Title – 流氷館の惨劇 (The Tragedy of Ryohyukan OR Tragedy at the Ice Drift Museum)
System – Family Basic
Author – 遠藤 高志 (Takashi Endo)
Publication – マイコンBASIC (Micom Basic) 1994 01
Page Scans – 1 2 3
Preserved By – ozidual
Recommended Emulator – VirtuaNES
Translated Article
As we know graphics and speed don’t necessarily make a great game. Sometimes all it takes is a new idea or a different way of looking at things. For Tragedy of Ryohyukan there are a bunch of penguins on the screen and your job as detective is to find the killer(s) and mark them pink/red. You can move your cursor with the D-Pad over 9 spots though only the 8 outside ones matter. All the penguins start in the bottom middle square and move counter-clockwise mostly in a group though staggered. Press A to change the direction of the penguins currently standing still. Press B to mark all the penguins standing still as killers. Press Start to see if you’ve marked all the killers (and just killers) red/pink. If you did, you win the stage. You get points for living penguins and bonus points for speed? or maybe for living killers identified since I believe killers can kill killers. There is a timer in the upper right corner with pink rectangles that disappear over time. If you run out of pink rectangles, you lose. If the killers kill all the innocents, you lose. You can lose up to 3 times before it resets you back to the main screen. There are 8 stages and as of stage 3, each stage seems to be the number of killers. I love this game!
Content
An earth-shattering new, authentic humorous travel suspense mystery game.
Story
Kenji Tahara and my friend, detective Shigeru Yamato, left Ueno at 11:57 and headed for Hokkaido on the “Thunderbird 3”. After enjoying the snow festival at Mount Osore, we ate the local specialties of bear, reindeer and Marimo, and then visited the Miki Family’s Ice Drift Museum, where a death threat had apparently been sent. I was shocked to see that all the family members looked the same, and Yamato said with a look of disgust “The brain is not where we think.”
How to play
The objective is to find the killer from the crowd. Use the D-Pad button to move the cursor and execute the following commands with each button. The command only works on stopped characters. Characters who are not the Killer are called Victims.
Turn (A button)… Changes the character’s direction of movement. The characters start moving immediately after exection.
Mark (B button)… Changes the character’s color. Once you have marked the number of killers in red, press the Start button. If everyone gets the answer right, you’ve cleared the game.
There are two conditions for a murder to occur:
1. The victim (one person) and the killer (any number of people) are stopped in the same room.
2. The vitims enter the room. There is no one on the ice (moving).
The person on the ice in the center is a searcher (this is Detective Yamato).
Strategy
When a duo doesn’t commit murder, they’re both murderers or both vitims. To split a group in two, wait in the next room and when a few people arrive, make your turn.
Program
Enter lists 1 and 2, save them, and then load and run lists 1 and 2 in that order.
Afterword
After studying at the Nintendo-Dentsu Game Seminar for a year, I was forced to think about the high aspirations I had in game design.
