Philips, Ports, and Porter (Late 1991 Part 3)
[We’re in a dimly lit hotel room when a tentacle inputs a phone number and grasps the phone. It then cuts to a woman working at the hotel’s reception desk, who picks up the phone.]
Woman: “Hello, what can I do for you?”
[Cut back to hotel room.]
Monster, in a seductive female voice: “Yes, room service? I’d like to order today’s special. Bring it to room 114, and make sure to send your CUTEST bellboy!”
Receptionist: “Alright, I’ll send it right away!”
[She then hangs up the phone, and we cut to a nervous bellboy who’s pushing a cart with food on it. He gets to room 114, and knocks on the door.]
Monster, from inside: “Ooh, yes, finally! I’m quite famished…” [She then opens the door, revealing her to be an octopus-like creature.] “...and you look like the perfect snack!” [The monster licks her lips.]
Bellboy: “AAAAAAAAH!” [As he screams, the camera zooms in on the bellboy from the top.]
Narrator: In this hotel, the clientele is anything BUT normal.
[The monster is now on her bed, and is seen burping up the bellboy’s hat, having eaten him.]
Narrator: Hotel Fever. Only for Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
[A variant of the Philips Interactive Media logo jingle plays, where instead of a CD it’s a cartridge being inserted on top of a box. This would be used for all of Philips’s base SNES releases, and the OTL 1991-95 logo would be used for SNES-CD releases.] - a TV commercial for Hotel Fever.
All About Hotel Fever
Platform: SNES
Developer: Philips Interactive Media
Publisher: Philips Interactive Media
Released: November 8th, 1991 (NA); April 11th, 1992 (EU)
Hotel Fever is an arcadey puzzle game developed by Philips Interactive Media, and TTL’s equivalent to
Hotel Mario. As a cartridge title, it doesn’t feature any of the FMV animated cutscenes or voice acting from the OTL game. Conceptualized by Stephen Radosh, the game was originally pitched to Shigeru Miyamoto as a Mario title once
Super Mario World wrapped up development. However, Miyamoto believed that Radosh’s idea would work better as its own thing, and so the Mario elements were dropped. You play as Porter, an anxiety-ridden bellboy who signs up for a job at the Münster Hotel, not knowing that it’s really the
Monster Hotel and that its patrons are out to get him. In two-player mode, player 1 wears red, while player 2 wears blue. There is a “story mode” like in
Hotel Mario, but there’s also an endless mode with randomized level layouts. The removed Mario connection also affected the gameplay: Porter can’t jump on enemies in
Hotel Fever, but he does have a melee attack, so he isn’t completely defenseless[1].
The main gameplay loop is the same as in
Hotel Mario; players must close all of the doors in a level, while enemies are coming out of open doors and reopening closed ones. However, thanks to the SNES’s superior hardware compared to the CD-i, additional complexity was added to the game that had to be left out in OTL. Every 5 levels in endless mode, you get to play a bonus round where you must grab 10 coins strewn about the stage while under a time limit (similar to the bonus rounds from
Mario Bros.). The gameplay is faster, and some levels have luggage carts that Porter can ride on to barrel through enemies and reach the other side of a floor quickly. Water spills are slippery not just to Porter, but also the monsters in the game. A fuzzy, electrified creature will head straight for elevators and cause one of them to go temporarily out of order, preventing Porter and other enemies from reaching certain floors for a short period of time. Stairwells have been added, which can’t go out of order like elevators, but they can only take up/down a floor at the same horizontal position (elevators can take you basically anywhere.)
Hotel Fever is Philips’s big holiday 1991 release, and has a much better reception than our timeline’s
Hotel Mario. Reviewers enjoy the hectic gameplay and high replayability thanks to the endless mode, but there are some complaints about the difficulty in later stages, as sometimes the random layouts can be quite brutal. Overall, it received high 8’s from critics, and is a big success for Philips, selling over 2 million copies across the SNES’s lifespan. It does the best in Europe, where it was a launch title for the system. In the modern day, it’s remembered both for its addictive gameplay and goofy atmosphere. A sequel for the SNES-CD would be released in 1993.
All About Dark Castle
Platform: SNES
Developer: Silicon Beach Software, Inc.
Publisher: Philips Interactive Media
Released: October 18th, 1991 (NA)
Dark Castle is a port of the Macintosh adventure game to the SNES. The controls are nowhere near as bad as the OTL CD-i port’s, thanks to the SNES controller having more buttons and being made more intuitive (throwing the rock, for example, simply requires you to hold the D-pad in the direction you want to throw it.) There’s proper music, and it isn’t just a looping section of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor like in EA’s Genesis/Mega Drive port. It does still suffer from dropping the player into the game without any instructions on what to do, so while there are some flaws, it’s a FAR better port than what was available on the Genesis at the time.
All About Defender of the Crown
Platform: SNES
Developer: Master Designer Software, Inc.
Publisher: Philips Interactive Media
Released: December 13th, 1991 (NA)
Defender of the Crown is a port of the Amiga strategy game to SNES. As a cartridge title, it doesn’t have any of the voice acting from OTL’s CD-i port. However, out of all the ports of
Defender of the Crown available for home consoles and computers at the time, the SNES version is the most accurate to the original Amiga release, being able to replicate the Amiga version’s graphics almost perfectly. It even outshines the original in the audio department thanks to the SNES’s superior sound chip compared to the Amiga.
Defender of the Crown did a great job showing just how capable the SNES really was, performing at the same level or sometimes even better than some home computers of the time.
~~~
The success of
Earthbound upon its Western release caused Nintendo to pause and do a double take about what games they did - or didn’t - bring stateside. By all accounts, they thought
Mother would’ve bombed in North America and Europe, but Philips was able to show them that with clever marketing, RPGs could succeed in the West. Perhaps there were other games in their backlog that they could bring over and have a successful release after all. Philips was also interested in bringing over some of Nintendo’s Japanese-only releases, as it would give them more experience with game development.
Stephen Radosh began looking through Nintendo’s library of games to see what could work best. The first one that caught his eye was a little game from 1984 called
Devil World. It had actually seen a European release in 1987, but never a North American one. It was a maze game, kinda like
Pac-Man, and was designed by Nintendo all-stars Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. But as you might expect from a game named
Devil World, there’s a lot of religious imagery in the game, something that Nintendo of America wanted no part of at the time. So that one was a no-go.
The next game that really piqued his interest, however, was one entitled
Nazo no Murasame Jō; translated into English, it means “The Mysterious Murasame Castle.” Released in 1986 for the Famicom Disk System and developed by the same team who made The Legend of Zelda, you play as Takamaru, a samurai who must defeat the villainous Murasame, who has taken over the four neighboring castles while remaining at his own. The game played like a more linear version of Zelda, with plenty of secrets that lead to dead ends as you made your approach towards the castles or inside of them. There’s even a score display! But
Murasame was also hard - damn hard, but the save feature and unlimited continues made it more forgiving.
Nintendo had originally decided against releasing the game internationally due to it being “too Japanese,” but since 1986, ninjas and samurai had seen a massive rise in popularity outside of Japan thanks to the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and, once 1993 rolled around,
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.) Surely the game could work well overseas now, right? However, by this point in time, the NES/Famicom was starting to begin its decline, and Philips wanted to focus their efforts solely on the SNES(-CD), so localizing a 6 year-old NES game was out of the question. Instead, it would be better if they made a part-remake, part-sequel to the FDS game for the Super Nintendo[2]; that way, they could introduce the franchise to international players, while also giving Japanese fans something new to play.
And so, development began on
Return to Murasame Castle, released internationally as simply
The Mysterious Murasame Castle.
Footnotes:
[1] Matter of fact, in OTL, Hotel Mario didn’t even have any jumping at first. However, the daughter of a developer, named Hollie, was playtesting Hotel Mario and thought it was weird how you couldn’t jump in a Mario game. Her contribution led to her getting a spot in the credits as “Play Consultant,” and an easter egg: with the CD-i’s clock set to February 17th, the “HERE WE GO” message displayed when starting a level will be replaced with “ITS HOLLIES BIRTHDAY”.
[2] Basically, they take the Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem approach, where the first half is the original game and the second half is a brand-new story taking place after it.
Next time, we've got a fantasy game double-feature, as we'll take a look at both Final Fantasy IV and A Link to the Past. Until then!