Do you know this hellish game?? Throwback to “Hell Cab”

My dad’s serendipity often bumped into very unique but basically troublesome gaming software, for example, “F1 Pilot” as “too early realized driving simulator” in PC Engine by Pack in Video which based on Formula 1 cars with the heavy steering feedback that was too uncontrollable on the gaming pad. Nonetheless, F1 Pilot was not the disastrously boring game because of the severe but exciting feedback but too much difficult to play.

However, “this hellish time-travelling adventure” was more cumbersome than aforementioned one. Hell Cab, as the picturesque adventure game originally released by Time Warner Corp and converted to Japanese version for PC-98 with the translation by NEC, was very notoriously memorable for my family.

For the first impression, the up-to-date and avant-garde concept of game was so interesting for us. In fact, this was the time-travelling adventure. Some suspicious taxi driver as vicious cicerone let the players to drag into the hellish paradigms such as colosseum in Rome where players were forced to throw the gauntlets with the knights and WW2 battlefield that forced us to escape or battle against soldiers. Hence, the virtual time machine named Hell Cab takes us to the horrible historical tours. However, those battlefields or troubles were not actually the hell for us because it was just a fiction, or rather the software itself was definitely the nightmare in reality, especially for my father who was involved in the irksome expenditure.

Basically, the CD drive of PC-98 series was not seamless and smooth to load up the data. The waiting time of completion was so long for us that we can make some coffee or wait for cup noodle in 3 minutes or more on occasions. Actually, those blanks were often too boring or exhausting for us during installing or booting up the software. Therefore, the enhancement of the loading ability by the latest devices in the laptop or desktop PCs were so unbelievably awesome which are so quick and very stable.

Besides, the data dimension of the graphics was too overloaded for the memory of PC-98 series. Nowadays, it is so common to see the meticulous and clear pictures on the display because the amount of the data was not gigantic for latest memory units. But, the digital amount of pics in 80’s or 90’s was very heavy for smaller capacity of memory than the latest one which was easily occupied by the sizable data. Those were the trigger of hellish days by Hell Cab which contained so much pictures or even footages.

As we expected, the prolonged spans to wait the completion of loading from the bootup to the operation were so long that dispirited my dad sometimes to get through the whole adventure. Besides, some of the stages were so intractable that needs complex commands. Those also brought some delays or errors that ended up to freeze the computer and excluded any commands from users.

Honestly, the concept of the original game was not boring but attractive. The whole scenario was intriguing even if the game were released again in latest paradigm. Nevertheless, it was too troublesome and far from the ability for PC-98 to realize the whole programs which was fundamentally for MS-DOS models which had higher specs than Japanese original formulas. In conclusion, this is not the drawbacks of game of itself but inevitable troubles brought by the software.

In order to solve the problems, he determined to upgraded his PC-98 with high-spec reader and more capable memory. Both of them were so expensive then in comparison with the latest reasonable but high-performance ones. To some extents, the expensive upgrades brought so-so satisfying improvements for PC. Fortunately, they profited us so much to play the other games and run some high-performance software smoothly. Nonetheless, the problems about Hell Cab were not able to be ameliorated consequently. He affordably tried to cope with any problems by the burden of economic expenditure. However, it was not effective. Even it was in vain. Finally, my dad determined to quit the game before reaching the staff roll.

My dad pathetically melted his money over 60000 yen mostly same as 600 dollar in USA to deal with environment of computer just for the esoteric gaming software, Hell Cab. Hence, Hell Cab unpredictably purveyed the hellish moment for him in reality.

Originally published at http://shougeki407.blogspot.com on November 15, 2015.