring too much on the difficult side of things, the unique gimmick does create a very interesting series of levels. 3/10

Player Agency:
It's a very basic side-scrolling shooter. 4/10

Interactivity:
You can shoot some walls, and the game can occasionally destroy other, otherwise invulnerable walls at it's desire. 3/10

Atmosphere:
Whether or not the developers intended to make something that plays like a cutesy nightmare, they succeeded, perhaps too well. 3/10

Graphics:
It's okay, nothing special. 2/10

Story:
Apparently the story is that you and Yoshino are lost in some nightmare labyrinth and have to get out. In game there is nothing. 0/10

Sound/Music:
I feel like if I just randomly played this then found out that the music was licensed, I would be surprised. It's all just noise after a while. 1/10

I'm going to take away a point because the game just got boring after a while, so that's 19.

Not really a lot to say about it. Beyond the novelty of the music connection and the weirdness of the looping mechanics, it's kind of a boring game.

Big news, I'm finally done with 1983, I couldn't get the game I designated the last game of the year running. It was a game I thought was going to be fun, but nevertheless I'm not unhappy that I'm done with the year. Expect to see that summary, a maximum of one game in the future.