犬のおさんぽ (Inu no Osanpo) [Arcade (NAOMI)]

You might've though Games2Jolly would take the cake for weirdest games that have been featured here, but they get blown out of the water by this one:

Arcade flyer: Text translates to "One! Two! One! Two! A happy walk with your cute dog!"

犬のおさんぽ (Inu no Osanpo, lit. 'walk the dog'), by WOW Entertainment (and supposedly CAVE, it's on their website) for the Sega NAOMI arcade platform in October 2001, is an arcade dog-walking simulator. Yes, really.

I played a lot of Nintendogs back when it first released and when I saw this game in the NAOMI games list and looked up a video I knew I had to play it. This was another high-effort-to-get-running game because the emulated controls are not exactly obvious (honestly I'm amazed Demul even supports them at all), and when I messaged the only person with a YouTube video as to how they got it working they couldn't remember anything special. Turns out there actually was nothing special, which will probably be a bit surprising in a few paragraphs!

I can never see Shibas the same after watching Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga

You choose one of 6 dog breeds (Shiba, pug, Siberian husky, Pembroke Welsh corgi, poodle, Labrador retriever; they all have cute names too) and one of three routes and go on a lovely little walk with your dog. You can go to the pet store to get more food, walk to a field so you can play with a frisbee, or make your way home from the dog park.

But of course, this is an arcade game! It can't be as simple and mundane as that! First, just look at the "controller" for this game: 

If I ever get to open my 'I won the lottery and have way too much money' arcade, you can bet I'll have this cabinet in there.

Yes, it's a treadmill. A treadmill, a fake plastic dog, and a lead. It might be the most bizarre control scheme I have ever seen for a game. When playing on emulator the control scheme might actually be even more of a mess, because the treadmill is bound to mouse movement. (and moving it even an inch before starting the game will simulate treadmill movement and will cause a BELT ERROR, complete with an annoying alarm and warning screen that only goes away by going to test mode and clearing it)

We failed to dodge the skaters; you can see one of them wiped out in the back

The game's not very pretty; it looks like a very early Dreamcast game which is disappointing for arcade stuff at the time (though everything looks disappointing compared to Planet Harriers, which was one year earlier). The music is okay and cute. There's nothing special about either: this isn't exactly the kind of game you'd play for the cutting-edge graphics, now is it?

Don't let your dog eat garbage in the road!

As expected with an arcade game, you are graded and scored based on your dog's mood meter. Successfully walking it, letting it investigate where other dogs have done their business, and completing in-level missions will raise it and cause your dog to prance around hilariously. Outrunning or moving too slow for your dog, letting it eat trash, or failing missions will lower it. Lowering it all the way will give you a GAME OVER, and your dog will be very sad.

Dodge the car!

The missions are really the highlight of the game: middle-aged women trying to catch a cat who stole their fish, getting attacked by crows, avoiding cars or bikes in the middle of the road, or even a series of 'fights' against a particularly mean bulldog, and that's not even listing the most ridiculous one of all. They're pretty outlandish and feature some funny animations, win or lose. They're also not too hard once you figure them out (except frisbee, I still can't manage to do that one at all).

Complete with bad Japanese puns!

It's honestly pretty fun, and worth it just to see how weird it is. Given that it's an arcade game, it's very short, probably 15 minutes for the longest route at the most. It's something that I can recommend at least playing through each of the routes once, you will probably laugh your ass off at least once in each. And of course, if by some fortuitous chance you actually see this in an arcade somewhere, you better play it.

Games2Jolly.com [Browser]

The screen you'll be greeted with every time you start a game, complete with a terrifying animation.

Games2Jolly.com is a presumably Indian (based on some oddly-named terms in the games) developer of Flash/HTML5 escape room games, who have made one every single day since 2013 or so. There's seriously almost 2000 of them! Complete with amazing titles like 'Car Escape from Dilapidated Area', 'Hifi Mall Lift Rescue', 'Grandpas Love for Music', or 'Old Scooter Escape'! 

A typical Jolly screen.

Members of the Mystery community found these games and after enjoying racing a few of them, decided to hold a tournament of racing through these games. At first, I didn't know what to expect. I joined the inaugural race to see what it was like and got absolutely demolished and hated every second of it. I join every event possible in the community so I joined anyway. After racing a few (I ended up making to top 5 and lost as my mouse stopped working, go figure), I knew it was something special and had a blast, and it ended up being a very memorable and fun tournament for everyone involved.

This is the current image for the SpeedrunsLive page for this game, by the way.

Basically, most games are differently skinned versions that use a lot of the same puzzles: put objects at specific heights, match colors to some clue, enter a word you saw on a sheet of paper, etc. You can interact with things in your inventory if they open a separate screen, which is sometimes necessary to use items on. You usually have to collect some items to put in holes to open something that either gives you clues or an end-game item. Sometimes there are dumb pixel hunts that everyone hates. Every puzzle is also set up so that you cannot input the solution until you've actually seen it in-game, so (almost) no brute-forcing can be done. There's also two different 'generations' of Jolly games that use two different engines (you can discern these at a glance as the newer games are in 16x9 while the older ones are in 4x3) that play a bit differently. The newer engine games are far better than the old ones. If you get stuck, there are video walkthroughs hosted on the Games2Jolly YouTube channel that you can access by pressing the >Walkthrough button in-game (some of these are quite funny due to the hilariously deliberate mouse movements). The game tracks your in-game time and gives you a score that is mostly based off of time. It wasn't consistent in all of our testing but it was roughly 5,000,000/seconds in most cases.

This cool guy was my personal vote for the SRL page image.

They usually have some hilarious lore on the splash screen before starting the game, not just because of the Engrish involved but the ridiculous scenarios they had to come up with to fit a game in there. Many are sadly boring text that just say "We know that you are a great fan of Escape games but that doesn't mean you should not like puzzles. So here we present you with [game name]. A cocktail with an essence of both Puzzles and Escape tricks." (deemed 'cocktail' games by our community)

There's too many examples of great lore, it was so hard to just include one!

The games are pretty much what you would expect from bad flash escape room games: esoteric puzzles, almost entirely ripped assets, royalty-free music (through a bit of detective work courtesy of Exuno and SomeGirl, we found the source for a bunch of them here and it turns out that even though the music is free, they still used a watermarked preview version!), and hilariously crude animations. There's a few recurring characters amazingly, most notably the mascot Jolly Boy and Jolly Girl.

Wouldn't be complete without some hilarious love story...

On their own, they're not fun at all frankly. It's frustrating, stupid, complete nonsense puzzles. There's little consistency in how you actually progress, in how long the games are, or how funny the scenarios are.

This image, plus the flaming lion head and cool guy are all actually from the same game, 'Princess Magic Rescue I', which was easily the best match of the tourney.

But this is a rare case of a game where the true way to play is get in a voice chat with some friends and race through them. I'm serious. It really shouldn't be fun but it transforms it into such a fun and hilarious experience that I can highly recommend doing it just for that. It's honestly some of the most enjoyable races I've ever done, and although I think it was a bit scary how I ended up kind of learning the 'jolly logic' for the puzzles, it was entirely worth playing them. Make sure to liberally use some screenshotting tool (I used PrintScreen + paste into MS Paint); it will save you a huge amount of headache. Side note: don't play the HTML5 games though, they're just not as much fun.

The most important part of the game: Jolly Escape!

You can play these games either on their website which I don't recommend, or through the Flashpoint archiving project. Good luck and have a fun! Jollymania...

硯 (Suzuri) [PC]

I got interested in this game after browsing Romhacking.net's translation section for PC games (I was probably browsing for Mystery Tournament submissions or something?) and saw this title, which immediately grabbed my eye because its genre was listed as "Other". I'd like to think I'm pretty good at distilling games into succinct yet detailed genre names, but I must admit there are even a few I would have to qualify as "Other" which automatically makes them interesting to me. The description by Non-Directional Translations describes it as a "paintbrush game" which is probably my new favorite name of a video game genre.

硯 (Suzuri, lit. 'inkstone') is an odd-little PC game released by ABA Games, a doujin circle who have made some excellent doujin shmups like Noiz2sa and rRootage, released for Windows 95 in 1998. The game is best-described as an 'avoid-em-up', basically like a shmup except that you can't shoot and there are no enemies, which makes the game sound a lot less fun than it actually is.

You play as a bright red-orange stroke of paint in their quest to avoid suddenly appearing kanji characters. There are two game modes: 素人 (novice, which I think is actually mispelled in game; it's missing one of the horizontal bars) and 玄人 (expert), which doesn't change the actual 10-level 'course' but makes your stoke move way faster. Your stroke's hitbox is not very obvious but it seems to be concentrated around the center of the stroke. Of course, this is pretty hard to tell when moving up and down but that's a lot of the challenge of the game. The stroke has a nice sense of momentum to it, which is definitely odd for a paintbrush but actually works to this game's benefit and it makes the dodges and maneuvering even more impressive and fun.

The game is surprisingly fun and addicting, one of those styles of games you'd expect to see on a cheap ad-filled mobile game nowadays but actually pretty good. It has that same feeling as making a very tight dodge in a shmup (and this game has a lot of tight dodges), and the whole game is short, sweet, and challenging enough to be interesting and very replayable. This wasn't this developer's first game as far as I can tell (they do have a few PC-98 games but none of their games are dated on the website) but I'm impressed they got that feeling right away. Maybe this game just appeals to my shmup-nut nature, but I think it's got some legitimate talent in it.

Of course, the real draw of the game is the visual style. The brush strokes are all well-animated (and most all of them are made in the correct order, which is a nice touch) and look very real. Even your stroke's motion at different speeds matches what would happen with a real brush. The entirety of the level is all classic-looking black strokes (aside from bright orange progress/time markers) which makes the visual effects very striking and oddly mesmerizing when moving at fast speeds. Whether flying through huge 山s or a sea of 人s or huge corridors, the game's look never gets old. Even seeing it in stills like this really doesn't do it justice. It's one of those visual styles you hope somebody on itch.io picks up and makes a neat game out of. 

Trying to get this game to run was kind of a nightmare, albeit mostly of my own accord due to my ignorance of Windows 95/98 and emulation. PCem is an excellent way to emulate old IBM PCs and Windows machines, and thankfully there are excellent tutorials (I personally used this one) to install and get games to run. Trying to install the game was another story, as it took about 3 days and many hours between them trying to troubleshoot a nasty InstallShield error where every single post about it on the internet is about the same error caused by far more serious causes. After many reinstallations of Japanese Windows 98, many different methods of making a disc file for PCem, I found out that the reason I was getting this error was that the directory the installer was located in (my virtual floppy drive in PCem) was read-only. After moving all the disc's files to my desktop and installing without a hitch I was almost too mad to even play the game! I was happy I persevered though; it was a fun little experience for the short few minutes it takes.

(note: this isn't actually my high score, just the only run I decided to take screenshots of because PCem's wonderful unrebindable screenshot key of Ctrl+Alt+PageUp doesn't make it easy even in a game like this that only required one hand)

Maybe it was just relief after the hell it was to get this to run, but I can recommend Suzuri if you're into short, weird, arcade-y Japanese titles and don't mind complicated emulator setup, especially if you're a huge shmup fan like me.

If you would like to play this game, it is freeware and available on ABA Games' website. An English translation is available on Romhacking.net courtesy of Non-Directional Translations here.