Transformers: Mystery of Convoy
| This article is about the game of death and suffering. For other uses of "Mystery of Convoy", see Mystery of Convoy (disambiguation) |
 |
| |||||||||||||||
| |||||||
 Ignore the racist logo in the corner! | |||||||
戦え! 超ロボット生命体トランスフォーマー コンボイの謎
(Tatakae! Chō Robot Seimei Tai Transformer Convoy no Nazo) | |||||||
| Developer | ISCO | ||||||
| Publisher | Takara | ||||||
| Platform | Family Computer, Virtual Console | ||||||
| Release date | 5 December 1986 (Family Computer) 10 June 2008 (Virtual Console) | ||||||
| Rating | CERO: A | ||||||
Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: Mystery of Convoy — or, per the packaging's English-translated sub-title, Mystery of Comvoy,[1] and sometimes referred to by its Japanese subtitle Convoy no Nazo — is a video game developed by ISCO and distributed by Takara for the Nintendo Famicom. The player controls Ultra Magnus in the fight against the Decepticons, taking on the mantle of leading the Autobots after the death of Optimus Prime.
The game was followed by The Headmasters, an exclusive to the Famicom Disk System peripheral. It would be officially re-released in 2008 on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console service in Japan (costing 500 "Wii points", or five dollars in Human money), up until the service was sunset in 2019. A direct sequel (and simultaneous parody) of sorts would be released in 2014 with the Q-Transformers: Mystery of Convoy Returns mobile app.
It has since become a cult title for its infamously poor critical reception and, especially, for being frustratingly hard.
Plot
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a 1980s action game, Mystery of Convoy's story is pretty barebones: although it would receive a completely different — and, actually, outright contradictory — account of its events in a tie-in-manga (see below), the narrative as told only by the game itself and the short one-page prologue in its accompanying manual is fairly straightforward.
Mystery of Convoy is presumably set as an alternative account to the events of The Transformers: The Movie (which would not be released in Japan until 1989 — three years after the game's release — although its events were first summarized to Japanese audiences through TV Magazine), filling in the gaps between the the second and third seasons of the show, the latter which had just premiered in Japan as Transformers 2010. The story begins as Optimus Prime is gravely injured in battle and perishes, passing on the Matrix to Ultra Magnus, who carries on the fight against the Decepticons to reclaim peace on Earth. Along his quest, Ultra Magnus faces various threats including Seeker-type infantry, floating Decepticon insignias, the Nemesis, the combiners Menasor and Bruticus, Megatron, and a final battle against Trypticon. Later on, Rodimus Prime joins him in his quest and... does all the same things Magnus did, again.
Gameplay
As a licensed game released four years into the lifespan of the Famicom, Mystery of Convoy's gameplay is... let's politely call it unrefined.
The game is a simple 2D platformer with the player making their way through ten levels, while under constant attack from various enemies. Killing enemies earns the player points and occasionally various power-ups such as extra defense or temporary flight. At every 20,000 points, the player is awarded with an extra life. Many of the levels are simple horizontal fields where Magnus must go from left to right until the level stops scrolling, while the various "Time Tunnel" levels are vertical, one of which is a frustrating labyrinth where escape depends on a very specific route through the level or else it will loop back in upon itself. At the end of each level is a boss which must be repeatedly shot in a small glowing weak point to be defeated. In most cases, the boss simply floats up and down on the right side of the screen while randomly firing projectiles at the player, who must navigate floating platforms to reach said weak point.
Ultra Magnus fights with a rapid-fire horizontal shooty-gun, which he can improve by grabbing the "P" power-up from certain defeated enemies, which adds a second diagonal shot. He can also transform into truck mode, which makes him fire directly upwards (he retains the second diagonal shot if he has the power-up) and makes him harder to hit, but his ability to jump is replaced with a downward-arcing forward shot (severely reducing his shot range on flat surfaces) with a very low fire rate. Naturally, this makes it a lot harder to avoid attacks, and oh boy is that a problem. Unless he's got the "B" power-up, Magnus will die from a single hit of any kind, whereas the majority of enemies require multiple hits to be destroyed.
There are also a few secrets in the game, such as special red jet enemies that appear in certain stages. If Ultra Magnus manages to kill these, Bumblebee appears and lets him skip a few levels. Another secret is the seven hidden letters that spell out "RODIMUS", which are obtained by killing specific enemies. If the player collects all seven letters by the end of the game, they are given the option of playing through the game again, this time as Rodimus Prime. Rodimus Prime has a new vehicle mode sprite, but his in-play robot mode is simply a recolored Ultra Magnus (which does look snazzy we admit), and the gameplay remains exactly the same as during the Magnus run.
This game is notorious for being extremely difficult to the point of frustration, thanks to sluggish, slippery controls and dodgy hit mechanics, in addition to the small size of Magnus's projectiles requiring very accurate aiming, as well as the copious amount of enemies who can kill you in one hit, and the color choices making it exceptionally difficult to discern important objects like enemy shots or even whole enemies from massive background elements like brightly colored mountains (seriously, look at the screenshot to the left), and there are "D" power-ups, which are easy to mistake for the others, that actually remove your other power-ups. On top of everything, there are no apparent continues; there is a hidden continue code, but you have only seconds to put it in or right back to the title screen you go. And for some extra salt, the difficulty gets cranked up with each subsequent playthrough, first by increasing the speed of enemies and projectiles, then by decreasing the player's acceleration. Yeah. This game is a pretty perfect example of "Nintendo hard".
Also the short looping music which rarely changes between stages will eventually break you. Enjoy!
Stages
Endings
Surprisingly, the game features multiple endings. A bad ending of sorts occurs if the player defeats Trypticon in the final boss fight without collecting all the letters to unlock Rodimus Prime, leading to the following end screen:[2]
| “ | EMERGENCY ORDER
Using a new power, Destron has revived and become even more powerful. |
” |
Players are then thrown back to the first level, where they'll have to go through the entire game again to grab Rodimus' letters (presumably, the aforementioned "Rodimus Energon Cube(s)").
If players fail to grab the letters again, they'll be met with the same end screen and once more be thrown back to the beginning. If they do manage to grab all the letters, however, a new end screen will be unlocked:
| “ | Magnus won the final battle. However, a new battle approaches! Go, Rodimus! Attack! Rodimuscomvoy! |
” |
Now playing as Rodimus, the player is rewarded with going through the entire game... Yes, again.
Finally, after beating the game as Rodimus, the "real" end screen is unlocked, featuring an English-written message that simply says...
| “ | CONGRATULATION! | ” |
Yes, an erroneously-spelled end screen is your reward for the many, many hours you've deprived of your life to reach it. Say what you will about Big Rigs, but at least getting the "YOU'RE WINNER" screen in that game is not a torturous task.
Characters
| Autobots | Decepticons | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
Cheat codes
Trust us, you're going to want these.
| Address | Value | Game Genie | Effect | Side Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0069 | 3 | LATEPA | Always have three lives | |
| 0053 | 20 | AZIALA | Indestructible | Music restarts every time you are hit |
| 0053 | 40 | AGIALA | Shot Power Up | |
| 0053 | 60 | ATIALA | Indestructible and Shot Power Up | |
| 0022 | 00 | AAZAZA | Indestructible (alternate)[3] | Freezes player select, intro, and prevents level transitions while active |
| 0074 | 01 | PAEAAAGY | Play as Rodimus Prime | |
| 82BE | B0 | EULETA | Infinite Lives | |
| 924F | 90 | EPGOYZ | Always have flight | Doesn't work in Time Tunnels |
Tie-in material
The events of Mystery of Convoy were adapted into manga form by Ikuo Miyazoe in a one-shot special published in the December 1986 issue of Comic BomBom. Considering how little storytelling the game has, this often-overlooked manga can actually be considered pretty integral to contextualizing the overall events of the game... assuming one does not mind how absolutely bizarre it is in the first place. Contradicting the game's manual, Optimus Prime is still alive in this version of Mystery of Convoy's story, and rather than Ultra Magnus, the protagonist is — no joke — Ultra Magnus Jr., the shrunken down son of Ultra Magnus (a character that, yes; exists only in this manga and hasn't been mentioned in any other Transformers media since). The game's plot occurs as he enters a "House of Mysteries" attraction in a theme park, wherein a strange power merges Magnus Jr.'s mind with that of Shunichi, an accompanying human, and takes them to the "Decepticon World of Nightmares" where the actual events of the game presumably occur. As unconventional of a story as it might be, it is nonetheless loosely compatible with the game itself: whether you want to treat this or the manual's premise as the the core narrative thrust of your gameplay experience really is entirely up to you.
The game would also be backed by an official strategy guide, published in Comic BomBom Winter Vacation Special: Family Computer Certain Victory Dojo Vol. 12, in January 1987. This guide would include yet another short manga adaptation of the game's premise — albeit in a far more truncated strip format that more closely follows the premise as provided by the game's manual — from mangaka Akira Tanizaki.
Reception
Despite the extreme difficulty, terrible controls, mediocre graphics, frustrating level design, and... really, everything, it might come as a surprise that Mystery of Convoy seems to have actually been a relatively well-performing title in terms of sales: while no official figures exist, the fact that it's one of the most common loose cartridges you'll usually find in bulk lots of Famicom games (a console with an otherwise massive library, roughly double that of its international equivalent the NES) suggests that Mystery of Convoy was at least a moderate success in its home country. As mentioned, it even did well enough that Takara would follow it up with another Famicom Transformers game and later release it on the Wii Virtual Console.
What should not come as a surprise, however; is that the critical reception of Mystery of Convoy — both contemporary and retrospective — is nonetheless overwhelmingly negative. All of the aforementioned aspects, but especially the unfairly frustrating difficulty more than any other, have endowed this title with a staggering amount of infamy amongst both Transformers fans and general retro gaming enthusiasts alike, and as a result, it is not uncommon to see it listed amongst the worst NES / Famicom games.
Legacy
Despite Mystery of Convoy's negative reputation — or, perhaps more accurately, because of it — the game has earned a small cult status of sorts. A lot of this allure is driven by the fact that, outside of two Commodore 64 titles (which, being on a more "adult-oriented" computer platform, never quite reached the same popularity among younger kids), virtually no Transformers games were released for consoles in the west during the 1980s. Thus, with Mystery of Convoy being largely unknown outside of Japan up until the internet brought about knowledge of its existence to the world, many fans were fascinated by the discovery that the Japanese equivalent of the NES had received a fully-fledged Transformers videogame... until they actually played it. When the game was released on Virtual Console in 2008, TakaraTomy put out an official blog post talking about the game's legendary status and warning that "just because you're an adult now doesn't mean you'll be any better at it than you were as a kid. Please be careful to avoid being traumatized." Yes, really.[4] Mystery of Convoy would also be famously featured in a 2009 episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd web series, making it even more well-known to western audiences. (Perhaps the most famous meme to come out of the series is, in fact, taken partly from the Mystery of Convoy episode — you can even hear the level restart jingle right at the beginning!) The game also has a tiny but dedicated speedrunning community, with the current record holder having managed the incredible feat of beating it in just under 5 minutes.[5]
In 2014 TakaraTomy released Q-Transformers: Mystery of Convoy Returns, a mobile game based on Mystery of Convoy, to tie in with their Q-Transformers toyline. It was accompanied by a cartoon in which the characters often discuss the difficulty and peculiarities of the original Famicom game.
Notes
- Despite his Japanese name being in the title of the game, Optimus Prime only appears in-game twice. First during the start screen, when his head explodes and reassembles as the player's sprite, and later his head reappears colored gray right at the end of level 7.
- Partly as a result of this, a common running misconception regarding the game's narrative is that it involves Optimus Prime going missing and Ultra Magnus heading out on a quest to find him, this thus being the titular "Mystery of Convoy". As we've mentioned, this is not the case: the game's commercial already declares Optimus as dead and Ultra Magnus as his successor, and eventually, this same story point would be reiterated in the game's manual. Likely, this confusion also stems from the title invoking other games with similar plots like Mario is Missing! or Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, but alas, as satirized in the end of Q-Transformers: Mystery of Convoy Returns, the only mystery in Mystery of Convoy is why the hell the game is called that in the first place.
- There are several enemy sprites that weren't used in the final game. There was a red and orange Laserbeak that fired bullets while flying at the player, a red eyeball-spider that moved vertically and fired four diagonal bullets, and a spinning blade-wheel that rapidly fired bullets at the player; the latter two were meant to only appear on boss screens. The other unused enemies didn't have routines programmed, like the unused insect enemies. Additional unused sprites resemble the Matrix and, inexplicably, a turtle. The most likely reason for these omissions is a simple technical one: the game can only handle a maximum of 64 unique stage "enemies" (which actually includes powerups), and the game absolutely hit that limit.
- The Alternity story, "To Die Game!", retcons this game as being part of a cross-dimensional game between the hyper-dimensional guardian Optimus Prime and the equally powerful Megatron, wherein Optimus had to choose one avatar (Ultra Magnus) to fight endless hordes of Decepticons empowered by Megatron.
- The Bee Team plays this game at the end of the 2015 Robots in Disguise comic book's first issue.
- Issue 2 of the SD SG comic features a mirror universe counterpart to the game, Transformers: The Super Obvious Truth of Optimus Prime.
- This game uses a strobe effect popular in Japan at the time. Such effects have become controversial due to concern over people with photosensitive epilepsy, and fell out of use altogether following the infamous "Electric Soldier Porygon" incident in 1997. This effect was reduced for the Virtual Console re-release.
- Upon starting the game, a cover of the opening melody to the Transformers 2010 theme plays.
- Ultra Magnus's robot mode sprite appears to be based on the original box art (or directly on the early deco on which said box art was based) with the white chestplate rather than the final blue.
- While there a no credits provided for Mystery of Convoy, ISCO listed the game among several other titles they developed,[6] while Locomotive founder Hiroshi Okamoto confirmed his company (a sole proprietorship he formed with his wife prior to Locomotive) was a subcontractor on the project; it was the first game he had worked on, with Okamoto acting as producer/manager, his wife as graphic designer, and an outside part-timer responsible for programming.[7]
References
- ↑ Yes, the English title on the package of the game is mistakenly translated as "Mystery of Comvoy". Quality!
- ↑ Deciphering the Hybrid Language Text in Transformers — Legends of Localization
- ↑ Transformers: Convoy no Nazo (J) - NES - Codes - GSHI
- ↑ "＜使用上のご注意＞大人になったからといって子供のときより上手にできるとは限りません！トラウマを重ねないよう細心の気構えをもってプレイしてごください。"—TakaraTomy, TakaraTomy blog, "『トランスフォーマー・コンボイの謎』でレッツトラウマ", 2008/06/06
- ↑ The Transformers: Mystery of Convoy(1986) on Speedrun.com
- ↑ ISCO list of games
- ↑ Interview with Hiroshi Okamoto
External links
- Perhaps the most comprehensive Convoy no Nazo site online, with screencaps, hints, and .ROM files.
- Convoy no Nazo commercial on YouTube
- Takara's promotional video for the game (using an unfinished build with cheats running)
- Strategy Wiki
- Game Genie codes
- Translations of the game's endings
- Rom de-compilation and editing project
