Game Journal: Pirate Ship Higemaru (3 Loop Clear)

I cleared 3 loops of Pirate Ship Higemaru, a 1984 maze game from Capcom.

Pirate Ship Higemaru is similar to the 1982 arcade game Pengo and other block-pushing action games, except you can pick up the blocks (barrels) and carry them around. This one change brings it much closer to a standard action game, with much more of a loose freeform feel than its predecessors.

It's easily one of my favourite games I have played this year. I love the feeling of dodging enemies and quickly throwing barrels at them under pressure, and I love how any hiding spot that you find will eventually be dismantled as you grab more and more nearby barrels to throw at enemies. At its best you have to carefully plan out which enemies to attack, where to move next and how to find opportunities to grab an enemy's barrel after stunning them, all while hitting frame-perfect barrel grabs with no input buffer:

Unfortunately the game has its fair share of problems, the first of which is its movement controls. It locks your movement to the grid lines, much like Bomberman, Tank Force, Ys 1 and The Legend of Zelda 1. But unlike those games, if you try to turn 90 degrees and your character isn't perfectly lined up with a grid cell, it won't force you to line up with the closest grid cell. Instead, it always forces you to walk forwards until you reach the next grid cell. So if you're a pixel or two off from standing on a grid line, your character often won't turn the way you're expecting them to. In the image below for example, holding right would make the player walk along the green (upper) arrow because they're facing upwards, even though they're only a couple of pixels above the magenta (lower) grid line.

You can somewhat get used to this by inputting every turn early like you're playing Pac-Man, but it's still much more fiddly than it needed to be.

The game's difficulty doesn't really increase past the first loop either, so once you've gotten used to the controls and gotten a feel for the game you can just kinda marathon it until you slowly lose your stock of extra lives.

Its powerups also make you invincible for twenty real life seconds for some reason, so whenever you get one you're handed so much free invincibility that it turns the rest of the stage into filler. These powerups also usually appear right as you're about to have to deal with the consequences of clearing out a bunch of barrels. Twelve thousand iframes...

The unbreakable coins/pots/oildrums/bags seemed to be very strong too. It's surprisingly easy to wedge yourself in a short corridor and repeatedly throw one back and forth to clear out any approaching enemies, undermining the game's usual risk and reward.

All of this annoyed me enough that I tried doing a challenge run were I intentionally avoided powerups, used as few unbreakable objects as I could, and tried to grab all of the flashing barrels:

This was a lot of fun! It didn't magically turn Pirate Ship Higemaru into the best game ever, and I would still prefer it if the enemies were a bit more proactive about shutting down your ability to hide in a corridor, but it helped me understand just how solid the basic game systems are. I hope someone makes a game that iterates on these systems one day! Maybe that someone should be me.

Despite all my gripes, Pirate Ship Higemaru's game system feels so good that I can't stay mad at it. I really do have such a soft spot for it. If you can get over the strange corner-turning controls, I highly recommend giving it a shot!