196. Pachicom (Shouei, Famicom, 1985)

When I went to Japan in 2012, I tried waltzing into a pachinko parlor to spend the dozens of 1 yen coins my friends and I had saved up visiting in Japan's cash-friendly economy for a couple weeks. Upon entering the parlor (which was deafening, like all pachinko parlors) we quickly realized this was not as simple as putting a coin in the machine, and we quickly decided to leave. So while I've never played real pachinko, I have had the pleasure of playing a couple pachinko simulators, and Pachicom was the first of many pachinko games on the Famicom.

Released in late 1985, Pachicom (which I'm assuming is short for "pachinko computer") is less of a game in the traditional sense and more of just a piece of software simulation. The game presents you with a single screen pachinko machine (with a black background (this was 1985)) complete with a bunch of pegs for the ball to bounce around as well as spinners and other interactables. "Playing" Pachicom consists of 2 inputs: you can press A to release a ball, and you can use left and right to adjust the angle that the balls are shot into the playfield at.

The rest of the experience is just sitting back and watching the balls fall through the screen triggering sounds and visuals and increasing your score. As far as I can tell, the score is actually the number of balls remaining, but it is simple enough to just hold down A and then press left or right until you find an angle that gives you more point than you are losing.

Many early Famicom games had different modes, and Pachicom's are laughably simple. The first mode has the timer counting up, while the second mode has the timer counting down (from 900 seconds, which was way longer than Pachicom was able to hold my attention for). It's clear that this was a super budget product, made even more obvious by this fun tidbit (from Wikipedia): "There is a hidden message...that can be found in any hex editor. Almost five percent of the entire ROM (2.05 kilobytes out of the 41 kilobyte ROM image) is taken up by this otherwise inaccessible message. The message...features a lengthy rant towards the game's executives, harshly criticizing them for forcing changes on the fly, particularly the sound effects".

This isn't super surprising given Shouei's overwhelmingly lackluster output on the Famicom, but it's also a pretty interesting piece of history / trivia. Humorously, the sounds effects were probably the only thing I enjoyed about Pachicom since they gave you some feedback as to how you were doing.

1/5, a desolate Pachinko simulator