Difference between revisions of "Blog:Witch (Arcade)"

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Revision as of 01:34, 21 September 2021

Witch (Arcade)

by CRV (talk) | Originally posted September 20, 2021

It's a pinball game. It's a gambling game. It's a pinball/gambling game.

Actually, gambling is illegal in Japan; you're playing for tokens. This is what they call a "medal game."

Witch has the elements of a decent pinball game. It has good control and graphics, some nice music from Fumito Tamayama (Decap Attack), and bonus tables similar to the ones in the Crush series.

Unfortunately, none of it is fleshed out, and there's a time limit, so you won't have much of an opportunity to enjoy what IS there. Most everything in this game exists only to bring up numbers on your bingo card. Yes, the pinball stuff is just window dressing for what is really a bingo game.

A pinball/bingo game might sound unusual, but the real "WTF" is what's hidden in the ROMs — game credits — and they don't appear to be the credits for Witch. They appear to be credits from an unreleased Famicom RPG called Shounen Majutsushi Indy (aka Indy the Magical Kid).

Indy made some headlines in 2019 when a prototype turned up on Yahoo! Auctions in Japan. A collector there won, and we probably won't see it ever again. It'd be kinda funny if the whole game was hidden in the Witch data. It probably isn't, but someone should look into that.

A company called Graphic Research (aka GRC) was likely the developer of Witch, despite Vic Tokai's name being attached to it, or perhaps because of it. Graphic Research did a lot of work for Vic Tokai. They also seem to have been involved in the medal game business. (A different game seen here even has a GRC chip.)

Then there's the most damning evidence of all (so to speak), the credits from Shounen Majutsushi Indy, which specifically mention GRC. And as mentioned before, sound designer Fumito Tamayama worked on this and would have been working at Graphic Research at the time.