Let me tell you a little story about my childhood, and the part a robotic rabbit played in it.
Back in the...I wanna say late 80s, Liverpool had three arcades, practically right next to each other on Lime Street, the main road to the railway station that fed the Manchester and London lines. The road was permanently busy, much more than it is these days, and that created a sweltering, exhaustive humidity whatever the weather, from which a welcome escape was the air conditioning in Alladin's Palace, the one closest to the town centre entrance in Renshaw Street. Though that was a great arcade, which often had the very latest loke test machines (Outrunners, The X-Men/Simpsons 4-player cabs and the first Neo Geo games come readily to mind), it was the smaller, open-plan place beside it that really took my...I wanna say 12-year-old self to that higher plane, since it was easier to get into than the heavy-doored Palace or the larger one with the Street Fighter 1 cab with those pressure pads you had to punch as hard as you could to do anything around the corner, and besides, the middle one (whose name I cannot for the life of me recall) had Arkanoid, my favourite game of the time, and Halley's Comet, which looked cool with its all-green pallette and dynamic power-up system. I don't think either of them are as good now, but the one I do remember was a little horizontal shmup called
Rabio Lepus, though the coin-op was known by its English title of
Rabbit Punch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJDkx5n0_r4
The game was cute, colourful, weird like a motherfucker, and murderously hard. The story was even more irrelevant than most shmups of the time; all I needed to know was I was a robot wabbit with sneakers on that could fire homing carrot missiles that it collected by shooting floating cans of tinned carrots. The levels were chock full of obstacles that made doing so difficult, with relentless enemies with precision aim that made collecting them essential to progress. However, my robbits had shields that allowed them to take three hits before dying, and also a mighty close-up attack resembling a small yellow boxing glove that shot out from the front of the craft (hence the English title, yeah?). The game itself was Konami E3 press conference levels of whacked out, and my prepubescent, daydreamy self loved it for it. It was the cause of much sagging off from school and wasted lunch money, but do you see any regrets here? Nope.
Then, in the late 80s, the Tory government of the time decided to tax the ever-loving hell out of video arcades for whatever ideological reason, and though the arcades continued to offer the best gaming they could for 20p a go, everyone knew the game was up. That, along with the advent of the 16-bit consoles with their Sonics and Marios, spelt the end of the video arcade as a sustainable business model. Though the Neo-Geo and Sega/Capcom/Namco/Konami kept things going as best they could, the arcades of Lime Street shrank back, increased their prices, and eventually closed down. The first of them to bite it was the unnames arcade in the middle, not too long after the tax hike hit. To my resigned disappointment, they took the Rabbit Punch machine with them.
To my delight, however, I (much later) learned that a port of the game was made for the then-object-of-mystery-and-desire (in the UK), the PC Engine. Now, in the hardcore gamer circles I tried to fit into, the PC Engine was one of those expensive Japanese machines hardly anyone had heard of, and almost nobody had even seen - some of the local games shops even resorted to playing VHS tapes of the latest games from Nippon, mostly Dragonball Z games and the like, but also some others like Street Fighter 2 and the like. It was on one of these tapes that I saw a familiar game beyind the tracking wipes and snowy interference, a game called Rabio Lepus for PC Engine. I asked the guy behind the counter if that was Rabbit Punch, but he had no clue, so I did the only reaearch I could in those pre-Google days - games mags in the nearby WH Smiths. One look in C&VG and behold - in a piece on the PC Engine in their import section, a single tiny screenshot, with the name Rabbit Punch next to it (literally the only words on it in the whole section). Yes! Now I only had to get my hands on a PC Engine...
Forward 10 years, and I finally manage to buy a PC Engne GT, the handheld version of the console that ate batteries like I eat chips with mayonnaise. Thankfully, the thing came with a power adapter that worked withthe UK Mains; unfortunately, the small selection of games available to me did not contain Rabio Lepus, though Vigilante and Legendary Axe kept me busy for a long time...until I was forced to sell the console to pay my nan's debts (don't ask, it was a dificult time). I gave up on ever playing it again after that, until...
Last year, I was browsing Twitch (as you do) when I saw a streamer called KitschTwentyTwo, who lives in Japan and (at the time) did a show called the JAMMA Hour Of Power, playing actual arcade games on actual arcade hardware. Intrigued, I watched, then folowed, then chatted up a storm about my arcade experiences with a rapidly growing, extremely friendly community. In its earliest days (last November, to be exact), Kitsch ran several raffles, with actual gaming hardware as prizes, to promote his channel and get more followers in. I was lucky enough to win one of them (a Pana Custom supergun, which can connect to and play actual JAMMA boards on a TV or monitor) and to be given another by a generous winner who didn't need his prize - a PC Engine Core Grafx! I honestly don't know which I was happier to have obtained, but the PC Engine gets the most use of the two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exe3b5ZpEJo
You wanna know the kicker? I haven't even bought a copy of Rabio Lepus yet. I keep forgetting! Also, it's apparently really short? I might be better off just playing it on MAME? Well,
fuck. I guess that's nostalgia for ya!
Oh yeah, if I win, make mine Mar--er, EU.
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