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6-year-old TJ was confused to no end by this game. Don�t know if you remember the promotional
art, but it involved a dude in the process of being chomped on by an alien - the kind
of thing that you always suspect happens in games, albeit euphemistically. Heck, even
the name alone was strange. The heck kind of a word was �Heiankyo,� anyway! Three
vowels in a row? How are the Letter People supposed to represent that? Nope, 6-year-old
TJ wanted no part of this thing, as there was portable Dr. Mario to be had and man,
did that shut that kid up for hours at a time. 29-year-old TJ, though, comes at it from a
different angle. But dude getting chomped on aliens - with directionally specific sprites
for each, no less - still maintains its creepyness.
So before the Game Boy was even a glimmer in Yokoi�s eye, back in 1979, the Theoretical
Science Group at the University of Tokyo put together a little computer game - because
if you had some disk space and spare time back in those days, that was pretty much THE
thing to do - about a brave police officer in the capital city, Heian-kyo (what we now
call Kyoto), fending off an alien invasion with... a shovel. That�s all the dude�s
got. A shovel. His method of dispatching aliens? Digging holes (by absolutely MURDERING the
A button), waiting for one of these trespassers to fall in (because, despite being capable
of interstellar travel, these aliens appear to be dumb as a failed simile), and then absolutely
MURDERING the B button to fill in the hole and bury said alien alive. Clear the entire
board... and you get to do the same thing, but with even MORE aliens! Man, my thumbs
hurt just thinking about it all. And the �new� mode, enhanced for the Game Boy version - and
when do you ever get to say that - still has it much easier than the digit-decimating Old
mode, a direct port of the 1979 original.
I have no idea how this thing managed to make it to the states intact. That�s not the
kind of thing that happened in 1990. By all rights, this thing should�ve been obtained
by Quaker Oats and star Captain Crunch trying to bury the Soggies under cereal or something.
That�s what you�d expect. Not a brutal arcade-style trek through the Heian period,
with vore awaiting you should you screw up. Speaking of arcades, turns out Sega of all
people produced an arcade version called Digger back in 1980, which just goes to show that
if you�re a Theoretical Science Group at a major university, you�re probably not
up on more pedestrian matters like copyright law. You�re too busy disguising your sick
vore fantasies in a game that would eventually get spread around the world. Published by
Meldac, of course, because they�re the only ones deranged enough to publish both this
AND the now ridiculously-valuable Zombie Nation. I blame them for corrupting the �90s. (Just
be glad I didn�t make a William H. Macy reference.)