Handkerchief doesn't exactly fit in with my 'games from a top 10 list' theme I've been going with this year, as it's so obscure that even the people making 'Top 10 Most Obscure PC Games' lists apparently haven't heard about it. But whenever mecha-neko plays a game I get a week off, so I'm giving the theme a week off as well.
| Developer: | Opus Corp. | | | Release Date: | 22nd September 2000 (Full game) | | | Systems: | Windows |
Hello everyone! It's my tenth anniversary of writing for Super Adventures! It seems like just yesterday that I was rummaging through mouldy disks and finding gems like David Wolf: Secret Agent, and doing foolish things like trying out sports games.
To mark the occasion, I'm playing a much-loved game from my secret past. It's one that doesn't appear on any Top Ten lists that I can find, sorry Ray. This is Handkerchief., a demo that I used to play endlessly back in 2000, over twenty years ago!
Let's go!
Our man is not going to take that lying down! He runs out of his house brandishing his Mauser and screeching at the top of his adorable gibberish voice. Video game tradition dictates that when an arrow pointing to the right saying "GO!" appears, you go. An awesome march-like blues theme begins and commences our quest for vengeance against the swine who blew up our house.
Seriously, this music is way cool. Listen on YouTube!
It leads here, to a suspicious dais offering a floating purple cap throbbing with energy.
Collecting the hat unleashes a miraculous, terrifying transformation! The screen is flooded with wild rainbow-cycling colours, a bicycle hooter squeaks triumphantly, and that desperate shell of a man is no more!
"Convert enemies to allies using turncoat bombs. Increase your power by collecting soldiers! Be warned that throwing turncoat bombs will use some of your spirit!!"
Purple is still armed with only his pistol, but these new clothes grant him the ability to convert his life-force into sinister mind control bombs, which instantly switch the allegiance of enemy troops and make them fight for him instead!
You best believe my new friends and I are going to shoot the heck out of that.
The enemy billboard erupts into flames, revealing a modestly heroic depiction of Butterfly's handsome visage. Under his commanding, 3D-rendered gaze, the very earth starts to reshape, causing a ramp to rise up to allow passage for him and his squad to the next area. Which was convenient.
It's a platform game. You're a soldier and you shoot guys. When you shoot 'em, they burst into flames and become a little skeleton with a halo and drop giant coins. It's good stuff.
The soldiers following Butterfly don't do anything except match his movements. Right now, they act as an extension of his health bar - any damage the squad receives gets psychically transmitted to the poor sod at the back of the queue. Butterfly's magic pistol imitates the weapon of the lead soldier and uses their ammo. You can't control the men independently or make squads like in Cannon Fodder, but you can rotate them in case one's about to die, or your lead man has run out of ammo.
I suppose Butterfly is a medium of sorts with his mind controlling spirit orbs, ghost handkerchief pals, and all that. These guys give you tutorial hints in big speech bubbles that get blown away by the wind, and act as temporary health bars before they too float away (screaming).
Right now this one's telling me it'd be a good idea to abstract that tank and go for a ride. Can't disagree. C'mon fellas, everybody in the tank!
We're still using the captured lead soldier's weapon in here, now firing a spread-shot based on the size of the squad; the tank's turret is just for show. It feels a bit unfair to plough through exposed soldiers like this until you remember you are fighting an entire army by yourself with tons of robots of their own. You can't make Butterfly run the enemies down with the tank's tracks, that would be a little too cruel.
Okay, I have to admit that Handkerchief isn't really all that flashy most of the time. It's not trying to blow your hair back with wacky cartoon antics and over-the-top animations the way Metal Slug does. Despite being about soldiers and tanks and running to the right, it's a completely different type of game. No time limit. No score. It's not an arcade game, and it's not trying to be. It's slow and it's comfy. You're assaulting territory, making places yours, and finding the best approach to hunting down enemy men at your own pace.
This thing doesn't give me much trouble since it can only shoot out of the elevated windows. I did have to retreat for a moment so we could all pile out, madly cycle to the Bomber soldier who still had some ammo left, and then hustle back for a second attempt.
There's a little intermission zone every so often full of vending machines to buy health and ammo powerups for your men. It's a bit like Halloween Harry, in that way. Unlike Harry, Butterfly has to dig deep and find over $1000 in loose change to use the Save Game phone booth to save between areas. Don't blow all your cash in one place!
I couldn't take the wheely robot from earlier with me since some fool put steps in my way, but the next area begins with something even better for Butterfly to take: a giant, goofy, sixties-themed robot I'm gonna call Mr. Legs. Mighty Mr. Legs takes ladders and jumps in his stride, so Gold Fish better watch his back. He's not an instant win button, though. Everything is still trying to kill you, although oddly the giant robot makes a smaller and more evasive target than Butterfly and his merry men weaving around the screen together.
Here up on a hill, I've found a helpful 'KeyMan' smiley face block who joined my team and asked me to return him to his bigger bro. When I did, the damn floor opened and dumped my squad into a trough of water surrounded by enemy men! The enemy weren't expecting the ground to suddenly open up like that either, so I managed to get out of there before they woke up or the water dissolved my squad. I think these men were supposed to join my team, but since I've reached the squad limit they ended up stunned like enemies now do when I hit them with a mind control ball.
I really don't want to get my awesome robot blown up, so when the bus starts shooting machineguns and bowling hard to hit goldfish rolling bombs at me, I run like hell.
Handkerchief looks lovely in motion. The trees and grass flutter in the wind, the sky background and smoke trails are blown about (the mind-control grenades too). I had to turn the sky off in the options and put it back in manually for these animations otherwise they'd be huge!
Oh! I know what Handkerchief reminds me of now! This whole thing reminds me of an episode of the TV show 'Trumpton' gone horribly wrong! It's got the low frame rate, the simple wooden toy soldier men, the simple flat countryside scenery - it's a stop-motion train set world run amok!
Let's have some more of that wanton destruction.
The stars are promotions for your men, increasing their maximum health and ammo. It's up to you how kindly you want to treat your squad - if you like, you can treat them as disposable extra health bars, knowing that there'll always be extra guys waiting for you to steal up ahead.
You can tell Butterfly is a man on the edge since his favourite food is pure sugar. (I can relate.) The vending machine at the top sells healthy balls of pure Glucose, which heal the Captain and his men and refill the Nurse's healing ability. Lucky we found this machinegun... machine... too really, since we're almost out of bullets.
Let's regroup!
You can't reorder the men or rebalance their ammo or promotions. You've got whoever you managed to capture and bring with you. Getting the right man out in front in the heat of battle takes some skill. Butterfly can only mind-control five troopers at once, but he can always make room for a Nurse, the no-good Lothario that he is.
All my men have turned red, meaning I've kept them alive long enough to fully promote them. Red soldiers have much more health and give Butterfly a more powerful version of their weapon when he imitates them in or out of a robot. They also fire in formation together when on foot.
Men! All of you, throw grenades everywhere! Everywheeeeere!
This boss music is seriously cool too! Listen on YouTube! It reminds me of the game Resonance of Fate.
Oh no! They set my poor chicken on fire!
It was a tough fight, just me and one soldier with ammo left, but since the screen wrapped around I could fire off a bunch of shots and dash out of the boss' range before his bullets could hurt us.
We got him. The enemy explodes into money, making this whole place now Butterfly's uncontested domain. A sound effect of children cheering plays. The Captain's squad heads towards a new secret exit that's opened underground...
I feel bad for the ten men I mind-controlled into my service with my forbidden hat-based powers and then led to an unfortunate death at the hands of their friends. All of this could have been avoided.
What could possibly go...
The guy just wants to sleep! He deliberately takes off his magic hat and hides it elsewhere each time he gets revenge so he can finally stop fighting! Why do you bastards keep dragging him into this!?
It seems like the man is destined to be fighting robot animals for eternity...
But he'll have to do it without me, since it's time for the
CONCLUSION
Handkerchief is gorgeous. It's a little drab, but it's gorgeous. It has a lovely design that feels very cozy. I'm nostalgic for the game, but I think the game is going for nostalgia as a theme, with the goofy retro robots, fun bluesy rock music and traditional wooden toy soldier men. I said it earlier, but the game really feels like a stop-motion movie come to life. The pre-rendered sprites all work together with the backgrounds, which is not something you can say about a lot of nineties games. It's stylish.
I'm glad the game doesn't make it explicit that it's about toys. That kind of context would've been pointless and annoying. As it is, Handkerchief is 'real' to the characters in the game; silly-real, if you like.
When I started played, the levels were so linear I worried that perhaps my happy memories of the game were flawed and the game was just coasting on its soundtrack (which it may well have been, it's awesome music). Like its chunky, basic men, Handkerchief's gameplay looks simple but is pretty sophisticated. It only has one difficulty level, but the game makes up for it with the freedom it gives the player in making forward progress. You can be as cautious or as crazy as you feel like: it all works.
You can try to keep a single squad alive through all the levels, taking care of their health and buying them ammo when they need it. You can treat your men as completely disposable and use your sinister powers to recruit new ones whenever your recklessness gets someone killed. You can try to make a squad that uses your favourite weapon exclusively, or just wing it with whoever you find. You can find secret robots in secret rooms, and there's a way to knock enemies out of their robots and tanks so you can steal them for yourself.
The only things you need to destroy to advance are billboards and castles. If you'd like to try to leave as many enemies alive as possible, go right ahead. There's even a way to work around the five soldier squad limit, if you feel the need to recruit every single soldier in the level into one ridiculous swooping conga line of destruction.
I also like things like promotions and pickups automatically passing down to any men who can use them instead of them being wasted when you're full. I've played other games with an upgradeable squad where it seemed like I spent most of my time in the pause menu trying to swap in my weaker characters for an instant to pick up upgrades.
Handkerchief is anything but easy though. If you make a mistake, everything goes downhill really fast. The game is very cruel with collision damage and there's no invulnerability. If you get Butterfly tangled up with enemy troops, your men will drop like dominoes. It's also infuriatingly possible to become separated from your men accidentally, with the game instantly killing them as a punishment if you get too far away rather than the game conveniently warping them to you as a concession.
The developer, Opus Corp., dates back to the PC Engine, where most of their credits are for sound effects and music composition work such as on Brain Lord, an action RPG for the SNES that Ray played in 2012. Almost all the Opus staff who worked on Handkerchief also worked on Surfing H3O, a PlayStation 2 sports sim released around the same time. I'd put money on Handkerchief starting life as a simple test game made by some of the staff to figure out Windows game development (or simply to blow off steam even) from early-1998 onwards, before being internally pitched to the big Opus boss who gave the green light to make it into a full release. That would just be a guess, though.
Kudos to them for making an early Windows game that doesn't have any weird transparency or palette problems or blow up if you look at it funny. Handkerchief is so simple it runs on anything capable of running Windows 98, yet so well-made it will hold up perfectly on any newer computer you'd like to try it on. It'll work with your modern computer's integrated sound and graphics and a USB gamepad just as well as on a thirty year old gameport Gravis plugged into an 8-bit ISA sound card. The controls are fully configurable, and you can even choose whether or not to have 'up' to jump! I took all these screenshots and gifs on a souped-up Windows 7 machine, no problems whatsoever. Fraps didn't even mind the game switching to a 256 colour paletted screen mode!
It's kind of a miracle that Handkerchief got translated and released outside of Japan at all. I first learned about the game from a PC Gamer coverdisk (June 2000 Issue 83), which is the exact demo I played here. The game was somewhat unfairly dismissively shoved in the Shareware section, despite being a real game with big full-page adverts in the magazines of the time. PC Gamer themselves barely noticed they'd put it on the disk - they didn't even bother to give Handkerchief the courtesy of a boxout listing the instructions (which is all Interpose got).
From what I can tell, it was an ex-Epyx, Accolade and Sega producer and entrepreneur named Christopher W. Bankston who made Handkerchief available worldwide. After leaving the Sega of America-owned studio he formed, Bankston created a sprawling octopus of companies importing anime, manga, soundtrack albums, pop music and games from Japan to America and Europe under a dozen names like Stealth Productions, Stealth Multimedia, Stealth Media Group, Symmetry Entertainment, JAMAN, FunXFun, Worldwide Media Sales Direct, XSIV Films and XSIV Games. This group (or perhaps it was just one company with a hundred faces?) had big but ultimately unrealised designs on promoting their own pop stars, producing their own films, developing their own games and licensing their own 3D engine, XSIV3D.
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XSIV Games are mostly known for slurping up the rights to Eclipse Software's Tyrian 2000 when Epic no-longer-MegaGames stopped being cool shareware dudes after making Unreal and became fantastically successful instead. At some point, Bankston's dealings in Japan must have led him to cross paths with Opus and/or the Japanese publisher Ask, where he picked up the rights for the Stealth Media Group to market Handkerchief outside of Japan. If you're reading Christopher, let us know the XSIV story!
Handkerchief may not have sold well, but the impact it had on nineties kids like myself who lived in a world of cover-mounted demo discs was universal. I've found Portuguese, Russian and Chinese abandonware blogs united in a shared nostalgia for Butterfly's crazy tale of soldiers and robots - 'Oh wow, it's that game!', 'I had that as a demo!', 'I loved that game, where can I get it??'.
Handkerchief was marketed as a budget game in both America and Japan, but it must've been available for only a millisecond since I've never ever seen a copy for sale, nor a photograph of a physical copy, anywhere. If somebody out there owns a legitimate copy of the full game of Handkerchief, American or Japanese release, I'd love to see it.
Speaking of, how do you market a cute, oddball Japanese toy soldier platform game to the US market?
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There's our hero: Jacob Streiker, Captain 'Butterfly'. (a.k.a. 'Kozō' before he receives the hat.) I feel like people who bought the box on the left might feel a little perplexed by the game they actually received...
And no, I don't know why American Butterfly isn't purple. It's his one characteristic and they messed it up! Sorry for the low resolution for Handkerchief's original cover, but it's the only image of it on the internet!
Opus Corp. are still around. On their website (which still has a section for Handkerchief), they've got a whole list of game credits up to the present day, including character animation work for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so bully for them. I sent Opus a message asking if Handkerchief was available for sale anywhere, and they replied no. They'd had some contact with GOG but without success, which is a real shame. I don't have any details, so it could be something about the game itself that GOG don't like, or possibly something like the rights to sell the game worldwide being up in the air after the disappearance of both XSIV and Ask around 2002.
If you'd like to see Handkerchief re-released, you'll need to contact GOG and Opus and make it happen!
Here's the demo: Handkerchief 'Limited Demo Version download', June 2000 - Offered as-is for preservation, no warranty, at your own risk, back up your stuff first, run a virus scan, etc. Runs on Windows 95 - Windows 7, possibly up to Windows 10. Right click on the .exe and set it to run as a Windows 95 program with 640x480 graphics and 256 colours. Right click during gameplay to get to the options menu. Have fun, and thank you for reading my posts!
He didn't think of thanking you in advance for leaving a comment though. If you've played Handkerchief in the past you could talk about your fuzzy recollections, or you could grab the demo and share some brand new opinions. And if you don't actually give a damn about Handkerchief you can still take a guess at what the next game is.
Ask me about LOOM™
ReplyDeleteYou nailed it.
DeleteI don't know if you're old enough to remember when BBC2 and Channel 4 would show these weird short cartoons from the other side of the Berlin Wall. They obviously managed to get them cheap and decided they would be perfect to fill the odd five minutes between programmes.
ReplyDeleteThe cartoons were odd because on a surface level they seemed to be like the stuff we'd be getting from the US, but there was something not quite right about them, and the end result was a general unsettled feeling.
I mention all of this because Handkerchief comes across like the same sort of thing, like a Soviet-bloc Button Moon, except it's a game.
Funny, I got a similar vibe. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the game would've been Eastern European in origin, so reading that it's a Japanese game actually came as a surprise.
DeleteEastern European was my guess as well, though I probably haven't seen any of these cartoons myself. Unless I have.
DeleteCartoons are just cartoons when you're really young I guess. It took me forever to realise that there was something different about the ones with the multi-coloured hair, weird dubbing and characters who went 'huh?' all the time.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteEvery fibre of my being wants to ask why it was called Handkerchief. It's an odd name. But the fact that you don't mention it makes me wonder if the reason is really obvious. Am I missing something obvious? Something to do with -chief? The man who imported it must have thought it made sense. They couldn't have called it Tissue, that would be silly.
DeleteAs the people above point out the game resembles a 1980s Czech / Brothers Quay animation about the dangers of European colonialism. Notice how the imperialist "hero" brainwashes the "enemy" and uses them as pawns in a futile game of military one-upmanship.
Also, and I wish there was an edit button, why Handkerchief.? With the full stop. Handkerchief.. Is it postmodernism? A subtle Pet Shop Boys reference? I've always associated that kind of typographical experimentation with the 1980s. Random bursts of italics. Lower case, like thirtysomething. But this came out in 2000.
Perhaps there is no reason.
I don't know if the folks in charge of marketing the game knew why it was called Handkerchief. either, but the adverts often say something like "How many will you kill before they raise the white handkerchief of surrender?"
DeleteThe name fascinates me as well, Ashley. It's definitely called Handkerchief. in Japan and I don't think Bankston/Stealth had anything to do with it as the name appears on the Opus website in June 1998, before any mention of association with SMG.
DeleteI think there's probably no secret meaning or origin to it, it's just how you'd expect - someone at Opus was familiar with the word, they passed it around amongst themselves and liked the sound and look of it, then they made the connection to Butterfly being a 'chief' himself and then they made the handkerchief tutorial ghosts and decided they looked cool too. It makes more sense than Brain Lord, at least. :)
The 'how many will you kill' banner Ray mentioned appeared as a vertical sidebar advert in the English language PC magazines of the time. I wonder if Handkerchief appeared in any Japanese PC magazines! I'm afraid I have no way to know myself.
Looking at that advert, and the box art, I can't help but wonder if the localisation artist mistook the little TM sign in the dog tag for a full stop, which is why it's rendered as Handkerchief. in the game.
DeleteThe last commenter was correct about the name; it was the Handkerchief of surrender.
ReplyDeleteWe closed the corporation for a very simple reason: it was a small, privately held corp with a few partners and we ended up not getting along at one point and just closed everything. It is really that simple. It was by no means little though, we had millions of $$$ invested and were actively selling products.
I'm very surprised to see that this is still an active topic after all of these years. I left the games industry around 20 years ago.
Kind regards,
Dr. Christopher W.Bankston
You learn something every day. This is what I like about Superadventuresingaming. It might not have as many readers as Kotaku, but the quality of the readers is much higher.
DeleteAnd the writing is good. But the quality of the readers is what matters and it is very high.
Absolutely, you're all awesome and your comments enhance any article they appear under.
Delete