After spending far too long grinding in Kowloon City, Taro is once again flush with cash, and we're ready to start modifying Brap Brap further.

But before we get into Group B and advance the story further, I figure we should try and pick back up on that whole 'dating' thread again that we dropped off from - just in-case we miss anything.

Now, last we left the Incest Twins, we discovered that Koichi (the guy) was making a bunch of suspicious extra money ‘working’ in the mahjong parlour, and when investigating, we discovered he is really into Taro’s sister. We then brokered a deal to exchange our sister for his sister.

…Or, something like that… this is all rather hard to follow.

Let’s go visit them at their house!





: Welcome


: Hikaru isn't here today


: is that so






(The game didn’t actually use this portrait, but I felt it appropriate)

Also Hikaru must be another name for Koichi. I can't keep up with these two and their names.


: (I didn't come here to see him or anything...)


: That’s right. Do you like games?


: Well, yeah.


: There's a fun game. Shall we do it?



Ooh, what is this girl up to? Let's do it!


: Yes, that's fine.


: (Lucky me!)



Oh ho ho. I think it’s finally time Taro… Your patience has worked….


: Well, it's a game called Tank Battle.


: Anyway, we’re shoot each other with tanks. If you defeat your opponent, you win


: Oh, it's a simple game



I think Taro was expecting to be shooting something else...


: But there are various power-up items, and you fight while picking them up, so it's pretty difficult.


: A detailed explanation follows the game title. It will be published, so please read it.


: Let's get started!


: You are on the left, that's good.



We cut to a videogame, in which we see two tanks travel down a war torn city on either side of the screen.





The title is revealed - Tank Battle!





We then get this menu screen, with two options, Start and Exit.

The game implies it is two player, which, presumably Katashina is the second player.





Here's a video of me playing, (and losing) at it:





The aim of the game, obviously is to defeat the other player.

You can move laterally up and down the playfield and can control the turret in three directions.

Each time you fire, there is a long cool down time until you can fire again.

Various items appear in the middle of the screen, in the form of letters and symbols. Some give you health, others greater speed, some give you additional bullets and others turn your little dinky tank into a big monster tank.

Problem with this game is, that Katashina is really good at it. I don't stand a chance, so I gave up.


: What’s wrong? Are you quitting? Yes / No



Yes. We don’t stand a chance.


: Well, come visit us again! Good bye



Well. It seems Katarina isn’t really interested in Taro the way we thought she was.

I guess she’s got the company of her brother... She just wanted someone else to defeat at Tank Battle.

I was curious to know what happens when we win, or if we could trigger something through winning multiple times, so I had to stick with it for a bit.

After a good while of losing every single time, it dawned on me to use some clever strategies.

And that strategy, basically was “cheat”.

So using the emulator, I slowed down the game to about 10x slower than natural, and continually abused the save / load state system. This made it much easier to focus on getting all the power-ups before she did - which in turn made it much easier to dodge her bullets land hits.

This took a really, really long time. Not just because of the slow motion, but because I had to prevent her from healing herself all the time!





Eventually I won!





But winning wasn’t enough. I had to defeat her 5 times to get a different result.





: You’ve gotten stronger.


: It’d be boring if you were with me


: No, that's not true.


: Yes? You're so kind.



Ooh, is this a Zero4Champ 1 and 2 esque escalation? Are we going to get to XXXX!


: Well, I'll give you this software. Go play with your friends.





: No, my sister and I…


: Hehehe, what are you talking about? Bring it when you want to do it with me. You should come here.



I think she’s saying we can have the game, and if we want to play it with her, we can bring it with us.

Nothing funny going on here…


: Oh, I see.


: Well, come visit us again. Good bye.



Well, that’s the end of that. We can return, and Taro will bring the game and it will continue as normal, playing against her.

But if we go home and use the Super Famicom, we now get the option to play Tank Battle in addition to Cockroach Panic…





This time Tank Battle has new options. ‘VS MAN’ and VS COM.





VS MAN will allow you to plug in a second Super Famicom controller and actually play two player for real. Vs COM just works the same as when we play against Katashina.

I wonder how many players ever unlocked this, given how hard it was to get this far… and that was with cheating!